Annual Report 2023/Story: New Types of Collaborations with the Education Sector in Order to Create Local Engagement

Access

Use

Community

Enabling

Access

2023

This story focuses on the initiation of collaborations with a new type of partner in order to foster local engagement. While the extended essay project is well-established and successful, we have not previously collaborated with folk high schools, and we worked to implement a similar methodology with them. Through this collaboration, we reach a group of students that we otherwise do not reach and build partnerships with organizations that are locally important. Additionally, this outgoing project also increases the visibility of the association within a group with great diversity.

New times mean new collaborations; folk high schools fit in here as we have previously worked with both high schools and universities. Folk high schools have a more unifying role than other schools; they have both high school-level classes for those who need to supplement their secondary education, vocational classes for those who want to enter the workforce, and preparatory college classes for those who want to go on to tertiary education. The broad geographic and thematic spread of Swedish folk high schools means that we can collaborate locally and build on local communities, but also thematically depending on the classes a particular school offers, such as photography or film.

During the year, we have given lectures about Wikipedia and source criticism at several folk high schools as part of building local communities and gaining a foothold in educational institutions we have not had much contact with before. The lectures have been appreciated and always led to good discussions and questions about reliability, participatory culture and about what the future holds with AI and other challenges.

Typically, the involvement has been limited to interest in recurring lectures annually adapted to fit into the curriculum before essay writing or other course elements. However, in one case, we have deepened the collaboration to a writing course similar to the extended essay project we have had for several years. In collaboration with Östra Grevie folk high school, we conducted a concise writing course where participants learned to edit and create new articles, as well as to upload images to Wikimedia Commons. The writing course took place over five weeks, preceded by creating user accounts and discussing relevance, scope and what fits in a Wikipedia article before the first workshop. During that period, we held two on-site workshops and a couple online meetings where the participants could ask questions. Several of participants also asked questions to the mentors they were assigned when creating an account, and about a third of the 50 participants published new articles; even more edits were made to existing articles.

Östra Grevie has expressed interest in continuing in the future; other folk high schools have asked both us and Östra Grevie about how the project worked and whether it could be implemented in other places.