In late May 2022, the “Building blocks” project team were fortunate to be able to travel to Graz for their second expert meeting. Two days of intensive work were devoted to discussing and improving the first drafts of what will become the project outputs. While these will mainly be concerned with the language-related elements that are too often missing in curricula for initial and in-service teacher education, the team members agreed on the importance of also aligning teacher education with the language-related specifications in national or state curricula for learners.
The planned building blocks, which will include texts, graphics, and links to existing projects and resources, will cover a range of sub-topics that are relevant for planning teacher education with a language-specific focus. These topics include references to key European policy recommendations, an accessible definition of language-sensitive education, and tasks to raise the target audiences’ awareness of language-related learner competences in curricula. At the core of the output, there will be practical tasks and recommendations for enriching teacher education curricula and selected modules of pre- and in-service education, as well as observation and teaching practice, with a (greater) focus on language-related issues across subject boundaries. In addition, teacher educators will be offered model profiles of language-related teacher competences for different categories of teachers, containing some dimensions that overlap these categories, and others that are needed for specific kinds of teaching.
The first building blocks will be made available for piloting and feedback after summer, in preparation for the main workshop, which will take place at the ECML on 14-15 February 2023.
Authors: Lukas Bleichenbacher, Nataša Pirih Svetina, Richard Rossner, Anna Schröder-Sura