Picturebooks and eTwinning as vehicles for Intercultural Citizenship Education

Description

Intercultural Citizenship Education (ICE) combines intercultural communicative competence of language education and civic action of citizenship education. It requires that teachers and their children take action beyond their classroom walls and, through English, engage with other teachers and children to ‘reflect together, propose and instigate change in their respective societies’ and become a ‘community of intercultural citizens’ (Byram et al., 2008: xxii-xxiii).

Intercultural Citizenship Education through Picturebooks in early English Language Learning (ICEPELL) is an Erasmus+ project, which aims to support practitioners to confidently integrate ICE into their EFL lessons and library sessions with children aged 5 to 12 years old. Picturebooks, which prompt meaning-making, reflection and discussion (Mourão, 2015) and facilitate access to the concepts of interculturality and citizenship education in the classroom (Short, 2009) were used as catalysts for taking action and practitioners connected through eTwinning to create their communities of intercultural citizens. One of the project’s intellectual outputs is a collection of ICEKits, teaching packs developed by practitioners for practitioners, around selected picturebooks. This keynote presents the ICEPELL project, a selection of the picturebooks and their ICEKits and details how practitioners and their children were able to come together on the eTwinning platform and follow their ICEKits to successfully take action far beyond their classroom walls and across their European borders.

Period	5 Apr 2022
Event title	YELL turns ten!
Event type	Seminar
Location	Udine, ItalyShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International