Important Update!
This website has migrated to the following web address: https://creativepracticestl.wixsite.com/translanguaging
We invite you to follow our activities and updates
at this new and refreshed website.
Creative Language Practices: Exploring Translanguaging in Pedagogical Contexts and Beyond is a project that started with a few important questions: What is the role of translanguaging in language teaching? How can teachers enrich their practice if they are to engage with translanguaging? What does translanguaging mean for teachers and pupils in different multilingual classrooms? In an attempt to answer some of these questions, our project aims to discover and develop creative practices, activities and ideas that teachers can use in multilingual classrooms within a translingual framework. The project builds on a collaborative model that brings together expertise about multilingual learning and teaching, as well as arts-based methods and creative practices.
As language researchers and practitioners, we believe in the creative potential of languages and the important role of all our communicative resources. In a world where languages oftentimes become measures of someone’s identity, place and individual worth, we have a duty to support our learners of all linguistic backgrounds.
- We want to create inclusive environments where languages are respected, valued and made visible.
- We aim to inspire our learners to cherish all their communicative resources (e.g., using effectively words, images, body language, artistic and/or digital forms to reach one other).
- We strive to build positive attitudes towards languages in our classrooms and beyond.
We want to break walls that separate languages and language users because we have much more to learn from each others’ sounds, voices, words, images, moves, songs, etc.
The project has been developed as a series of workshops. Ten teachers from the Glasgow area together with 2 researchers from the University of Glasgow and four creative practitioners have worked together to explore creative practices and engage with the principles of translanguaging. This site records some of our stories, shares the resources we have developed in collaboration and provides useful links to similar projects. While developed in the context of teachers’ work in their respective schools, we believe that many of our resources can be used and applied in other contexts of language teaching and learning. If you are interested in finding out more about these workshops, feel free to contact us.
For this project, we have been supported by the Glasgow Knowledge Exchange Fund from the University of Glasgow and hosted by the Glasgow City Council, the EAL Unit, under the generous guidance of Maria Walker. The workshops have emerged from research conducted by Dr. Lavinia Hirsu and Dr. Sally Zacharias with the support of the British Council under the ELTRA funding scheme.
