OFFICIAL PRESS RELEASE. The Faculty of Education and Welfare Studies at Åbo Akademi University, Finland, has received 1.8 million euros in EU financing for the Erasmus+ project LISTiac (Linguistically Sensitive Teaching in All Classrooms). The aim is to support teachers in becoming more linguistically sensitive to enable opportunities for equally successful schooling for all students in Europe.
Åbo Akademi University is the main coordinator of the project, led by Professor Siv Björklund and Associate professor Mari Bergroth. The aim is to provide all students in Europe with the same possibilities to be successful in school. Despite existing research and the number of didactic tools developed for individual teachers to date, it is still problematic to change monolingually framed school policies and school-wide practices. In order to change this situation, the project intends to reach out to non-language teachers.
In a world that is constantly changing, it is relevant for all teachers to take the different languages of the students and the surrounding communities into account.
Professor Siv Björklund
In the project, policy experiments will be conducted to reach new solutions in practice. Five researchers from five European universities will work full-time during the project. They will develop, test and evaluate a reflection tool to help future and in-service teachers become more linguistically sensitive in their teaching, thoughts and attitudes. Three more universities will help conduct field research, and the project is carried out in collaboration with the ministries in Finland, Portugal and Slovenia.
LISTiac aims to reach out to relevant teacher education programs in different contexts with varying linguistic diversity in order to develop evidence-based policies. The project focuses on both teacher education and in-service training.
The total budget for the project that started in February 2019 and ends in February 2022 is 2.4 million euros.
