Abstracts

Phil Ball, The Federation of Basque Schools

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 ‘faceto-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, learnercenteredness, 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.

Pille Põiklik, Estonian Ministry of Education and Research

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.

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Anna Golubeva, Tartu University Narva College

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.

Enrica Piccardo, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto

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.