With our project, we desire to create an educational atmosphere that students from all backgrounds will love being around. Here you will find our studies and a lot of study and training materials to be more comfortable in the multicultural environment.
Children integration on the fun way
The goal of the MUTUAL project is to provide all the tools and knowledge you will need in the classroom with the children from diverse culture and language background. While the project is serious work we want to prepare results which they will be fun to use.
Our Mission
We desire to create an educational atmosphere that students from all backgrounds will love being around. Our training programs are intended to empower teachers to encourage students to tackle challenges and take on experiences that may be new to them. At the MUTUAL project, we are striving to make learning fun and dynamic so that all of our students can accomplish their goals.
Check it in the results section.
Our Story
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 year’s curriculum to welcome every and each child beyond understanding a few words in a 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 training to be available also to other early years practitioners: child care professionals: preschool teachers, childminders, 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.