TWO LANGUAGES, ONE STORY, ZERO WORDS. AN EXPERIENCE BASED ON INTERMEDIALITY

The present study in entrepreneurial education has as purpose promoting an entrepreneurial education through arts, offering the opportunity of new actions and strategies to provide the challenges needed to be competent in today’s society. In our communication we present our experience of an intermedial lesson unit in a secondary school’s entrepreneurship class, analyzing the creative, intermedial and micro-enterprise tasks.

We proposed a workshop where we designed and created a musical picturebook with no words, to accomplish two of our main goals. On the one hand, we wanted to insert both musical and visual language (both secondary ones next to the primary verbal language) in everyday classroom, offering the opportunity for new actions and strategies to profile entrepreneurs with imagination and creativity. In some sessions teenagers interpreted their music and from there they drew a visual message using an engraving technique. In other sessions, they worked in reverse: they explained a drawing through music. On the other hand, we wished to take into account the merchandise –and therefore the more economic aspect of entrepreneurial education– as the book was sold during the Saint George Fest, known as the day of the book. Pupil decided that the proceeds were contributed to endometriosis disease.

Based on the results, we believe it is important to introduce those languages in the school curriculum, and work on them in all areas. Music and visual pairing are necessary in different educational stages. Teachers should encourage this learning tool to promote the work of perception, production and reflection among students and to provide creative techniques to suggest that there are more languages than the standard verbal one. By creating a wordless book, we insist in the validity of these media as communicators.
Students are not used to be asked to think creatively, they often even do not believe they could do so. Insisting in competences as self-esteem, disposition and overcommitment, as well as using different creative techniques, pupil’s divergent thinking can improve. At the end of these sessions they themselves were astonished by their own capabilities.

So we didn’t only achieve the aim of creating a product they themselves had to sell (micro-enterprise), but as well to improve their competences and idea about themselves; to provide creative techniques, which they might use in any context of their lives; and suggest to them that there are more languages than the standard verbal one.

This unity forms part of the University of Girona’s project and entrepreneurial education’s promotion Teacher 2020 (Erasmus + 2014‐1‐ES01‐KA201‐004463), which contributes to entrepreneurial education as an active and participative methodology, in which students have a high degree of empowerment in their learning processes. They work out and learn from real community challenges, so that this way, we may be able to build a new, more sustainable and equitable community. As the European Commission of Education and Training (2016) says: "Entrepreneurship in Education is about inspiring entrepreneurial potential. People need the mind-set, skills and knowledge to generate creative ideas, and the entrepreneurial initiative to turn those ideas into action."