Professor Mercè Bernaus Queralt from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona was one of the initiators of Listiac in January 2018, and the UAB team has been both a vital and an active part of the project ever since.
Members of the Faculty of Education of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) have been involved in international projects related to linguistically sensitive teaching for all classrooms for many years. They have worked within many different European projects introducing language awareness and positive attitudes towards languages in all classrooms. The research centre hosting the Listiac project at UAB, the Research Group on Plurilingual Interaction and Teaching (GREIP), is recognised both locally and internationally for expertise in this field.
It should therefore come as no surprise that UAB was one of the initiators of the Listiac Project in January 2018, when Professor Mercè Bernaus Queralt was invited by the European Commission to a presentation of Erasmus+ Key Action 3. There she met with the representatives of the Portuguese Ministry of Education, Vytauto Didzjiojo Universitetas, Lithuania, and the Slovenian Ministry of Education. They started to discuss the possibility of applying for a project related to teaching in multilingual classrooms. UAB colleague Professor Emilee Moore was immediately engaged in the possible project as representative of the GREIP team.
Since the beginning of the Listiac project, the UAB team has carried out various actions for the project. The researcher, Júlia Llompart, is an active member of the Listiac research team, and the UAB team are also active in their local setting. In June, the team put through a pre-pilot with a group of pre-service university students, which will later result in a locally published research article. During the past six months, the UAB team has talked about Listiac, linguistically sensitive teaching and plurilingualism in various conferences, seminars and workshops all over Europe.
One of the most relevant upcoming actions is the organization of the seminar ‘Linguistic diversity and teaching: reflections on linguistic inclusion’, which aims to bring together various actors related to teacher training in order to promote the reflection of linguistically sensitive teaching. This seminar has been organized thanks to the UAB ‘Grant for organization of seminars on experiences and management strategies of linguistic diversity in the UAB classrooms (2019)’. Actions like these are an important part of the Listiac project and the change that the project is aiming for.
