In September 2020, the Erasmus SeLFiE Project, STEAM Education and Foreign Language Learning in Europe, was established with a total budget of €331,569.
The aim of this project is to improve the CLIL competences of pre-school and primary school teachers and their trainers by considering English, Spanish or French as an additional language. In addition, SeLFIE finds to develop a valid model for bilingual teaching in general, in other words, with several languages as a first or second language. This model will be applicated and validated in several schools in the participating countries with specific didactic material, which will later constitute a series of books for foreign language and science subjects in that language and an online repository of materials. This didactic material will be adapted to the different curricular contents of each partner country.
The SeLFIE Project has partners from six European institutions: International Trilingual School of Warsaw (Poland), Centro de Formación del Profesorado e Innovación Educativa (CFIE) de Burgos (Spain), Universita Ta Malta (Malta), Senior Europa Sociedad Limitada (Spain), University of Granada and University of Burgos which leads the project.
The project takes place in a favourable framework for action, due to the enormous support received for bilingual education at non-university levels in the European context. The European Commission is promoting the development of new approaches to improve the European citizens linguistic competencies. Thus, the CLIL approach (Content and Language Integrated Learning) is considered suitable for teaching a subject using an additional language (different than the mother tongue). To this end, the partnership is supporting interdisciplinary work based on STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Mathematics) proposals from the Inquiry-Based Science Education (IBSE) and Engineering Design Process (EDP) methodologies that will encourage the inclusion of all students and will also promote cooperative work.
The first transnational telematic meeting was held on 1st of December 2020, with the participation of 18 members of the above-mentioned institutions. The main target of the meeting was not only to exchange proposals for action regarding the development and dissemination of future activities, but also to determine the plan of work that will be carried out until September 2021. On the next transnational online meeting, which will take place on 3rd of February, the participating partners will be invited to share the results of the work carried out so far in the different fields of action.
