The Community Cafe project: final report

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Description/Abstract

The Community Café project was a collaboration between the Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies (LLAS) at the University of Southampton; Southampton City Council and the COLT project at Manchester Metropolitan University. The aim of the project was to work together to co-create a community collection of online language and cultural materials for use by those engaged in the community-based teaching and learning of languages within the local Southampton area and beyond. The project combined informal ‘café’ style meetings for the sharing of pedagogic knowledge in a social environment and networking, with workshops on various aspects of using technology in teaching. All materials created under the project have been released on an open access website, called the LanguageBox, which also acts as an online space for collaboration, sharing and networking amongst language teachers across all sectors in education within the UK. The project has been extremely enjoyable and successful in exciting the enthusiasm of a particular community group about creating effective teaching resources, sharing ideas with others and publishing teaching resources openly online: in the words of Dr. Sarwar Jamil, the Community Languages Manager at Southampton City Council: “The project has opened a new door for community language teachers.”