“Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common vision. The ability to direct individual accomplishments toward organizational objectives. It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results.”

Andrew Carnegie

For us, this common goal was to raise awareness and educate people on the situation of the Mediterranean countries in regards to low literacy. The four of us have a common vision on the relevance of low literacy as a crucial problem in our societies. Due to our Mediterranean backgrounds we decided to work on low literacy in the countries we love the most and that are forever going to be our homes. 

Working together was insightful and inspiring. Our personalities and approaches to the problem were initially very different, and it was therefore harder to come up with a strategy. However, our love for cuisine, tradition, and Southern European countries helped us get closer. Fueled by pasta, paella, baccalà and gyros we started working seriously on this blog and found the task much easier. Our weekly meetings, in our favorite Italian restaurant in Maastricht, became a moment of reflection. We exchanged our ideas, opinions and data coming from the studies, sources and papers we read. 

In order to engage with our audience, we decided to use a clear and easy to follow language.We believe that such a delicate topic had to be transmitted to as many people as possible in an interesting and interactive way. Since English is not the first language of much of our audience and the topic is already quite challenging, it was important for us not to further complicate the readability of our posts. 

The part in which we struggled the most was finding a common strategy, since the dimension of the low literacy problem has many different shades. As to engage in a coherent analysis and to overcome the differences that these countries display, we decided to divide the approach. First, we analyzed the policies which the countries used to tackle the problem, and then we discussed their consequences, keeping the current situation into account.

Besides some struggles about the approach and blog-writing, OUR current situation made it also difficult to work together like we wanted. Having different timetables made it difficult to meet regularly during the week, so we often ended up taking some hours aside in our free time. Corona certainly  did not help with this aspect either, more and more restrictions are being implemented in Maastricht. Moreover, it is also scary the number of cases that go up everyday in the news. Thankfully, we are healthy and energetic, always ready for blogging. 

For all the reasons we mentioned above, we found that working together was surely hard on the one hand, but extremely fun and inspiring on the other. 

As we enjoyed writing our posts, we hope you enjoyed reading them as well! 😄