The practice of the oral competence is an unresolved matter in the process of teaching and learning languages in schools. Setting off from the real difficulty to make students talk “with taste and for fun” the languages they are learning at school, we want to build physical and mental spaces which improve coexistence with others and their languages. The project wants to make students aware of the richness in the diversity of languages in Europe and aims to foster openness to the treasure that entail the migrants’ languages, creating like this an inclusive and open society. WE want to awaken and nurture the enthusiasm for communicating, learning “the gift” of languages, as all languages are “ours”. In “El Patio de Babel” the words, the voices and the people are our assets. All the planned activities in the project encourage oral communication, they aim at the students’ participation- the physical and artistic creation itself of “El Patio”, the radio, the workshops, are motivating because they are inspired by informal and not formal education and for the relationships that are constructed with people from other cultures. Throughout the diversity of activities and with the high degree of implication of students, they will be able to experience- at different times for each one- the joy of opening to the languages of others and discover a new linguistic awareness playful and enriching at the same time.
"El patio de Babel" has developed orality, pleasure and passion for languages in the four schools of the project through multiple creative and communicative activities. Our language classes have gradually become a "patio", rich in exchanges and encounters: language discovery workshops are organised, conversations between pupils ("los pares de Babel"), "guests" from different countries come to tell us about their life experience, artists collaborate with the pupils in the physical design of the "patio"... because "el patio de Babel" is also a space in the school where pupils go to learn languages differently, where they will not be "obliged" to speak foreign languages, but will be "eager" to hear them and dare to speak them, without fear. By taking language learning out of the classroom, pupils were able to experience the real "power" of languages, to "hear" them often and above all to "want" to speak them in a spontaneous and natural way without the pressure of school constraints. This project transformed our language classes into a vibrant show in which a multiplicity of actors took part: first of all the pupils - the real protagonists of the project - , the teachers - who collaborated and developed their creativity - , the guests in our "patios" - people from other languages and cultures - , artists, singers... - , the schools - by welcoming the travellers, preparing and organising the activities during the mobilities - . The lively dynamics of our project have been adapted to the restrictive conditions of the health crisis: we became "patio de Babel confinado" in March 2020 by proposing to our students to stay in touch with creative activities and finally, following the impossibility of carrying out the mobility in March 2021, we transformed it into a virtual mobility. During the confinement we proposed to our students collaborative activities, sharing experiences: songs, testimonies, reproductions of famous paintings, time capsules, etc. We asked them to create a time capsule in the form of a photo mosaic to be found in 2021 to assess what they had experienced: did this crisis help them to grow up? How do they see themselves in a year's time? Each pupil was able to express his or her creativity and react to the proposals of the others by commenting on the productions, in order to feel part of a collective citizenship: the one we created with the "patio of Babel". Following the extension obtained in order to be able to carry out our last mobility project - the Babel Festival - we set off again in 2020-21 with new projects, aware that links were more necessary than ever in this difficult context of confinement - in our homes, in our borders - and of social distancing. We first created a padlet organised in different columns, so that the students could choose the type of articles they wanted to write. The categories proposed were very free: favourites, poems, free texts, people or actions that inspire us, positive news from the world, etc. The originality of this journal is that it is not thematic, it is open to the free expression of our pupils and the possibility to add comments on the padlet also allowed us to collect readers' opinions among the pupils participating in the project. We then made a selection of articles to produce the two issues of the newspaper which we distributed in our different schools and outside via the digital edition. A final challenge was to turn the mobility that will not take place into virtual mobility. We therefore drew up a programme of three half-days of meetings and festivities so that the pupils would have the impression of being together despite the distance. We have planned workshops to "sing" the languages of Belgium, a discovery of Esperanto, testimonies of multilingual pupils from 4 schools, a meeting with a storyteller and then the collaborative writing of a tale, the viewing of a film on the history of Belgium made by the pupils of the Human Sciences and Audiovisual options, a challenge to translate the titles of the films, a workshop on language gestures and, to finish, a collaborative fresco with Jamboard to share our emotions linked to virtual mobility. In a project where artistic expression was so important, "an art gallery" could not be missed: the students expressed what the project had brought them by choosing a painting and writing a title and a commentary.