Last week, a transnational consortium of schools, universities and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust launched their three-year learning project Culture Shake (CUSHA), which will develop and test teaching activities for students from multilingual and intercultural backgrounds. The lead partner of the project, the University of Education in Karlsruhe (Germany) invited representatives from the four partner organisations University of Primorska in Slovenia, Friedrich-Woehler-Gymnasium in Germany, the English School in Gothenburg and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust to officially launch the programme and to get the project going.
We will use Shakespeare as a medium and tool to engage Swedish and German pupils aged 12 to 15 with questions of intercultural communication by working with them to create a multilingual dictionary of Shakespeare words and peer teaching materials. The German and Swedish pupils will continue to work together on their projects and dive deeper into the world of Shakespeare during their stay at SBT in September next year. All of the pupils speak at least three languages, either as part of their multicultural family backgrounds or as languages they study at their school.
Funded by the European Commission through their Erasmus Plus programme, CUSHA is a strategic partnership of organisations from different countries that would otherwise not have worked together and I am very much looking forward to delivering this project with such a crack team of educators from all over Europe.