Abstract:

This abstract explains the benefits of education through the arts for Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) education in a primary school in Liège (Belgium), firstly by trusting your senses to interpret historical objects from museums, secondly to construct meaning through idea exchange, thirdly by expressing learning through the arts.
Inspired by the results of the Erasmus+ KA2-project “Articulan - Education through the arts in multilingual primary schools”, a PXL-teacher educator did a traineeship in coteaching with an experienced CLIL-teacher English in a primary school for 10-year-old children growing up in a predominantly French-speaking environment. CLIL – Content and Language Integrated Learning – is a dual-focused approach teaching new content in a foreign language. As a Dutch-speaking language teacher educator, I was curious to see how pupils construct meaning when combining subject didactics linked to history, pedagogical CLIL-didactics and insights of education through the arts. The main research question for the history classes was “Why did people in prehistory start to develop writing?”.
In a first phase, we discussed the prior knowledge about the life of nomads and sedentary peoples in prehistory. In a second phase, pupils investigated a different sub-question in each group. They observed pictures of archaeological objects available on websites of historical museums and an atlas providing geographical and historical information of Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia 3400 BC. This rich input invited children to explore and make sense of life at that time. In a third phase children described what materials and symbols were used to transmit the first messages. They tried to guess the function of these objects in the daily lives of respectively nomads and sedentary people, and eventually how it made their jobs easier. The teacher actively helped them to express their ideas, rephrasing their thoughts or asking for more information. By asking open-ended questions, the teacher showed interest in the children’s work and gained insight into how they analysed historical resources. In a fourth phase, the children shared their insights with the others and the teacher provided interactive language support to articulate their thinking. Together, they tried to answer the main question. The teacher had the responsibility to label the new basic concepts, map the connections on the blackboard, have the children articulate them and repeat them in a subsequent learning activity. In addition, children learned to apply historical knowledge to their current lives by classifying letters and sentences of different modern languages in several ways. In a final phase, the children created their own hieroglyphs or cuneiform writing with clay.
This approach makes teachers realize that there are multiple ways to perceive reality. The authentic materials strengthen the children's involvement and curiosity and help them to decode the situation. As children gained confidence, the motivation to discover increased and more questions were asked. Collaborative working in heterogeneous groups was very helpful in this setting. Even though museums used easy words to describe the historical objects, in most cases the texts were very spicy for 10-year-old children. Thanks to the intense collaboration with the experienced CLIL-teacher, I gained a good understanding of how to apply the CLIL-strategies in multilingual classes. This experience helps me guide students in teacher training even better.

Keywords:

Multilingual education, CLIL, Arts education, creative thinking.