Plurilingual and intercultural education

The two-day workshop “Fostering the plurilingual wellbeing of language teachers”, held on 25-26 March 2026 at the European Centre for Modern Languages (ECML) in Graz, marked an important step in the development of the Pluriwell project (2024-2026).

Teachers’ wellbeing is increasingly recognised as a key factor in shaping high-quality, inclusive education. Within the Council of Europe’s broader commitment to democratic culture and education, teachers play a central role – not only as educators of their subjects, but also as professionals navigating linguistic diversity, cultural complexity and evolving learning environments. Supporting teachers in reflecting on their own language repertoires and identities is therefore essential.

The Pluriwell project addresses this by focusing on the concept of plurilingual wellbeing. How is this concept defined? It is not only being aware of and valuing the potential of one’s own language repertoire; it is also feeling comfortable with using this repertoire in a variety of personal and professional contexts. As the project coordinator, Caterina Sugranyes, explains, “much of the focus has always been on what we can’t do – plurilingual wellbeing shifts the focus to what we can do.” This dimension of wellbeing underpins teachers’ ability to foster plurilingual, intercultural and democratic competences in the classroom. Caterina Sugranyes also highlights that plurilingual wellbeing is closely linked to democratic culture, involving “positive emotions, openness to the world and relationships” – key elements for learning and living together in diverse societies.

The Graz workshop brought together 37 participants – including the expert team, consultant and partners – from 28 Council of Europe member states. As part of the four-year programme Language Education at the Heart of Democracy, the workshop provided a space for testing and refining the Pluriwell toolkit and for reviewing other project outputs, including guiding principles and teacher testimonials. The insights gathered will now feed into the finalisation of the project results, including the future Pluriwell website, making the outputs more widely applicable across different European educational contexts.

The ECML workshop reaffirmed the importance of placing teacher wellbeing – particularly in its plurilingual dimension – at the heart of efforts to strengthen education systems, support professional practice, and promote democratic culture through language education. This was echoed in the words of the project consultant, Chantal Muller, “When our languages – and, by extension, our identities – are valued, we feel recognised and respected for who we are. This recognition enhances teachers’ sense of wellbeing and enthusiasm, which in turn positively influences their teaching practices and interactions.”

• ECML project website “Fostering the plurilingual wellbeing of language teachers” (2024-26) (available in English and French): www.ecml.at/pluriwell

At the recent ECML project network meeting  in Graz, the team introduced a new layer of the Pluriliteracies for Global Citizenship approach — the 4Rs Framework: Reading, Repositioning, Reflecting, and Responding.

Building on the theoretical foundations of Beyond CLIL, the 4Rs Framework translates pluriliteracies principles into concrete classroom design. Each “R” represents a distinct literacy practice:

• Reading across multilingual and plurimodal texts;
• Repositioning through multiperspectival inquiry;
• Reflecting with epistemic humility and empathy; 
• Responding through dialogue and responsible action.

Together, these practices form spirals of deeper learning, enabling language learners to connect conceptual, linguistic, and citizenship growth.

To make the framework teachable and observable, the project introduced three complementary tools:

1. Deeper Learning Episodes (DLEs) – design units that structure progression from activation to transfer;
2. Ten Principles of Task Fidelity – guidelines for ensuring relevance, scaffolding, and feedback;
3. Revised Guiding Questions for Teachers and Learners – prompts that translate design principles into classroom dialogue.

Alongside these tools, the team also presented a first version of descriptor bands for each of the 4Rs. The team will be assisted by world-renowned expert Prof. Francisco Lorenzo who presented the first research results conducted within the COST-project CLIL Network for Languages in Education: Towards bi- and multilingual disciplinary literacies (CLILNetLE).

These descriptors provide a formative assessment tool for observing and supporting learners’ development of pluriliteracies in the languages classroom, helping teachers trace progression and give feedback across Reading, Repositioning, Reflecting, and Responding.
Participants provided constructive and highly valuable feedback and input, helping the team fine-tune both the framework and its tools so that they better reflect diverse teaching contexts.

By linking theory and practice, the 4Rs Framework supports teachers in breaking down classroom walls — connecting learning with global and local realities and affirming the languages classroom as a space where global citizenship is not only discussed but practised.

Authors: PlurlitCit team

• ECML project “Pluriliteracies for global citizenship – Deeper learning in the foreign language classroom” (2024-2027): www.ecml.at/deeperlearning
• See also: Pluriliteracies for global citizenship (working paper) and video testimonials of network participants

On 16 June, Pluriwell teachers and the expert team came together for a general meeting to conclude the academic year. The goals of the meeting were to share the final versions of the plurilingual wellbeing tools that the participants have created, to gather and exchange feedback, and to reflect together about the impact of the project.

Over 20 teachers from around Europe connected for the meeting. Many of them have been involved in Pluriwell since September or October of last year. “One thing we wanted to do at this meeting was to express our appreciation for our participants,” said project coordinator Caterina Sugranyes. “The four project leaders might officially be the expert team, but at this point all of our participants are also experts in plurilingual wellbeing in their own right.”

The attendees had a chance to take a closer look at some of the plurilingual wellbeing tools that their colleagues had created in other countries and contexts. “Seeing all of our work collected there like that was quite thrilling,” said Sugranyes. Relying on their expertise and the insights they have after working these past months with their colleagues and the Pluriwell team as a whole, they were able to offer detailed feedback, and they paid special attention to how tools that had been created elsewhere could be adapted for use in their own contexts.

Over the past few months, the Pluriwell teachers have been concentrating on creating and refining these tools, which they have designed to spread plurilingual wellbeing among their colleagues, but it goes without saying that working on the project has affected the participants themselves and their own outlook on languages and teaching. A participating teacher from the Netherlands, Dieuwke Popma, observed that the project had helped her become more aware of the importance of giving a place and a voice to all the first languages present at her school. “As language teachers, when we talk about the ‘language of the heart,’ we have always tended to mean [the regional language] Frisian,” she said. “But that is not the same for all the children at the school, and now we are more active in making children with other first languages feel at home.”

The Pluriwell team

• ECML project website “Fostering the plurilingual wellbeing of language teachers” (2024-26) (available in English and French) : www.ecml.at/pluriwell

Pluriwell school map / carte des établissements scolaires