Plurilingual and Intercultural Education in Teacher Training Mobility: Experiencing and Implementing PluriMobil

Abstract

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.