2016, Egli, Mirjam, Kürsteiner, Brigitte, Bleichenbacher, Lukas, Frehner, Ruth, Kolde, Antje-Marianne

Mobility programs for learning purposes, such as physical class exchanges or forms of virtual mobility, have long been recognised as powerful instruments for plurilingual and intercultural education. At the same time, it is clear that spending time in a different environment need not necessarily result in higher intercultural or linguistic skills. Such experiences will result in more sustainable learning outcomes when they are carefully prepared, accompanied, and followed up on, for instance by the use of different portfolio instruments and other appropriate materials enhancing plurilingual and intercultural learning. This principle is at the heart of PluriMobil, a project at the Council of Europe’s European Centre for Modern Languages (ECML). In this chapter, we present the theoretical underpinnings of this educational project, and report on its implementation in teacher training in a German-speaking Swiss context. There, the future teachers draw from their own experiences to design pedagogical scenarios, in their future work as teachers at primary, lower or upper secondary levels. The aim is to foster coherence across educational levels by the use of comparable didactic instruments, and to prepare teachers for worthwhile mobility experiences with their classes. Finally, we discuss to what extent this focus on didactic innovation also contributes to integrating mobility into teacher training curricula in a more coherent way.

2016, Egli, Mirjam, Höchle Meier, Katharina, Lüdi, Georges, Höchle Meier, Katharina, Yanaprasart, Patchareerat

Pedagogical research literature shows consistently that a focussed and structured support of the phases before, during and after the mobility experience turns out to be a crucial factor in the learning success of all types of study abroad activities. PluriMobil is a concept developed at the European Centre of Modern Languages (ECML) of the Council of Europe. It yields practical and ready to use pedagogical resources, so called lesson plans and learning scenarios, geared towards fostering sustainable plurilingual and intercultural learning in mobility. The PluriMobil resources are available for five educational levels: teacher training, primary, lower secondary and upper secondary general school and upper secondary vocational school. The latter, the focus of this contribution, is partially grounded in, and partly in response to, a part of the research findings in the DYLAN project. The aim of this chapter is to show how these findings could be put into practice.