Designed as part of
the LALI (Language and Literacy Learning through Art) project, this compendium has
benefited from an interdisciplinary team with specialists from four European countries.
The goal of this project has been to come up with a pedagogical kit in order to
foster basic skills, and thus to improve social inclusion of underprivileged
people or those from immigrant/non-native backgrounds. The innovative component
of our approach is a hybrid methodology which uses visual resources, systematically
chosen from art history, in language/literacy learning. In this resource book,
you will find a corpus of activities to be used in museum settings and/or in
classrooms to prepare museum visits. The artworks provide excellent means to
initiate discussions and/or interactions at different levels between the
participants, based around the artworks themselves and the different cultural heritages
of the host country and their home countries. A series of pilot workshops took
place where we tested this facilitator’s pack with participants from two
learning groups. In the first, the local language of the host country was
taught to newly arrived immigrants; in the second, literacy was taught to
participants who were fluent in the host country’s language but lacking writing
and reading skills. These activities, designed for an adult public, emphasise
non-formal and participatory approaches during the learning tasks; most
exercises suggest working in pairs or in small groups in order to foster dialogue,
interaction and peer-learning. We recommend this compendium to language teachers
looking to take their groups out of the classroom and adapt the frame of their
learning to include more art or playful modes of learning. It is worth
mentioning that the semi-autonomous approach to studying artworks and the
indirect guidance from facilitators to initiate discussion were the aspects
most appreciated by participants. Likewise, we received very positive feedback
on moments when the attendees discovered links between their own cultural
background and the universe conveyed by the visited exhibition: similarities between
Japanese and Syrian myths, for example, or the representation of the aftermath of
civil wars in the Western and Eastern World.