en  fr

The project: Involving parents in plurilingual and intercultural education

What is it about?

The project aims to disseminate knowledge relating to the cognitive and social benefits of plurilingual and intercultural education. It also aims to develop the inclusion of parents in the elaboration of plurilingual and intercultural activities at school. To achieve this second aim, teachers must be informed about and trained in the benefits of involving families in pluralistic approaches – pluringual and intercultural.

Abstract

The project aims to deconstruct language and ethnic prejudices, which represent an obstacle to the development of plural approaches in education systems, especially when they include socially minorized languages and cultures. On the one hand it aims to inform parents, and, more widely, educational practitioners about the cognitive and social benefits of pluringual and pluricultural approaches. This will involve the dissemination of scientific knowledge about the importance of all languages, whatever their value on the "languages market", in general language development, the construction of knowledge about the world and the construction of a common culture, inclusive of diversity. On the other hand, the project aims to propose ways of involving these actors by inviting them to contribute to the design and to the implementation of these approaches, which should also help school institutions to establish closer connections with parents; some of them, who are migrants or belong to disadvantaged socio-economic classes, are often linguistically and symbolically insecure towards school especially because of social representations which depreciate their languages and cultures.

Target audience involved in project activities

  • teachers;
  • teacher educators;
  • parents and parents’ associations;
  • associations (national or international) of experts in education promoting plurilingual approaches and didactics. 
     

This project was run within the ECML's Learning through languages programme.

Project working languages:  French, English

Project term: 2013-2014

Acknowledgement

The PARENTS publication and website result from the work of an international network established within one of the ECML projects. We would like to thank all who worked on PARENTS, in particular the project coordination team for their motivation and active involvement.

Project team


Stéphanie Clerc (coordinator)
France

Anna Maria Curci
Italy

Brigitte Gerber
Switzerland

Xavier Pascual Calvo
Spain