The Community Café project: getting community languages teachers to share resources online

1. The Community Café project:getting community languages teachers to share resources online Kate Borthwick Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies

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

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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

10. 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

11. 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