Category: around us

Resources we are creating as part of the Creative Language Practices project are to become available to schools through the Mitchell Library – with the help of the School Library Outreach team. To find out what it means in practice we visited the library and discovered a true gem: a huge room full of shelves and boxes with teaching resources on any subject you can dream about!

What was not there! Costumes, games, fluffy toys, stones, dinosaurs, objects from far away and from very close, and of course millions and trillions of books – including dual language books, books in Scots, Gaelic, Urdu, Arabic, Polish, Spanish, French, Italian, Hungarian… –  just to be borrowed and read.  The service is provided by the Mitchell Library to schools completely free of charge. For more details visit School Library Outreach or follow them on Twitter https://twitter.com/GlasgowSLO.

This project  led by Eneida Garcia Villanueva (Heriot-Watt University) reflected on the multilingual, multicultural and superdiverse society represented in Glasgow today through the medium of a multilingual performance.  Eneida worked with pupils from the Whinhill Primary on creating a multilingual play, which they subsequently performed in a local theatre to main language stakeholders in Scotland, families, MPs, policy makers and pupils and teachers from other schools.

Continue reading “All the World is Our Stage: Primary School Pupils Never Lost in Translanguaging”

The Edinburgh Multilingual Stories Festival organised by  Bilingualism Matters, Theatre Sans Accents and the Polish Cultural Festival Association brought together artists, researchers, children and communities to celebrate the diversity of Scotland’s many multilingual families and communities. It  offered an opportunity for bilinguals to creatively explore and express what it means to learn and speak more than one language. For monolinguals, this was a good opportunity to get a glimpse of the bilingual experience.

Continue reading “Dreaming in the Language of Drawing with Elina Karadzhova”

We started the first workshop of the Creative Practices: Exploring Translanguaging Research in Pedagogical Contexts and Beyond project playing with toys borrowed from a child’s drawer. Erasers, Lego blocks, tiny boxes and metal balls, transformers, miniature cars, keys, strings… what wasn’t there… Whilst doing it, we tried to imagine language as a physical object and considered the metaphors used to describe it.

This introductory activity engaged us to think out of the box. In fact, we started with a box and ended up with the metaphors that we use whenever we speak about our languages. Language as a container, language as a fluid, language as a tool — all these metaphors made their way onto the table via real objects. Looking at language in this way made us think more carefully about what we’re truly saying when we’re saying: I use my language… I have  a language, My languages are… (more on this activity will be included in the upcoming Resources section of our website).

Continue reading “Translanguaging Comics Created by Monika Szydłowska”