Erasmus+Strategic Partnerships aim to support the development, transfer, and/or implementation of innovative practices at organizational, local, regional, national, or European levels.
Strategic Partnerships offer the opportunity to organizations active in the fields of education, training, and youth, as well as enterprises, public authorities, civil society organizations active in different socio-economic sectors to cooperate in order to implement innovative practices leading to high-quality teaching, training, learning and youth work, institutional modernization and societal innovation. Read more about these Strategic Partnerships here.
What is TEAM?
Many countries face a variety of problems and challenges within the educational system and in teacher education in the context of mass migration to a traditionally monolingual country. The Erasmus+ Teacher Education About Multilingualism (TEAM) project aims to address these issues.
An example is the very recent massive migration to Poland from Ukraine, which has transformed traditionally-monolingual student populations in local district primary schools. Whether it is the children of Ukrainian labor migrants in Poland, Britons settling in a rural community in Spain, or the massive wave of migration to Europe from the Middle East and Africa, such demographic changes find ordinary schoolteachers grossly unprepared, as they lack the basic knowledge of the specificities of bilingualism and multilingualism, and the basic teaching skills required to teach students with limited knowledge of the language of instruction.
The TEAM Consortium includes Adama Mickiewicza University Poznaniu, Poland; Bar-Ilan University, Israel; Universitat Konstanz, Germany; Aristotelio Panepistimio Thessalonikis, Greece; Universidad De Granada, Spain; Sveuciliste U Rijeci, Croatia; University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom; Uniwersytet Jagiellonski, Poland; and Universita Per Stranieri Di Siena, Italy.
The TEAM project started on 1 September 2020 and runs for 36 months. The Israeli branch of the partnership is run by Prof. Sharon Armon-Lotem.
Prof. Sharon Armon-Lotem
Prof. Sharon Armon-Lotem is a researcher at the Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Centre and a professor of linguistics in the English Literature and Linguistics Department at Bar-Ilan University. She was granted a PhD in Linguistics: First Language Acquisition and Syntax from Tel-Aviv University in 1997.
Prof. Armon-Lotem studies language acquisition by monolingual and bilingual children with typical language development and with specific language impairment (SLI). Her research combines linguistic and cognitive perspectives on the characteristics of language impairment and bilingualism in preschool and early school-age children.
Prof. Armon-Lotem runs the Teacher Education About Multilingualism (TEAM), is the Director of Bilingualism Matters Israel, and heads the Bar-Ilan Impact Center for Multilingualism and Multiculturalism across the Lifespan (MultiLinC).
Prof. Sharon Armon-Lotem Shares her Thoughts about TEAM
Bar-Ilan University is the host of the Israeli branch of Bilingualism Matters. This is made up of a network of researchers that is dedicated to excellence in research, but at the same time, sees the importance of disseminating scientific knowledge to a broader audience as well as for educating future educators.
The problem arises as there is a growing number of bilingual children and students worldwide and a major scarcity of materials for preparing their teachers for working with them. We envisioned the TEAM project in pre-COVID-19 days as an endeavor to generate online materials to be used in remote and offline teaching. Little did we know how soon such material would be needed.
One of the major benefits of the project for Bar-Ilan University is that it strengthens Bar-Ilan’s connections with multiple institutions in Europe and is expected to lead not only to joint teaching materials, but also to future research collaborations.
Personally, I expect this experience will impact my teaching by providing me with new materials, but it will also enhance my research collaborations with the various members of this consortium.
The TEAM project hasn’t been running for long and it requires a lot of adaptation due to the situation caused by the pandemic, so we’re not aware of the impact it will have yet. However, our intentions, which are stated in our proposal, are as follows:
We intend to create an open education resource available in nine language versions and containing the course materials and the interviews as well as other materials, interactive activities, and links to other relevant online resources. These will be made available to academic instructors beyond the TEAM consortium as well as the general public. The resource will be made available in nine languages to increase its transferability potential and reach beyond traditional academic audiences.
We envision the desired impact of the project in two main areas:
- the improvement of day-to-day educational practices through educating the teachers and providing them with tools to better understand the needs of bilingual children as well as more effective teaching techniques to facilitate language acquisition and maintenance and to foster academic attainment; and
- a change in educational policies affecting bilingual children towards putting in place more sufficient provisions for language education of children who’ve experienced migration.
Our plans for the future are likely to make a huge impact and we are very excited about this potential to make a difference in the lives of so many teachers and their students.
