Lessons learned by partners and registered through the questionnaire are being collected here.
If you wish to add your own lesson, please edit the table below the arrow(s) corresponding to your pilot and fill in the fields required, or fulfil the following password-protected form
| PILOT NAME | Date | Type of lesson | Subject | Lesson | Situation | Recommendations & comments | Barriers |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2. The Adventures of the Little Prince in the World (1/5) | 2023/ 05/19 | Activity co-creation | Researchers giving up power and control in the process | The intricacies of co-creation posed further challenges for us as researchers, too. Apart from being an exercise of ongoing reflexibility and adaptability, co-creation faced us with the challenges involved in giving up power and control in the research process. | For example, there were instances where the focus of the activities indicated by the teachers did not necessarily match the priorities of our enquiries as researchers. | Allowing the teachers to take the lead was an exercise of putting the needs of the schools first and identifying creative ways of fitting research inquiries to work within given sets of priorities. We found it necessary to keep returning to the focus of migration with the teachers, as part of our brainstorming conversations around possible activities. | Cultural barriers in: Activity co-creation, Engagement, Mentoring |
| 2. The Adventures of the Little Prince in the World (2/5) | 2023/ 05/19 | Activity co-creation | Teachers’ changing feelings about the unstructured and open nature of co-creation | Despite their experience of working with migrant pupils and confidence in steering the co-creation process, teachers, at times, also indicated signs of uneasiness regarding the unstructured and open nature of the process. | Primary school: Teachers did not develop their initial, original ideas, but instead they opted for adapting the Handbook by Cyprus Secondary school: They developed an original programme of activities inspired by the Little Prince project but adapted to their own curriculum (Anthology booklet, poetry and creative writing activities) | We reflected on this, as a feature inherent to PAR and co-creation, which may prove to be an unfamiliar and at times counter-intuitive process. For the primary school, it was clear that they valued the Handbook produced by Cyprus and found the mentoring meeting helpful. | Cultural barriers in: Activity co-creation, Engagement, Mentoring |
| 2. The Adventures of the Little Prince in the World (3/5) | 2023/ 05/19 | Engagement | Challenges of doing PAR with schools | There are well-documented challenges in recruiting schools, especially after the Covid pandemic, and even more so, when the research topic is not strictly related to attainment. Working with participatory methods added additional complications and barriers to these already challenging conditions. | We captured schools being particularly busy and overwhelmed in dealing with the curriculum demands and responding to the multiple needs of children. This leaves limited time and capacity for schools to engage with research projects. | At several instances, the research team reflected on the fact that PAR requires the active and ongoing initiative and involvement of teachers, students (or even parents and local communities), which adds to their existing pressures. | Political barriers in: Engagement |
| 2. The Adventures of the Little Prince in the World (4/5) | 2023/ 05/19 | Implementation | Schools are extremely busy and teachers overworked | Throughout the co-creation and implementation process, we realized how busy the teachers are, as their diaries were fully booked we observed that they worked well beyond the school hours. For example, they had upcoming parents’ meetings, school trips, dance and other kind of competitions and themed school days, among others. | The school we worked with was particularly busy as they were exceptional in working with outside groups and participating in many different projects, which often run in parallel. | The team had to adjust to the ways the school and teachers are working, which involved short yet very focused and productive communication/meeting etc. Also due to their busy schedules the teachers were predominantly focused on action and the implementation of pilot activities in their classrooms and had limited time for communicating with the team the particulars of the activities or provide extensive accounts on their reflections. Our initial expectations for more frequent and detailed communication were adjusted to the teachers schedules and working style. | Social barriers in: Engagement, Implementation Political barriers in: Engagement, Implementation |
| 2. The Adventures of the Little Prince in the World (5/5) | 2023/ 05/19 | Implementation | Formal versus informal communication with teachers | The importance of informality in co-creation processes: Formal communication may prove daunting for teachers and put them off, while informal conversations and links work well towards building relations of trust, which were much appreciated by the teachers and offered a more welcoming feel to the meeting resonating with a friendly encounter. | Our role as researchers was to support the teachers in brainstorming activities, offering ideas and suggestions yet allowing them to lead the process. In this sense, our role was to initiate and encourage co-creation, and be responsive by accommodating teachers’ ideas and suggestions, while also ensuring that the focus on the main/wider themes and objectives of the project is maintained. | We ensured that informality and friendly language communication was reflected on our emails and face to face communication. Also, small things can make a difference towards this direction, such as bringing snacks or biscuits to our meetings, ‘Little conversations’ (fast paced & to-the-point) helping us develop relationships and keep momentum both in terms of implementation planning and relationship building. | Emotional barriers in: Communication, Engagement Social barriers in: Communication, Engagement Cultural barriers in: Communication, Engagement |
| 3. Teacher training and family involvement in pluralistic approaches to language education (1/3) | 2023/ 04/12 | Engagement | Teachers’ complex and often rigid perceptions of pupils’ plurilingual practices | The lesson described herein is complex and includes negative and positive aspects. On the negative side, we identify an evident contradiction between the principles and practices of the school regarding family languages at school hours, and the plurilingual proposals being implemented as part of the repilot. We understand that coping with linguistic diversity can be complicated and teachers might not be used to it, or expect students to master the local, vehicular language at expense of their plurilingual practices. Still, we hope that, through the positive process and outcomes of the repilot action, teachers and students will be able to see the advantages of promoting plurilingual practices and of including family languages in their daily dynamics in a more integrated way. | This log refers to an extended and complex situation we have noticed along the process of co-creating the pilot action with the school staff. On one hand, teachers were very eager and enthusiastic about the pilot and the idea of including plurilingualism in the school dynamics. On the other hand, and at the same time, they expressed their clear rejection to letting pupils use their home languages during school hours, arguing that this practice created ‘guettos’ and was ‘impolite’. In the initial steps of the project, we could observe that children expressed similar beliefs and restrained from using their home languages at school, oftentimes also in the pilot activities. | Our recommendations would include approaching teachers’ beliefs and practices regarding plurilingualism with respect and comprehension, while at the same time discussing their fears and expectations and opening spaces for change. | Emotional barriers in: Engagement Social barriers in: Communication Cultural barriers in: Communication Education barriers in: Communication, Activity co-creation, Engagement, Implementation, Evaluation Language barriers in: Communication, Engagement, Implementation, Evaluation |
| 3. Teacher training and family involvement in pluralistic approaches to language education (2/3) | 2023/ 04/12 | Communication | Mother tongue day celebration: activities around a Chinese-Italian bilingual tale adapted to the catalan context (use of videos on unknown languages) | Important things to be highlighted: – The activity opened spaces to visibilize other languages that are not part of the children repertoires and to discuss differences and similarities between languages and varieties; – When watching the video in Chinese, students were curious and commented on the intonation, images, gestures, facial expressions of the reader as cues to understand what the tale was about; -At the same time, though, the inclusion of languages that are not part of the children’s repertoires, like Chinese, through the use of videos, created confusion and did not facilitate face to face interaction and body language support, not engaging the children as was expected. – Nevertheless, many children were fully able to understand the content when listened in Italian and with support from images and gestures, especially the older ones (5 years old) who were able to fully translate the story to Catalan. – Teachers were surprised by the pupils’ ability to inter-comprehend related languages. -Students were also very interested in discovering new words and sound of the new languages. | The lesson relates to an activity prepared for the Mother Tongue day, consisting of a bilingual tale in Chinese and Italian, that was translated into catalan. Before reading the catalan version, pupils watched a video in Chinese and in Italian recorded by native speakers and commented on what they could or could not understand of each language. Afterwards, they played with manipulative games (flashcards of the story, printed images to be painted or decorated, etc.) | -The inclusion of different languages that are not part of the children’s repertoires should be supported also by gestures, images and multimodal resources. Ideally, bringing in a native speaker that can enhance face-to-face interaction and other communicative cues would be much more hepful than using videos. –Manipulative activities are more engaging with young children. | Emotional barriers in: Implementation Cultural barriers in: Communication, Engagement, Implementation Language barriers in: Communication, Activity co-creation, Engagement, Implementation |
| 3. Teacher training and family involvement in pluralistic approaches to language education (3/3) | 2023/ 04/12 | Communication | Mother tongue day celebration: activities around a Chinese-Italian bilingual tale adapted to the Catalan context (use of videos on unknown languages) | Important things to be highlighted: – The activity opened spaces to visibilize other languages that are not part of the children repertoires and to discuss differences and similarities between languages and varieties; – When watching the video in Chinese, students were curious and commented on the intonation, images, gestures, facial expressions of the reader as cues to understand what the tale was about; -At the same time, though, the inclusion of languages that are not part of the children’s repertoires, like Chinese, through the use of videos, created confusion and did not facilitate face-to-face interaction and body language support, not engaging the children as was expected. – Nevertheless, many children were fully able to understand the content when listened in Italian and with support from images and gestures, especially the older ones (5 years old) who were able to fully translate the story to Catalan. – Teachers were surprised by the pupils’ ability to inter-comprehend related languages. -Students were also very interested in discovering new words and sound of the new languages. | The lesson relates to an activity prepared for Mother Tongue Day, consisting of a bilingual tale in Chinese and Italian, that was translated into Catalan. Before reading the Catalan version, pupils watched a video in Chinese and in Italian recorded by native speakers and commented on what they could or could not understand of each language. Afterwards, they played with manipulative games (flashcards of the story, printed images to be painted or decorated, etc.) | -The inclusion of different languages that are not part of the children’s repertoires should be supported also by gestures, images and multimodal resources. Ideally, bringing in a native speaker that can enhance face-to-face interaction and other communicative cues would be much more helpful than using videos. –Manipulative activities are more engaging with young children. | Emotional barriers in: Implementation Cultural barriers in: Communication, Engagement, Implementation Language barriers in: Communication, Activity co-creation, Engagement, Implementation |