The Community Café project:

language teachers creating and sharing resources online

Kate Borthwick & Alison Dickens

Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies

Overview

• what was ‘the Community Café’ project?

• why did we do it?

• what did we do?

• how did we get on?

• what happens next?

The Project

• funded by JISC under the developing community content initiative for:

‘the development of community collections, where digital content is created, co-created or enhanced by audiences from outside traditional tertiary education boundaries’www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/digitisation/communitycontent

• in our case we had already identified community languages as an area in which there was a need for more support and teaching resources. This project presented an ideal way of helping to address this.

Why did we do it?

• to create more up-to-date online teaching resources for community languages • to give community language teachers the opportunity to improve their teaching and IT skills

• to help community language teachers to make contact with other teachers across the UK

• to share expertise and resources from the University of Southampton with the local community

What are ‘community languages?’

For this project ‘community languages’ were defined as “…languages spoken by members of minority groups or communities within a majority language context” (Cilt)

In the Southampton area, for example, there is a wide range of community languages, including Gujarati, Bengali, Chinese, Afghan Farsi, Hindi, Malay, Malayalam, Persian, Punjabi, Polish and Urdu.

Often taught and learnt in informal, community-based situations (e.g. in the home, in complementary schools) rather than within mainstream education.

Why did we do it?

• to further develop our OER work built up through the HumBox and LanguageBox projects • to draw on successful community building techniques developed through these projects and others (offline) such as the Language Café

• to further demonstrate that OER can be used to enhance as well as showcase practice

• to develop approaches to OER that are pedagogically rather than technologically driven

What did we do?

• met at the Community Café once a month to share teaching ideas and explore new ways of teaching their students

• ran a workshop programme to provide training in the use of new technologies for teaching languages

• used an online space, The LanguageBox, to store and share the resources created by the project

• worked in partnership with LLAS, Southampton City Council and Manchester Metropolitan University

How did we get on?

• café has met 7 times and there has been very good attendance (30-40 each time)• we have discussed classroom teaching practice and have had guest speakers• we have run 7 workshops on how to use new technologies to create teaching resources or share teaching ideas• we have worked collaboratively in groups and sometimes across languages• teachers are growing in confidence in using IT• resources are being uploaded into the LanguageBox

The online space…

• personal profile pages

• range of resources contributed by language teachers

• see most viewed/downloaded

• see when someone else downloads, remixes or comments on your resources

• create ‘favourites’

• contact other users through the site

Personal profile

Personal profile

A range of resources

The resource page

Comments

My Room downloaded

What’s in the Box?

• resources for teachers to use in the classroom

• resources for learners to use on their own

• teaching ideas for other teachers to adapt

• guidance on the use of software

• advice on teaching techniques

• cultural materials – images, songs etc.

• a workshop pack for trainers and teachers

Teaching materials

• resources for teachers to use in the classroom• resources for learners to use on their own • teaching ideas for other teachers to adapt• guidance on the use of software• advice on teaching techniques• cultural materials – images, songs etc.

Learning materials

• resources for teachers to use in the classroom• resources for learners to use on their own • teaching ideas for other teachers to adapt• guidance on the use of software• advice on teaching techniques• cultural materials – images, songs etc.

Teaching ideas

• resources for teachers to use in the classroom• resources for learners to use on their own • teaching ideas for other teachers to adapt• guidance on the use of software• advice on teaching techniques• cultural materials – images, songs etc.

Technology guides

Teaching tips

• resources for teachers to use in the classroom• resources for learners to use on their own • teaching ideas for other teachers to adapt• guidance on the use of software• advice on teaching techniques• cultural materials – images, songs etc.

Cultural materials

• resources for teachers to use in the classroom• resources for learners to use on their own • teaching ideas for other teachers to adapt• guidance on the use of software• advice on teaching techniques• cultural materials – images, songs etc.

What have we learnt?• Community-based language teachers are extremely enthusiastic learners and are not intimidated by new ideas and technologies (although many have a lot to learn!)

• Open access is an ideal vehicle for assisting the work of community-based language teachers (sharing resources doesn’t meet with resistance and they like the idea of expanding what is often a small community at local level)

• There needs to be more knowledge transfer between HE and school sectors and community languages teachers to enable culture change (OER has a human as well as a technological face)

What have we learnt?• Neutral environments are necessary to allow cross-linguistic, cross-cultural sharing to take place (working in this way in a multilingual context on and off-line helps bring all lanuages teachers together and open up close-knit groups to a wider community)

•Informal meetings enable useful networking opportunities (the LanguageBox is very user-friendly and community-driven as were the F2F sessions)

• Successful community-building takes account of the different motivations of participants to take part (technology upskilling was a big draw and other things such as OER were made possible as a result)

What does the community say?

“I have found the LanguageBox to be very useful as inspiration for my own lesson planning because I can get ideas from other teachers’ lesson plans and from their teaching resources. I have been publishing a series of lesson materials for Polish on the LanguageBox, and I hope to make contact with other Polish teachers in the UK by doing this.”

Krystyna Jenvey (Polish teacher)

What does the community say?

“[Using technology in teaching] is not as hard as it first seems. It just requires a lot of planning.” - Gurwinder Atwal (Punjabi teacher)

“I learnt lots of things and after this I have more confidence in using new websites.” – Nighat Jawed (Urdu teacher)

“Sometimes it is difficult to find a good podcast for your lesson. Now I’m able to do it on my own!” – Hedi Gonda (Hungarian teacher)

ConclusionsIn this context, the open access world is perfect for enhancing the practice of community-based language teachers, uniting them through a professional network, and providing an outlet for them to reach their students in exciting ways through the use of technology. The JISC-funded Community Café project has begun this in a fledgling way, and through the promotion of the LanguageBox and the project model, laid real foundations for future development in this area.

Community Café final report

What happens next?• teachers hopefully will continue to meet monthly in the Community Café to share ideas and resources

• teachers will continue to create resources and share them through the LanguageBox

•a workshop pack will be added to LanguageBox which can be used to support community languages teachers in other parts of the UK (http://languagebox.ac.uk/1846/)

• we will present the project at conferences and meetings

• we will look at new sources of funding to develop further community engagement initiatives

Find out more

• The Language Box: www.languagebox.ac.uk• Draft final report: http://languagebox.ac.uk/1842/ • The Community Café blog:

www.communitylanguages.wordpress.com • The webpage: www.llas.ac.uk/communitycafe• The HumBox Project www.humbox.ac.uk • ‘Community Languages in Higher Education: towards

realising the potential’ (2008), a report by Joanna McPake and Itesh Sachdev for the Routes into Languages project

A big thank you to all the teachers who have participated. It has been great to get to know you and I hope you have all got to know each other a bit better.

And special thanks to Sawar Jamil for being such a great project partner and also to Kate Chandler for supporting the project idea and helping get the City Council on board