Making plurilingual/pluricultural education accessible by integrating imaginative, ethical, citizenship, and critical perspectives using teacher made materials.

MELINA PORTO; BARBONI, SILVANA; HELVER ADRIANA

Bremen

Conferencia; Making plurilingual/pluricultural education accessible: International perspectives; 2022

University of Bremen

Making plurilingual/pluricultural education accessible: International perspectivesUniversity of Bremen, 13-15 September 2022. Final conference of the Erasmus+ project "TEACUP“Title: Making plurilingual/pluricultural education accessible by integrating imaginative, ethical, citizenship, and critical perspectives using teacher made materials.AbstractIn this presentation we will show how a plurilingual/pluricultural agenda can be enacted in English language education in real classrooms. We suggest that the cornerstone of this agenda is the integration of imaginative, ethical, citizenship, and critical dimensions, which can be enacted through creative, arts-based and outdoor learning experiences. We will describe and illustrate our argument with a case study involving the development of teacher-made, locally produced, critical post-method materials, which were used in primary and secondary schools in the province of Buenos Aires in Argentina in contexts that can be characterised as vulnerable or difficult. We will describe these materials and how one teacher used and adapted them in her classroom. We will begin by describing the process of design of four English Primer Readers published by the Ministry of Education of the Province of Buenos Aires in Argentina. We will show the guiding principles followed by the author, an English language teacher, in response to contextual circumstances and policy challenges. We will focus on some of the main decisions made regarding this plurilingual/pluricultural agenda when developing teacher-made, locally produced, critical post-method materials. We will then describe an outdoor learning experience in a public secondary school in Argentina that stimulated student community engagement in a disadvantaged context. A progressive pedagogy was enacted through work with alternative discourses, multimodality, the creative arts, and an out-of-school visit to the Ecological and Cultural Park William Henry Hudson in the city of Florencio Varela. The case will show a starting point to build up plurilingual and pluricutural competences by fostering students’ strong identification with their surroundings and their engagement in civic action in their community.