BIG Symposium „Keine Sprache ausblenden“

Finding resources – developing potential

The Vienna BIG (educational cross-border cooperation) partners Vienna Board of Education and Viennese children’s organisation Wiener Kinderfreunde successfully held a symposium on the topic of multilingualism. Around 220 participants from Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia accepted our invitation.

In the morning the audience was addressed by the President of the Vienna Board of Education Mag. Heinrich Himmer, the managing director of the Vienna Kinderfreunde Christian Morawek and, as representatives of the two Viennese project partners, Mag. Jürgen Czernohorszky, city councillor for education, and Mag. Jan Sisko from the Federal Ministry of Education. There were, however, also representatives from the scientific community: Prof. Dr. Hans Jürgen Krumm spoke about multilingualism in a political context, and Dr. Karin Steiner (WKF) presented the first results from the BIG project. The keynote lectures followed, which were held by Prof. Dr. Georg Gombos (University of Klagenfurt), who examined “multilingualism as a resource” and by Prof. Dr. Ingelore Oomen-Welke (University of Freiburg), who focused on multilingualism in German lessons. In the afternoon participants were able to choose one of nine workshops offered, which – in contrast to the theoretical lectures in the morning – explored mainly practical inputs, experiences and insights from BIG.

*) The projects BIG AT-HU, BIG AT-CZ and BIG SK-AT are implemented within the framework of the cooperation programmes INTERREG V-A Austria-Hungary, INTERREG V-A Austria-Czech Republic and INTERREG V-A Slovakia-Austria through funding from the European Regional Development Fund.

Pictures

All pictures of the event can be found in the picture gallery.

Documents