MUTUAL PROJECT

This is a story of an Erasmus plus project Mutual which stands for Multilingual and multicultural learning in early years. It brings together early years teachers, researchers and other child care professionals from four different countries (Czech, United Kingdom, Greece and Sweden) who all share a task to make the classrooms welcoming to children from different languages and cultures. How to enrich the early years curriculum to welcome every and each child beyond understanding a few words in child’s mother tongue? How to provide learning opportunities for all, how to understand every child’s needs, challenges and how to make sure that they are all reaching their potential? How to celebrate diversity through following often rigid agendas of early years learning goals and objectives?

The nurseries and preschools are often the first points from the new cultural and educational environment that young migrant families build the relationship with. How to make spaces for all young children, their language and cultures in the light of the recent migration waves of historic proportion can sometimes be overwhelming. For example, in childcare areas of Lillberget, Kilsmyra and Ljusnevägen the children come from as many as 25 different linguistic and cultural environments. The situation is similar in Bradford with as many as 17 languages and in east Leeds with 34 languages in the early years classrooms. Our first research has also shown that in some cases we are having classrooms where the % of children who do not speak the language of instruction as their first language can be sometimes as high as 80%.

We are all in one way or another working with young newcomers and their families and still learning. Through our Mutual project we would however like to exchange and enrich our practices and develop new ones accordingly. In doing so we will share and further develop tools, materials and trainings to be available also to other early years practitioners: child care professionals: preschool teachers, child minders, family support workers, special needs workers, volunteers. This will be supported by the web platform run by IT partner PIA. Essential in this process is our close cooperation with parents as well as local communities. All of our activities therefore include valuing children’s first language, involving the families in the language learning and promote their home language and culture while building the second language skills, which can influence attitudes to education for a lifetime. Centre to our project are therefore issues of equality, diversity and inclusion. We hope to further encourage the pluricultural/plurilingual education through early years education and care.

Our first tasks were focused on identification and comparison of the practices, methodologies and approaches which are currently at place in nurseries and preschools in the four regions the partners come from. We have collected the views of child care professionals and gathered them in the common report. The focus of our interviews have been also the training needs which child care professionals have expressed.

The second part of our project will be focused on training and implementation of new ways of work into the child care settings.