To deal in an honest way with language through the curriculum requires a close collaboration between researchers specialized in language and researchers specialized in different fields of knowledge, who provide not only expertise in their respective areas but also the discursive traditions proper to each discipline.
This is the raison d’être of the LED group, which was constituted in September 2013 with the aim of directing research on the relation between linguistic development and curricular learning, from the complementary theoretical and methodological points of view contributed by members belonging to different disciplines.
Despite the difficulty that establishing multidisciplinary teams within a university environment entails, given the attachment of the teaching and research staff (PDI) to specific departments and areas of learning, LED includes academic experts from four different departments of the UAB: a) Didactics of Language and Literature (DLL); b) Social and Systematic Pedagogy (PSS); c) Didactics of Physical Education; and d) Hispanic Language and Literature.
In addition, LED cooperates regularly with researchers from the fields of Applied Pedagogy, Science Education, Social Science Education, Mathematics Education, Didactics of Music Education, Psychology of Education, Applied Linguistics and Translation. Our cooperation with these researchers—who are working in research groups related to their own particular areas of knowledge—has borne fruit in various projects such as the drawing-up of the interdisciplinary research project ‘Pathway’ (Ref. 2015ARMIF00001), a project coordinated by LED researcher Dr Cristina Escobar Urmeneta. LED also works closely with teaching staff attached to the departments of English and Linguistics Applied to Education at universities outside Catalonia.
From a methodological standpoint, the vision provided by the social interactionism (linked to constructs such as situated learning, communities of practice, interactional competence) characteristic of LED’s driving core has been complemented by an approach focused on the study of innovative proposals of an essentially social nature (Dewey, 1938), which start from the construction and contextualization of knowledge in content-rich environments (Pepper, 1942). These complementary reference sources offer the new group a theoretical and methodological framework that enriches and underpins the proposal of interdisciplinary work initiated by the school-university partnership projects organized by the CLIL-SI collaborative team.
LED performs many actions related to knowledge transfer in areas such as: a) ongoing training for CLIL, ICLHE and language teaching staff; b) the design of online tools for linguistic improvement and self-training; c) advice for education administrations on curricular development and teacher education; and d) the design of materials for teacher education with a focus on empowerment.