The Community Café project:

getting community languages teachers to share resources online

Kate Borthwick

Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies

Overview

• What is ‘the Community Café’ project?• Why do it? • Aims• Method• Work so far…• Future plans• Useful links

The project

• funded by the JISC ‘Developing community content’ programme

• collaboration between LLAS, Southampton City Council and Manchester Metropolitan University

• Broad aim: to co-create and publish a collection of online language and cultural materials for use by those engaged in the teaching and learning of community languages within the local Southampton area

Why do it?

• there is a scarcity of up-to-date online teaching resources for most community languages • community languages teaching is under-resourced and under-valued despite often large student numbers

• to provide ways for community language teachers to make contact with other teachers across the UK

• the University of Southampton has a remit for community engagement

Aims:

• to use expertise and tools developed at UoS to collect and co-create digital resources• to build a self-managed community-based group to support community language speakers engaged in teaching and learning• to improve the pedagogy of existing materials through peer review/discussion• to provide training in using and creating digital content

Secondary aims:• raise awareness about the work of community languages teachers in the community and beyond• upskill C.L. teachers through engagement with elearning and consideration of pedagogic practice• provide a model which could be run elsewhere in the UK

Method

• cafés – informal café-style meetings

• workshops – training by university staff in using technology to create and teaching resources and the use of technology in the classroom

• online space – 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

Work so far…

The positive…

• great enthusiasm (attendance 30-40 each time)• enthusiasm to discuss pedagogy and teaching practice• desire to engage with technology and learn new skills• willingness to work cross-language• early discussions have already begun to influence teaching practice• IT successes for less IT-literate

Work so far…

Some issues…

• IT literacy highly varied• community languages teachers work ‘out-of-hours’, so time to engage is limited• access to computers within their teaching setting can be restricted• perceptions of how to use technology in the classroom• teachers are new to the concepts of open sharing of resources• reflective practice new to the group

The future…

• complete our programme of workshops • begin funded development projects

• get the Portsmouth community involved

• work with Manchester Metropolitan University to engage their community languages teachers; get them using LanguageBox and evaluate materials

• set the Community Café off on its own

Thank you! Here are some useful links…

• The Language Box: www.languagebox.ac.uk• The Community Café blog: www.communitylanguages.wordpress.com • The webpage: www.llas.ac.uk/communitycafe• The JISC programme• ‘Community Languages in Higher Education: towards realising the potential’ (2008), a report by Joanna McPake and Itesh Sachdev for the Routes into Languages project