Abstract:

The development of teaching and learning strategies that embed elements of context and culture can significantly contribute to effective learning. Examples exist across diverse education fields, ranging from natural science to arts and humanities, offering support to the relevance of taking into account the cultural context, as well as cultural values as the basis for developing learning strategies that increase students’ engagement. Moreover, the need to enhance the skills and attitudes for communicating interculturally has been widely acknowledged by the EU and other organisms such as UNESCO and OECD. According to this view, education and training programmes need to be designed with a purpose, in order to promote the development of competencies for intercultural communication. This article offers a description and a discussion of the learning experience developed under the European project COMPASS, devoted to the development of language and digital competencies in adult and senior populations. The project aims to address the need for competence development for the segments of the adult and senior European population, which is asked to keep pace with digitalization, as well as to adapt to an increasingly multicultural Europe. Moreover, such needs are often reinforced for those who see many of their relatives engage in migration experiences, making them face the growth of their close family in foreign contexts, that they need to quickly learn about and understand. The project COMPAS is developed in collaboration with partners from 6 European countries and has involved the development of pedagogical resources in different languages, building on the local culture and heritage elements, and a teaching and learning methodology that resorts to storytelling as a means to engage learners in active experiences that build on the heritage elements. The resources and methods were piloted with senior learners, allowing for a discussion of the challenge and benefits of such an approach. The article offers contributions to the discussion and advancement of knowledge about CLIL (an acronym for Content and Language Integrated Learning), referring to educational contexts where a foreign language is employed to promote the learning of non-language content.

Keywords:

Competencies development, CLIL, senior population, cultural heritage, learning.