Europe recently experienced a dramatic influx of refugees. By the end of 2015, the European Union as a whole had received over 1.2 million first-time asylum claims (IOM, 2015). A small but significant sub-group of these people on the move are highly qualified professionals – doctors, architects, lawyers, teachers, engineers – who often find themselves in low-skilled, minimum-wage jobs for which they are over-qualified. Their skill sets and professional experience often count for little, as host countries in an alarming number of cases fail to utilise the potential of much sought-after qualified personnel. The integration of these highly skilled individuals into the labour market is crucial in order to avoid their long-term dependency and marginalization, and to create a positive image in the eyes of the public.Against this backdrop the ‘Critical Skills for Life and Work’ project (2017-2019), led by Newcastle University in the UK in partnership with the University of Graz in Austria, Fryske Academy in the Netherlands, and Action Foundation, a Newcastle-based refugee charity, sought to identify and articulate the profession-relevant communicative, interactional and intercultural needs of highly-skilled refugees, which would enable them to find employment in a professional domain for which they are qualified. The team’s ultimate aim was to design and implement effective training tools for enhancing the professional intercultural communicative competence (PICC) of highly skilled refugees and the language teachers who work with them. The four project partners worked with a group of 26 of highly skilled refugees and migrants, and with 15 teachers across the UK, Austria and the Netherlands to co-create a set of resources that can be useful in a diversity of European contexts. The result was an online toolkit for teachers and learners.The toolkit was developed as part of a two-stage collaborative process: In stage one (research stage) the team investigated in detail the lives and experiences of people who had successfully made the transition from refugee status back into the professional sphere. This was done through 15 ethnographic interviews (‘success stories’) which sought to discover exactly how these people had made the transition, what had helped them, what had hindered them, and what they could pass on to others like them by way of advice. Additionally, 21 focus groups were held with learners and teachers in the different locations, to gauge current provision and their needs in relation to developing PICC. Findings from this stage pointed to the importance of agency, resilience, self-motivation, as well as language and intercultural communication skills. In stage two (co-production), the team worked closely with local refugees and volunteer language teachers to develop learning and teaching materials. These were then piloted and trialled through a series of workshops and multiplier events with different target groups, including agencies working with skilled refugees, teaching organisations such as colleges of further and higher education, and relevant employers and employment agencies. The aim was to create a model which can be extended to other contexts. The main dissemination event was the project conference on 21st June 2019, which was attended by 100 people. The conference was also the official launch of the toolkit.The toolkit offers two modules: Module A: Teaching professional intercultural communicative competence (IO2: for teachers)Module B: Professional intercultural communicative competence for work and life (IO3: for learners)Both modules are available to download for free on the project website (http://cslw.eu/). Relevant sections of the toolkit have been translated and localised into German and Dutch.Each module consists of five parallel units: (1) context & background, (2) finding a job, (3) applying for a job, (4) being interviewed and, (5) starting a job. Each unit includes a set of activities designed for classroom use (for teachers) or for self-study (learners). All activities relate to the development of PICC. Supplementary materials and extension tasks are included at the end of each unit. The units are self-standing to allow teachers and learners to choose units and activities depending on their own specific needs and circumstances. From a linguistic perspective, the toolkit is built around the assumption that refugee and migrant professionals will have some linguistic capital. The primary aim of the toolkit is to develop PICC, as opposed to linguistic proficiency in any specific ‘target language’. Using all their plurilingual resources, learners might engage with input in one language and generate meaning in contextually appropriate ways.The toolkit has been and continues to be promoted through several activities: Conference presentations, the project website and social media activities, online posts and newsletters (for details see sections 6.3 and 6.2 below).

Context and background of the project:Global citizenship education (GCE) is a core part of many contemporary educational policies and is in line with UNESCO’s Sustainable Development Goals. It envisages an active, empowered role for citizens in sharing a sense of responsibility for global concerns. It strives towards “a common understanding of shared humanity on a fragile planet coupled with a commitment to addressing social problems through engaged public participation” (Gaudelli, 2016, p. 7). Numerous curricula across the world already include forms of global citizenship and it is typically situated within transversal competences which are the responsibility of every educator of every subject. Yet, training for GCE remains relatively scarce and it is rarely systematically part of educational programmes for teacher development. An often neglected aspect of global citizenship educational programmes is an explicit awareness of linguistic plurality and the integration of plurilingual pedagogies. Yet, as Torpsten (2011, p. 4) argues, “when skills increase in different languages, [people] become aware of their identities as multilingual persons [as well as] their possibilities of being active, multicultural, global citizens”. Therefore, one of our key innovative objectives is to explicitly integrate the multilingual perspective into a social justice informed notion of global citizenship. Objectives of the project: Our aim is to provide online teacher development resources to support secondary teachers of all subjects in learning ways to integrate GCE goals including plurlingualism into their daily practice in sustainable ways which will be motivating for them as educators and invaluable for their learners. Our project will create digital resources to help teachers to understand, gain knowledge about, practice, and integrate global citizenship goals through a plurilingual approach into their teaching practices. Participants:We seek to address a global population of teachers of all subjects working in primarily secondary, but also tertiary contexts through the website and professional development resources. An additional audience is teacher educators who may wish to utilize the toolkit in their own education programmes with secondary teachers.Activities:To meet these aims, we will develop three main forms of output. Firstly, we will gather examples of good practice in respect to GCE and plurilingual pedagogies. Based on these, we will create a framework for teachers to self-assess their competences. The examples of good practice will also form the input basis of our multimodal online course and toolkit for teacher professional development, which is our second major output. The website, which houses the course, will also facilitate community action by participants who can upload localizations and subject-specification adaptations and innovations. The final output is an accompanying manual for teacher educators who may wish to adapt the online course and toolkit for use in their teacher education programmes. Results and impact:We anticipate that the online course and toolkit will inspire a large number of teachers and teacher educators across the globe and in diverse subject areas to consider how they can contribute to the EDU2030 challenge of meeting the UNESCO Sustainable Development Goals. One key way to do this is through Global Citizenship Education and increased respect for plurilingual and multicultural diversity. Helping educators to know how to make such goals part of their regular pedagogical practices without it feeling like an additional burden is key to the success of this vital educational innovation.

The VirtuLApp (Virtual Language App) project group addresses the needs of primary school teachers concerning multilingual education, and supports them to gain more knowledge about and tools for multilingual education, integration of migrant languages and less language separation. VirtuLApp promotes educational innovation and aims at contributing to motivation and self-regulated (collaborative) learning for students in the classroom and provides a toolkit for teachers on how to deal with the multilingual situation in the classroom.Therefore, VirtuLApp has developed an innovative multididactic approach which teachers can use in the classroom in any situation, by providing knowledge on multilingual didactics, application of that knowledge and tools to use in the classroom. This is done by developing and offering:•A digital toolkit with:oExperts’ answers to Frequently Asked Questions, which are teachers’ real questions and concerns they face in practice, about using different languages in their instruction, school environment, students ‘wellbeing or tools.oBest practices of multilingual approaches across European schools in the Didactical Videos to inspire other teachers to create their own strategies and activities.oThe input and expertise of Experts in the field of multilingualism and multilingual approaches.•An entertaining Quiz to raise language awareness, knowledge on multilingualism, and languages around the world•The multilingual, multi-player Augmented Reality game BabelAR for pupils aged 7-12 years, which teachers can use to welcome multilingualism in class, to show pupils the value of the language(s) they possess and to activate their language knowledge.All these results can be found on the project website (www.virtulapp.eu). Teachers and schools from around Europe, and even beyond, have found the project to learn more about multilingualism and multilingual didactics. Due to the covid-pandemic, three multiplier events were held online with a high attendance rate. VirtuLApp focusses on primary education and with various needs, such as schools with a (large) number of immigrant pupils who want to improve attitudes towards migrant languages and include these, schools with predominantly national language-speaking children which want to introduce their pupils to minority -and other languages, and schools which want to experiment with less language separation in their language didactics.The results have been shared and discussed in different ways, such as the project website with all the project outcomes and resources, five multiplier events, two extra webinars, VirtuLApp newsletters and newsflashes, as well as numerous dissemination activities undertaken by all project partners. The MEs were attended (online) by more than four hundred participants in total, which not only raised awareness of the project, its premises and outputs, but also generated valuable input from the target group.Research with pre-service teachers on the project shows that the VirtuLApp tools (digital toolkit, the quiz and BabelAR) influenced their language awareness, skills and knowledge on multilingual education. VirtuLApp contributed to increasing their knowledge about languages in education and languages in the world. Moreover, VirtuLApp provided them with various tools to implement multilingualism in their teaching practices that cover different aspects of multilingual education, such as the involvement of home languages and parents and support the pre-service teachers in facing challenges in multilingual education. According to pre-service teachers, the game BabelAR increased language awareness and linguistic skills of pupils and increased the teachers’ language awareness and awareness of the benefits of multilingualism. What is more, BabelAR gives multilingual pupils a sense of pride and stimulates collaboration, and the research participants generally agree that the BabelAR game is an effective tool to raise language awareness and openness towards different languages of both pupils and teacher.In the course of the project, VirtuLApp and BabelAR have been nominated for several awards, which we see as a great recognition of our work. For the Leeuwarder Courant Awards, a Frisian prize for study projects, the research on the application of BabelAR was nominated. Second, for the Belgian Game Awards ‘21, BabelAR was nominated in the category of “best non-entertainment.”Third, VirtuLApp won the second prize of the NUFFIC Europees Talenlabel 2021 (European Language Label) in the Netherlands. Last, in February 22, BabelAR won Gold in the category of Digital Product in the Belgian design awards.

Many less used and minority languages are in danger of extinction because they are not spoken by the younger generations. However, recent legislative initiatives in the countries of Latin America together with the European framework for multilingualism develop a trend to reverse this situation and now the knowledge of a local/ minority language can be an important asset in order the young people to find an employment. It is also true that the areas where minority languages are spoken are those where unemployment rate is very high especially between the young people. The knowledge of how to improve this knowledge and valorise it for employability purposes will help them a lot to find an employment or begin an entrepreneurial career with the skills and assets they already possess. Youth work has a very important role in order to raise the awareness of these opportunities, support the young people to valorise them and support intergenerational learning which is a key factor in this process.To fulfill this purpose a wide international consortium has been gathered. Partners from South America, Argentina and Peru with very strong ties with their communities and equipped with a very innovative character and experience with young people mobility. Action Synergy has a big experience in European projects and are specialist in the development of online education tools. CIDLeS from Portugal has developed projects in the framework of language documentation and The Fryske Akademy from Netherlands belongs to a association with the main goal of promote linguistic diversity. In the framework of the project three capacity building courses for youth workers are going to be organised (in Netherlands, Argentina and Peru). Also an e-learning course is going to be developed in order to extend the training also to youth workers that are not able to follow the online courses. Moreover, a research is going to be organised in each country in order to evaluate the minority language situation and legal status. Also, there are going to be organised cultural events for the promotion of minority languages, there are going to be developed awareness raising videos in the minority language (with subtitles in all the languages of the partnership plus English) and recordings of songs in local language which are then going to be published on the web.Capacities necessaries to promote with the media their cultural roots are going to be build, a space to valorise the cultural characteristics related to each minority language is going to take place. All these are activities are going to be available for an international public through the website, Facebook page in many other media in order to multiply its effect beyond the project duration. At the end of the project the young people involved are expected to improve their employability through the valorisation of the asset of their local/ minority language.

<< Background >>In Europe, hundreds of languages are endangered as they are not being passed on to the younger generations and are progressively disappearing. This does not only threaten the language itself, but also the culture linked to it. A main problem is that endangered languages are often under-resourced, which means that materials and tools for schools to integrate or teach endangered languages are scarce. Additionally, languages are often either labelled as economically more or less beneficial. Such tendencies constitute obstacles for preserving and fostering endangered languages, especially in educational settings. The OWL+ project wants to detach endangered languages from market-value-based attitudes and re-introduce them as valuable social factors with the focus on educational settings. The project will develop tools and resources to innovate school curricula and offer materials that enable teachers/educators to accommodate endangered languages in their classrooms and other learning settings. Teachers and educators will also be equipped with skills to take ownership of their cultural heritage. As endangered languages are viewed as a vital social factor for their communities, the project also targets community leaders (such as councils and local initiatives), which are an integral part of endangered languages’ support structures.<< Objectives >>The objective of OWL+ is to innovate in curriculum building for and about endangered languages by contextualising them within the big picture of language diversity in Europe and by providing stakeholders with practical tools to help them foster the transmission of the language. The project’s aims are to: 1) support teachers and community members in leading the creation and enhancement of curricula by making use of local resources and digital methods; 2) empower speakers and learners of endangered languages to create new domains of use through education and social entrepreneurship; 3) develop and make available a set of digital didactic materials, free of charge for communities across Europe and the wider public, regardless of the nature of their interest in language; and 4) raise awareness of European linguistic diversity in an optimistic tone, fostering a positive attitude towards multilingualism in mainstream education. Our project’s audience is primarily schools (teachers, trainees, school staff) from areas where an endangered language is spoken, as well as the community leaders (associations, councils, cultural initiative leaders) that are investing themselves in maintaining the use of the language. Our commitment is to provide them with tools to become more independent in their endeavours and to empower them to take ownership of their cultural heritage.<< Implementation >>Next to activities related to project management, we will organise four multiplier events (ME) and develop three project results (PR). An important aspect is the active involvement of our associated partners in the production of project results 2 (The Module: Teaching and Learning in Linguistic Diversity) and 3 (The Handbook: Documentation-Based Curricula for Endangered Languages). Our associated partners are schools and community centres working in contexts in which endangered languages are used. We will ask them for their feedback on the module, and work closely together on the production of the handbook. The consortium and the associated partners will gather data (through e.g. surveys, classroom observations and interviews) to identify the teachers’ and pupils’ needs and expectations concerning the handbook. Further on we will pilot some of the designed activities of the handbook in cooperation with the schools and community centres. The multiplier events will facilitate the presentation and promotion of the project and project results. The events will be an opportunity to learn about digital methods and a chance for educators to network with other teachers and stakeholders who are active in educational contexts of minority and endangered languages. Our associated partners will also have the possibility to share their experiences of the project results with a broader audience at the multiplier events. Regarding activities related to project management, we will distribute the work between organisations with research foundations and organisations with a community-driven approach. The duties are distributed as follows: Tallinn University will bring in their technical expertise. Following the consortium’s needs assessment, their main task will be to select a hosting service that fulfils the project’s requirements, and to take on the integration of the content in a way that is attractive and effective for learning. Fryske Akademy (FA)/Mercator European Research Centre (MERC) as the coordinating organisation will be responsible for the project’s coherence and progression during its 32-month lifecycle. FA/MERC brings into the project a strong international outlook; they will ensure that the result is transferable to minority language communities across Europe. They will lead the creation of project result 2, and, given their experience with European projects, set the bar for dissemination activities. CIDLeS, given their extensive experience in the mobilisation of language documentation data, will lead the creation of the handbook. The team at Nord University have a long-established working relationship with South Saami groups. Together, they play the role of advisors making sure that the activities take into consideration the needs of Europe’s indigenous groups, a crucial factor that determines the transferability of the project’s outcomes. The Rēzekne Academy of Technologies brings in their first-hand experience with language maintenance but also raising awareness of the nature of their distinctive identity. As such, their role will be to advise the rest of the partners during the creation of the project results to ensure that the solutions proposed are transferable to the Baltic region.<< Results >>The project will produce three project results: 1) An e-learning platform that responds to the current market challenges. This will include a design and user experience that lives up to the learners’ expectations, well-informed content, and a plan to keep the materials accessible beyond the end of the project. 2) An online module aimed at deepening the understanding of the linguistic needs of communities across Europe among school staff. The module will be organised in units with multimedia content and includes self-assessment quizzes. 3) A handbook for teachers and community leaders that facilitates the creation and renewal of curricula in under-resourced languages. The handbook will provide step-by-step instructions and templates, with a strong focus on strengthening language domains in and outside schools and promoting intergenerational communication. The consortium will follow a multidisciplinary approach drawing on multilingualism, intercultural communication, education, and language documentation. The development of the e-learning platform will rely mainly on the partners' previous knowledge, with an element of testing and questionnaire-based feedback. The module and the handbook will be a product of recommendations from academic research combined with feedback from bottom-up implementation. For these two outputs, the consortium will work closely with its associated partners to ensure that the theoretical concepts are adequately bridged and that the activities are implemented with enthusiasm from the pupils’ part. The expected impact is a deeper understanding of the needs of a linguistic community, a more proactive relationship between communities and teachers, and the empowerment of teachers and community leaders to take on the challenges of a multilingual and ever-globalising world.