This project brings together Cornish teachers, community members, learners and researchers who all care about helping people use more Cornish in everyday life. Everyone involved brought different experiences: some have taught Cornish for many years, some are newer to teaching, and others took part as learners who know exactly where the challenges lie. What united the group was a shared wish to make Cornish classes more enjoyable, more communicative and more confidence-building.
Cornish teaching has huge strengths, but it also faces pressures familiar to many minority languages: most teachers are volunteers, materials can be uneven, and there are limited opportunities to practise speaking in real community settings. Many teachers told us they wanted more support with planning lessons, building learner confidence, and developing approaches that get people speaking Cornish from the very beginning. This project was created to respond to those needs in a practical, respectful and teacher-led way.
To guide the work, we used something called a Change Laboratory, a collaborative, hands-on method where a group looks closely at their everyday challenges and then designs solutions together. It’s not about experts telling teachers what to do. Instead, teachers analyse their own experiences, share what works and what doesn’t, and gradually build new tools and methods that fit their real classrooms. A Change Laboratory feels a bit like a community workshop: people talk, sketch ideas, test them out, rethink them, and keep going until something genuinely useful emerges.
In our case, that meant creating approaches that support Cornish speaking, building more communicative lessons, and finding small, sensible ways that technology (including AI) can reduce teacher workload without undermining what makes Cornish classes special.
Link to a simple explanation of Change Laboratory