Abstract:

CultureShake is an Erasmus+ project. The aim is to create teaching material for multicultural and multilingual inclusion. After the so-called refugee wave in 2015 the topic “refugees” was on the EU agenda again. In the field of education there is a need for approaches and teaching material including refugee pupils. The CultureShake project regards integration as a twofold process, which means that not only refugees have to integrate, but that also established societies have to change to make integration happen. The project focusses on the education sector, on secondary schools in particular. The teaching tools and materials are designed for a cultural and linguistic diverse classroom. This diversity not only includes refugees, but also students with migrant background in general. However, students with no migrant background are not excluded, but also part of this multilingual and multicultural mix.

To accomplish the aim of the project a transnational team was chosen. The partners are from four different European countries and three different institutions: the University of Education Karlsruhe in Germany, the University of Primorska in Slovenia, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in the United Kingdom, a German secondary school and an English School in Sweden. The cooperating countries in the project made different experiences with migration and also have different ways of coping with migration in the educational sector. This expertise is needed to create products for Europe. With Germany and Sweden, two main partner countries are at the heart of receiving refugees. Besides this there is another strong argument for a transnational team when it comes to diversity: in contrast to other branches, school education is still nationally or even as in Germany regionally organised. To meet the EU aim to increase job mobility, school education needs to be internationalised and therefore the collaboration of teams from different European countries is needed. According to EU strategies such as Education and Training 2020, the Paris Declaration or the Commission Staff Working Document on Rethinking Education, education objectives for a highly mobile Europe are: promotion of basic and transversal skills (e.g. foreign language learning, cultural awareness), enhancement of digital skills, inclusive education, practised mobility, developed European dimension in education, usage of transnational expertise, increased motivation for language learning through innovative teaching methods. Referring to this, the aim of CultureShake is to provide open access student-centred secondary level learning material for intercultural communication in multilingual educational settings including refugee classes or refugees in classes via didactics of literature classes and school exchanges, created for the following target groups: pupils and teachers at schools, further education centres, ministries of education as well as students and lecturers at universities.

Keywords:

Inclusion, diversity, multilingualism, refugees, migrants.