Project

The integrated literature teaching model begins with close reading while opening the text to film, adaptation, comics and other forms of visual storytelling. This allows students to compare the languages of different media and ways of constructing a story. Bibliotherapy and therapeutic reading encourage connections between literary experience, personal responses, emotions and questions raised by the text.

Emotional literacy and narrative reflection have a central place in the model. Students learn to name emotions, understand characters’ perspectives and consider how stories shape their understanding of themselves and others, going beyond identifying content and literary techniques. Digital teaching tools support new forms of interpretation, visualisation, collaboration and creative response while retaining reading at the centre.

The project runs from 2025 to 2029 at the Faculty of Croatian Studies, University of Zagreb. Around 120 secondary school students participate in experimental and control groups.

Literature teaching still often focuses on recalling knowledge: checking content, identifying characters, themes, plots and stylistic techniques, and repeating predetermined interpretations. Although this can support the acquisition of basic literary concepts, it often leaves too little room for individual experience, emotional resonance, understanding characters’ motives and connecting literature with students’ lives, social experience and values. Students can remain passive recipients of ready-made interpretations.

IUČIP treats the literary text as an open space for experiential, analytical, interpretative and reflective activity. Students are asked to explain how a text affects them, how they understand characters’ actions, which emotional and ethical conflicts they recognise, and how literary situations relate to their own experience. This supports interpretative autonomy, emotional literacy, empathetic understanding and reasoned expression of a personal reading.

Students grow up in a highly multimodal communication environment shaped by films, series, comics, short videos, social media, digital narratives, interactive content and hybrid media. The project treats these as teaching resources that may deepen understanding. Comparing a work with its film adaptation, visualising a scene, turning a narrative sequence into a comic or storyboard, and creating a digital narrative can reveal story structure, perspective, symbolic relationships, emotional dynamics and shifts in meaning between media.

The purpose of this transmedia approach is to return students to the text with more questions, greater concentration and greater interpretative sensitivity. Film, comics and digital tools open additional routes into a literary work, whose meanings are continually checked against the text. Students develop the ability to distinguish media languages, critically compare originals and adaptations, and understand how a medium shapes reception.

The project combines textual, visual and emotional experience in an integrated model, connecting receptive, interpretative, creative and reflective dimensions of teaching. Students read, analyse, compare, visualise, adapt and articulate their experiences, while teachers organise interpretation, moderate discussion and encourage independent thought.

The model investigates whether close reading combined with transmedia techniques and emotionally focused activities can improve comprehension, engagement and narrative reflection. It examines whether this teaching supports deeper reader responses, more precise expression of emotions, better understanding of different perspectives and stronger connections with identity, relationships and social life.

IUČIP understands literature teaching as a process of developing readers. The aim is for students to read more attentively, interpret more independently, recognise their feelings more consciously and argue more convincingly, as well as knowing more about literature.

The model aims to support a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of literature. Students are encouraged to recognise the emotional and ethical dimensions of storytelling, considering why characters behave as they do, the consequences of their decisions and the questions these experiences raise for readers.

Connecting literature with film, comics and other visual forms develops visual and narrative thinking. Students learn how images, shots, perspective and sequences of events shape meaning, and how the experience of a story changes with its telling. This also helps them express and explain their responses and compare them with other readers’ experiences.

The ultimate aim is to connect literary experience with students’ personal and social lives. Literature becomes a way of understanding themselves, other people and the world. Encounters with different characters, conflicts and perspectives develop reflection, empathy and more responsible judgements about their own actions and those of others.

The project also develops practical tools that teachers can use in schools.

By comparing media forms, the project explores how images, shots, rhythm and the visual organisation of narrative affect students’ reading, imagination and interpretation. Film and comics provide additional interpretative routes into complex narrative and emotional relationships.

Bibliotherapeutic reading encourages students to recognise, name and reflect on emotions in literary texts and relate them to their own experience. Literature thus becomes a space for reflection, understanding and emotional sensitivity as well as analysis.

On this basis, the integrated teaching model connects emotional literacy, visual thinking and narrative reflection. Students visualise, adapt, compare and discuss texts from their own perspectives, bringing together cognitive, emotional and creative dimensions of reading.

The project will compare comprehension, engagement, emotional responses and reflection under conventional and innovative teaching arrangements. The innovative approach will therefore be tested scientifically, beyond its appeal as an engaging classroom activity.

Instruments for measuring emotional resonance, comprehension and engagement will enable systematic evaluation and provide teachers with clearer indications of how students experience, understand and connect literary texts with themselves and the world.

The project asks whether students’ understanding changes when they also see, visualise, adapt, draw, dramatise or connect a text with their emotional experience. It explores reading as a complex process combining words, images, movement, emotion and personal reflection.

Students will approach literary works from interconnected perspectives. Comparing a text with a film adaptation will help them consider changes in narrative, atmosphere, characters and emotional credibility. Reading and creating comics explores the relationship between words and images, while scripts and storyboards translate literary content into scenes, shots and visual decisions.

Reflective writing and bibliotherapy discussions allow students to consider their reactions, characters’ actions and conflicts raised by the text. Analysis of emotions, symbols and conceptual metaphors supports recognition of deeper meanings and the ways literature shapes understanding of inner states, relationships and life situations. Digital and transmedia tasks extend opportunities for interpretation, collaboration and creative response.

The approach opens more routes into literature’s complexity. The more ways students can explore a text and connect it with their experience, the greater the opportunities for deeper understanding, independent interpretation and recognising its relevance to their lives.

This approach examines project effects from several perspectives. Changes in comprehension, emotional engagement and reflection cannot be reliably described by one instrument alone. Quantitative methods provide measurable, comparable results, while qualitative methods show how students read, feel, imagine and transform literary content. Together they provide a more complete and methodologically persuasive picture.

Pre-tests establish students’ starting level, while post-tests show whether their knowledge and interpretative abilities improve after implementation. This reduces reliance on general impressions.

Emotional resonance questionnaires and emotional literacy scales address a dimension often overlooked in traditional assessment. They monitor the intensity of emotional responses, the ability to recognise and name emotions, and connections between texts and personal experience, seeking systematic and comparable measurements.

Written reflections reveal aspects that standardised questionnaires cannot fully capture: how students justify their experiences, recognise motifs and conflicts, understand characters’ actions and relate literature to personal and social questions. They reveal the depth and complexity of reader responses.

Comics, scripts and storyboards show how students transfer content between media. They require selection of key scenes, sequencing, decisions about images and words, and choices of narrative perspective. They reveal understanding of narrative structure, character relationships, symbolism and emotional dynamics.

Coding narrative and emotional patterns makes qualitative analysis systematic. Recurring motifs, metaphors, emotions, perspective shifts and forms of identification are classified according to predefined categories. Individual responses become a comparable research corpus, with more transparent interpretation and less dependence on subjective impressions.

Statistical procedures help assess whether observed differences are consistent with more than chance variation. T-tests compare two groups or measurements; analysis of variance examines differences across multiple groups or factors. These methods can explore differences by teaching model, student age, task type or initial emotional literacy.

The main advantage is methodological triangulation. When comprehension tests, emotional questionnaires, reflections and creative work point in the same direction, conclusions become more convincing. Divergent findings are also valuable: students may be emotionally engaged without substantial gains in comprehension, or vice versa. Combining measurement, interpretation and statistical analysis provides a sound basis for evaluation.

Teaching innovation can therefore be assessed through measurable results as well as impressions.

The project aims to produce structured, tested results available for further professional and academic use. Its central result is a scientifically evaluated model integrating close reading, film, comics, bibliotherapy, emotional literacy and narrative reflection, tested in real classrooms. Its value will be assessed through evidence of its effects on comprehension, engagement and reader responses.

Evaluation instruments will monitor emotional resonance and engagement. At least two analytical rubrics will support systematic assessment of written, visual and transmedia work. A coding system will classify narrative and emotional patterns, including identification with characters, emotional reactions, symbols and narrative perspectives, making complex reading experiences comparable.

A database will contain analysed reflective texts, comics, scripts, storyboards and other creative work. More than 50 representative works will be selected for a public digital collection with appropriate personal data and copyright protection. The collection will serve as a project archive, a source of good practice, material for future research and inspiration for teachers.

At least four workshops will transfer research into practice for teachers, librarians and other professionals. Participants will explore the integrated model, bibliotherapy questions, film and comics, and assessment of reflections and creative work.

A methodological and teaching handbook will explain the model’s theoretical foundations, research procedures, classroom activities, evaluation tools and adaptation to different works and age groups, enabling use beyond participating schools.

At least two A1-category and five A2-category papers will present the theoretical framework, methodology, empirical results and aspects of literary reception. Findings will also be presented at international conferences, professional meetings and public lectures, contributing to wider discussions of literature teaching, emotional literacy and transmedia education.

The digital collection will include selected reflections, comics, scripts, storyboards and other creative work, accompanied by descriptions, commentary and analytical context.

IUČIP is an open research and educational space connecting academic work, teaching, libraries, cultural programmes and healthcare practice. Alongside the teaching model, it builds collaboration among institutions approaching literature, reading, education and emotional development from different perspectives.

Schools, teachers and students are central because the model must be tested in real classrooms. Collaboration includes teacher training, preparation and use of materials, workshops, collection of reflections and creative work, and evaluation of participants’ experiences. A bibliotherapy series based on The Wizard of Oz has already been delivered at Fran Galović Grammar School in Koprivnica.

Libraries connect reading, education and local communities. The Ogulin City Library and Reading Room hosted a Literary Bibliotherapy Practicum based on Rumena Bužarovska’s Nikamo ne idem. The Božidar Adžija Library in Zagreb hosts a longer series on Alessandro Baricco’s Ocean Sea. These settings allow project methods to be explored with adult readers and diverse groups beyond formal teaching.

Collaboration in higher education and professional training includes the Academy of Arts and Culture in Osijek, which hosted Bibliotherapy in Theory and Practice. International activities connect the project with Sapienza University of Rome, where Dubravka Zima participated in Fairy Tales in Slavic Countries: Reception, Production, Circulation, and the Institut für Jugendliteratur in Vienna, through work on children’s literature, reading promotion and literary mediation.

Healthcare collaboration includes the Sveti Ivan Psychiatric Clinic in Zagreb, where literary bibliotherapy has been applied for several years in the Day Hospital for Early Intervention and the Day Hospital for Psychotic Disorders. It connects literary interpretation, psychiatric practice, psychoeducation and therapy in a professionally supervised clinical setting.

International professional exchange was strengthened through the 8th Slovenian Psychiatric Congress in Portorož. The project also participates in publishing and research networks through Domagoj Brozović’s chapter for the Routledge Handbook of Global Comics and papers in journals addressing bibliotherapy, literature and education.

The project remains open to schools, libraries, cultural institutions, research institutes, universities and specialists in literature, teaching methodology, education, film, comics, bibliotherapy, psychology and psychiatry. Joint activities may include research, training, exchange of materials, publications, conference presentations and the development of research instruments.