Rebus Community’s newest projects are focused on translation and localization, and are led by the Catholic University of Valparaíso, Chile. They are the first launched in our new platform, Rebus Projects! Take a look at the projects on the platform, or keep reading to learn more.
The Rebus Community is excited to announce its first set of translation projects – an English to Spanish translation of the Rebus-supported Digital Citizenship Toolkit and a Spanish to English translation of a report called Desafíos de la Formación Ciudadana en la era Digital (Challenges for Citizenship Education in the Digital Age). Both projects are lead by Werner Westermann, Head of the Civic Training Program at the Library of the National Congress of Chile, in partnership with Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso (PUCV). Werner is an active member of the Open Education community who has been advocating for OER Policy and using the Open Government Partnership to produce and deliver OER related to citizenship education in Chile, and beyond.
The power of OER is evident in how these projects came to life: Werner was reading through the Rebus Community’s weekly newsletter, when he spotted an announcement about the Digital Citizenship Toolkit project. That very day, he contacted Rebus saying that he would love to work on translating this toolkit into Spanish, for use in classrooms at PUCV. The toolkit is an open textbook project lead by Ann Ludbrook and Michelle Schwartz at Ryerson University. The book aims to help students develop a higher-level critical lens in which to navigate the digital realm, and will later be accompanied by a faculty handbook. At this point, Werner also shared that he was keen to translate Desafíos de la Formación Ciudadana en la era Digital, a report on Citizenship Education, from Spanish to English. This project poses a wonderful counter to the open textbook translation project from English to Spanish.
We will work with senior translation students at PUCV to translate the Digital Citizenship Toolkit into Spanish and the Citizenship Education report into English. Students will also work to localize the content in the book, with specific content related to Chile and its context. This work is being supported by a grant from the US Embassy in Santiago, Chile, which seeks to test an infrastructure and methodology framework for creating and publishing Open Textbooks.
These projects have another unique aspect: they fit in with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal number 4 — Quality Education / Educación de Calidad. Target 4.7 of this goal is specifically related to civic and citizenship education objectives: “By 2030, ensure that all learners acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development, including, among others, through education for sustainable development and sustainable lifestyles, human rights, gender equality, promotion of a culture of peace and non-violence, global citizenship and appreciation of cultural diversity and of culture’s contribution to sustainable development”
Looking to the future, Werner says, “I dream of educating empowered citizens that look for public incidence and agency to make a better world through strengthening democracy.” We’re excited to help him get closer to this dream with these two translation projects.
If you’re interested in learning more about these projects, or if you’d like to participate in any way, please join both projects in our new platform!