Mellendorf - Germany

Literacy Outside the Big City

An attempt to reach rural illiterates – with surprising results

Mellendorf is a village about 20 kilometres north of Hannover. The Mellendorf Literacy Workshop was created in order to give local residents with low levels of literacy the opportunity to improve their skills by attending a learning environment in form of an open workshop: no enrolment, no obligation to attend regularly, and individual activities for each attendee corresponding to her or his individual needs. This course requires a closer relationship between teacher and learner than in ordinary courses.

This was an open workshop. People could come without complicated enrolement etc., and the teacher tried to find for them individually the best activities. Foto: Jürgen Hosang.

Concept poster to present the project idea. This was displayed during our team meeting in August 2018 in Västeras, Sweden. Foto: Ch. Geiselmann.

 A full report on this experimental course is published in our book "New Ideas to Promote Literacy".