KOINOS. European Portfolio of Plurilingual Literacy Practices Erasmus Project

Project Title

KOINOS. European Portfolio of Plurilingual Literacy Practices

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for higher education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2015

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Early School Leaving / combating failure in education; Inclusion – equity; Pedagogy and didactics

Project Summary

The core of this project is related to KOINOS (meaning “common” in ancient Greek), the European e-portfolio of multilingual literacy practices. KOINOS selects the best experiences in linguistic diversity and education in Europe, improves them and enhance them, in order to face the challenges of the XXI century. By referring to KOINOS, the project aims to overcome the latent oxymoron that continues to exist in the minds of Europeans between linguistic diversity and coexistence.
KOINOS consists of three core elements that can be found on the Educational Portal: the travelling carpets, a tool to be used in classroom projects and focused on promoting reading habits as well as multilingual and multimodal literacies; a framework designed to elaborate linguistic life histories of individuals and communities; and a collaborative and proactive dossier compiling the experiences of multilingualism in a specific local community. Guidelines are provided along with these three elements, for the effective and efficient use of the e-portfolio, as well as a catalogue of best practices resulting from the experimentation in the field, and resources for teachers’ training.
However, KOINOS is not an end in itself, but a tool elaborated in order to initiate social impact and long term changes. Through KOINOS, the objective is to transform the way multilingual education is understood at a concrete local level, so that this educational transformation involves a change of the whole community. KOINOS should only be the tip of the iceberg, a small part of a community transformation’s process with the aim of reaching high levels of social welfare and happiness for the citizens who participate actively in them. Such proposals are necessary to overcome the profound economic and moral crises of our times, and to guarantee social cohesion in culturally and linguistically diverse 21st century societies.
In order to achieve the mentioned purposes, KOINOS has two concrete objectives: 1) to help members of local multilingual communities to perceive multilingualism as an asset, which includes the recognition of cultural minorities; and 2) to promote everyday practices of multilingualism as a tool for building intercultural settings, leading to community building. Both objectives are aimed directly at increasing levels of positive coexistence.
Due to the aspirations of the project itself, KOINOS constantly moves in a local-global dialectic; local because it allows to generate authentic educational and social transformations in specific communities, and global because international impact is pursued beyond the countries involved, through the exchanges that the Educational Portal make possible.
KOINOS is developed within a framework of community education, where the objective is not only to reach the members of the educational community, but also to promote interaction as a key success factor, through the collective use of the e-portfolio of multilingual literacy practices. KOINOS is led by a team of partners from countries that are historically linked to working on languages and education. It is this team that will focus on multiplier agents (education professionals, local technicians, civil society, adults) for them to experiment and validate the model in a broader range of incidence.
The KOINOS project involved three national headquarters (Germany, Spain and Portugal), and five groups of different universities coordinated by the IMEB (Barcelona Municipal Institute of Education), with a long experience not only in education, but also in the community work of multilingualism and interculturalism in favor of coexistence and social cohesion. Other partners have been involved in the project, who are experts in the work on multilingualism and interculturalism across Europe, all with a clear experience of classroom research: a group from the University of Aveiro, CIDTFF; a group from the University of Barcelona, PLURAL; two groups from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, ERDISC and GREIP; and a group from the Universität of Hamburg.
KOINOS: represents a great product validated in 3 countries, 8 educational communities, more than 200 experts in training on multilingualism and coexistence, 230 university students, 2,700 pupils of primary education and around 10,000 Europeans who have participated in different ways in a multilingual experience and intercultural construction of coexistence and social cohesion.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 254629,17 Eur

Project Coordinator

Institut Municipal d’Educació de Barcelona & Country: ES

Project Partners

• UNIVERSITAET HAMBURG
• UNIVERSIDADE DE AVEIRO
• UNIVERSITAT AUTONOMA DE BARCELONA
• UNIVERSITAT DE BARCELONA
• UNIVERSITE LUMIERE LYON 2