PRIMARY SCHOOLS BELGIUM

Both Belgian primary schools have a culturally-diverse school population and are located in a city with internationally known artists who focus on diversity. The Europaschool in Genk welcomes newly-arrived pupils. EFC Hors-Château is a CLIL school in Liège.

‘Europaschool’ in Genk

At GO! BS Europaschool Genk (Belgium) we think it is important that we can be a partner of the European project ArtiCULan because it fits very well in our vision to link language and creativity.

Not every child has the same language level and is eager to get extra language lessons, but language acquisition through creative processes in which language plays an important role results in an substantial added value for our school.  Children and teachers become aware that expression not only exists on the level of spoken language but that there are several ways one is able to express oneself.

So art as a means to strengthen language is a challenging approach for us.

Bringing the expertise from PXL University of Applied Sciences and Arts (Belgium) into our primary school results in an enormous amount of valuable input for our teachers. They gain new ideas, look from a different angle, adjust their teaching, dare to try new approaches, …

‘Ecole Communale Hors-Château’ in Liège.

Recently our contacts with the PXL University of Applied Sciences and Arts (Belgium) have grown into enriching and innovative pedagogical moments for our pupils and teachers.  For our school EFC Hors-Château Liège (PXL) it is an ‘out of the box’ experience.  In the workshops we are surprised by the different and innovative didactic practice for language acquisition through arts in its broadest form…  The team ‘ArtiCULan’ of the PXL University of Applied Sciences and Arts introduces modern and varied material that is usually not available in a classroom or school environment (audio-visual, microphones, digital recordings and sampling, graffiti, etc.).  This is particularly attractive for our pupils and interesting for our teachers.

The population in our school is very mixed.  We have many nationalities (Turkish, Moroccan, African, …).  In this sense, as a school, we include both target groups for the ArtiCULan project: CLIL classes, and refugee children (or foreigners with a different cultural background, language, …).

Any activity that can add value to language acquisition is very welcome in our school and is complementary to our pedagogical vision; and especially when this didactic approach has a different operating base: creating art, each time with a nod to the language.