Programme Monday, 26th of September
Gathering in room M-225
Eero Loonurm has been active in higher education internationalisation for nearly 15 years.
His responsibilities in the national Estonian Education and Youth Board (Estonia) include the development and execution of the national higher education marketing strategy for “Study in Estonia” and representing Estonia in communications-related working groups on the state level and European level. He belonged to the education related working groups for the national development strategy "Estonia 2035" and is the marketing and communications expert in promoting Europe as a study destination for the European Commission project “Study in Europe”.
The onset of the information age has inevitably altered our views on education, not only in terms of the content of the curriculum but also in terms of the architecture and spatial nature of learning. With regard to content, the easy availability of information has ushered in the concept of competence-based education, where we now see knowledge and skills as the ‘resources’ of competences, whereas before we regarded them as independent components to be assessed. They are the wheels on the (hybrid) car now. They’re no longer the engine. With regard to spaces, we still have classrooms, but with the new binary distinction of ‘face-to-face’ and ‘online’. The sudden need to adapt materials and methodology to cope with the shut-down resulted in an extraordinary flowering of creative solutions from both instructors and learners, and research suggests that the meta-disciplinary competences that we traditionally associated with the social interaction of classroom environments were in many cases enhanced by the zoom-boom. It seems counter-intuitive, but curricula that were already offering competence-oriented practices (such as CLIL) found the sudden shift to online teaching a much less problematic one. This talk will consider some of the reasons why this took place, but will also consider a wider definition of ‘Learning spaces’ where the dynamic shifts from teacher to learner, and the learners look outwards, seeking to interact. CLIL, for example, has been a major player in this re-configuration of the landscape, for the simple reason that when teachers operate in the L2, they think twice. How does a teacher ‘thinking twice’ lead to competences, learner-centeredness, and a more action-oriented approach? This talk will show some examples of how this happens, and how the traditional ‘space’ of the classroom can now simply be a base for looking outwards and solving real-life problems.
Phil Ball is based in San Sebastián in Spain. He is the co-author of the book ‘Putting CLIL into Practice’ (OUP 2015) and his CLIL textbook series for the Basque curriculum was nominated for the ELTONS Innovation Award in London. He is module leader on the MA CLIL degree for NILE in England and his work has included consultancy projects in Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Austria, Japan and Qatar.
He has been involved in several European-based CLIL projects and has written a wide variety of CLIL-based textbooks for the Basque and Spanish social science and English language programmes. He co-designed the new ‘CLIL Essentials’ online course for the British Council and works at the University of the Basque Country (UPV) training lecturers to deliver their subjects through English. He also works with vocational teachers at the University of Vienna and on the OTA masterclasses at Christ Church, Oxford.
He has authored various CLIL-based articles and is currently working on digital language materials for the French and English CLIL programmes in the north of Spain.
The presentation takes as its starting point a European survey conducted in early 2021 within “The future of language education in the light of Covid. Lessons learnt and ways forward” initiative. The initiative is carried out by the European Centre for Modern Languages and the organisations that are members of its Professional Network Forum in further cooperation with the European Commission. The survey and the subsequent work done within the initiative focus on both the teachers’ and learners’ experiences of the pandemic as well as the implications that the pandemic period has for future language education. We will revisit some of the responses from the 1735 professionals who participated in the survey, focussing on what happened (and what might still need to happen) inside the language learning process.
Pille Põiklik, PhD, is a chief expert at the Language Policy Department of the Ministry of Education and Research, Estonia. Her work involves supporting foreign language learning, Estonian as a second language learning for adult learners and multilingualism in Estonia. Pille is a member of the Governing Board of the European Centre for Modern Languages. Prior to joining the Language Policy Department, Pille worked at the English Department of the University of Tartu, teaching practical English, academic writing as well as courses on media literacy and discourse analysis.
The session introduces the unique experience of the Estonian language immersion programme which is one of the first examples of using immersion to teach the majority language to minority students. The Estonian immersion programme was launched in 1998 to provide Russian-speaking students with possibilities to acquire the Estonian language mastery to be competitive for university education and at the labour market. Currently the Estonian immersion programme implements three models at the preschool education level and three models in general school education. The session introduces these models and explains the reasons for their implementation. The speaker invites the participants to discuss current international practices of facing the challenge of linguistically diverse classrooms and the ways teachers could learn from each other.
Anna Golubeva works in Narva College of the University of Tartu as the Head of the Centre of Multilingual Education. She previously worked as Chief Specialist in the Estonian Language Immersion Centre where she coordinated the preschool network and was also involved in development and implementation of the two-way language immersion model. She is currently a PhD student at Dublin City University. The topic of her research is professional development needs of preschool language immersion teachers in Estonia.
This session will focus on the development of plurilingual practices and mediation activities in the classroom. It will consist of an interactive presentation that will highlight the theoretical developments informing such practices and activities and of a hands-on workshop. After a presentation of plurilingualism and mediation, two core concepts of the CEFR that had been introduced in the 2001 edition and that have since been further developed in the CEFR Companion Volume (Council of Europe, 2020), participants will be invited to consider their own plurilingual profiles and trajectories and their personal experiences with mediation. They will then have the opportunity to consider in break-out groups a series of examples of activities that foster plurilingualism and/or mediation that can be implemented in the classroom and to discuss (and if necessary to adapt) these practices in relation to their teaching contexts.
Enrica Piccardo, PhD, is a Professor of Applied Linguistics and Language Education at OISE, University of Toronto, and director of the OISE Centre for Educational research in Languages and Literacies (CERLL). A collaborator with the Council of Europe since 2008 and co-author of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) Companion Volume (Council of Europe, 2020), she has coordinated international research projects on language teaching innovation in Canada and Europe. Her research spans language teaching approaches, multi/plurilingualism, creativity and complexity in language education. Among her publications: Piccardo, E. & North, B. (2019). The Action-oriented Approach. A Dynamic Vision of Language Education Bristol: Multilingual Matters; Piccardo, E., Germain Rutherford A. & Lawrence, G. (2021). The Routledge Handbook of Plurilingual language Education. London: Routledge; Piccardo, E., Lawrence, G., Germain Rutherford A., & Galante A. (2022). Activating Linguistic and Cultural Diversity in the Language Classroom. New York: Springer.