Module 6 - Community

Module 6 – Community

This module examines another of the 5 Cs of CLIL - Community.

The CLIL approach is learner-centred. It raises awareness of the student’s own culture, including learned attitudes and behaviours, and of how that culture relates to other cultures. This enables learners to understand themselves and others, and to recognise their place in the global community.

The classroom community is a part of the school community, which itself is part of the local community, of the national community, and of the global community. 

In the classroom, students are motivated to learn about themselves and the world they live in, as they interact with each other and with the teacher, with the rest of the school, and with wider communities outside.

Use of an additional language for learning is itself a gateway to connect the classroom to the world outside. In the CLIL approach, community and culture are all about connection. CLIL is a way of connecting learning to students’ lives, to local communities, and to wider communities, cultures and environments.

The task for a CLIL teacher is to find ways of leading students to an understanding of these connections through the content they are learning.

In this module, teachers will have opportunities to explore what is meant by community, to consider how it links to content, and to find ways of building links for their students to the outside world.

Later on in the course, you will have an opportunity to see how other teachers have connected classroom learning and community.

Learning Stages: 

Awareness of Culture and Community

1. We can help our students to better understand how we are affected by the community and culture in which we live. 

2. Go to your Learning Diary and do:  

3. Task 1 - What makes us what we are?  

4. Task 2 – What do you understand by community and culture? 

   1. Community within the CLIL context 

5. Teachers often bring the community into the classroom by inviting ‘outsiders’ (such as grandparents, local businessmen and businesswomen and/or members of local government) to come into the classroom and talk to students. 

6. CLIL teachers can also find members of the community who use or have knowledge of the CLIL targeted language and ask them to share their experience. It could be possible to contact people from local cultural organisations, consulates or embassies, locally-based international employers, or travel agencies. What contacts can you think of in your local community who could bring the targeted language into the classroom? 

7. One of the most useful ways you can help your students see how their learning connects to the outside world is to form a link with a school from another country. Useful sites for finding a school to link with, together with guidance on what to do, are World Class and e-Twinning. 

8. Links with other schools provide an instant window into another community/culture. 

9. Another site to consider is e-Pals, which connects more than seven million students and educators in over 190 countries. The site helps create links for classroom-to-classroom project-sharing, practising language and literacy skills, and teacher-supervised communication between pen-pals across the globe. 

10. Go to your Learning Diary and do Task 3 – Connecting learning to community. 

11. You have now added to your planning outline teaching ideas about four of the five Cs – Cognition, Competence, Communication and Community. The fifth C is Content. 

12. Go to your Learning Diary and do Task 5 – What Content will you teach?