Symposium overview

Contemporary educational landscapes are characterised by complex linguistic repertoires, cultural heterogeneity, and increasingly multimodal forms of knowledge-making. Within this context, multilingualism and creativity can be conceptualised not merely as learner attributes or pedagogical techniques, but as epistemic and pedagogical resources through which knowledge, meaning, identity, and participation are constituted and negotiated.

A growing body of scholarship challenges monolingual and transmission-oriented conceptions of education, foregrounding learners’ dynamic linguistic repertoires, multimodal meaning-making, and situated forms of knowledge. Similarly, creative pedagogies draw attention to the generative, relational, and transformative dimensions of learning, including the ways learners engage with uncertainty, experiment with ideas, and produce knowledge through diverse modes of expression.

Against this conceptual backdrop, the symposium, which will take place at Cambridge University, 9-10 September 2027, examines the intersections of multilingualism, creativity, and learning across formal and informal educational ecologies. It invites critical consideration of how linguistic, cultural, social, and material resources are mobilised across different learning spaces, and how these practices are shaped by their specific sociocultural and institutional contexts. Such a perspective enables attention to both shared conceptual concerns worldwide and locally situated understandings, practices, and knowledge traditions.

Symposium aim

The symposium positions multilingual and creative education as a field of inquiry concerned not only with how learning takes place, but also with whose knowledge, languages, identities, and modes of expression are recognised as legitimate within educational processes. In this context, it aims to create an interdisciplinary space for examining how plurilingual and creative approaches shape teaching and learning in formal and informal educational contexts. It intends to explore how educators, learners, families, communities, cultural institutions, and other educational actors use languages and creative practices to construct knowledge, develop identities, participate in learning, and engage with others.

Contributors

Keynote and invited speakers include Linda Fisher and Ianthi Tsimpli (University of Cambridge), Li Wei (University College London), Ingrid Gogolin and Silvia Melo-Pfeifer (University of Hamburg), Joana Duarte (University of Groningen), Carla A. Cursino (Federal University of Paraná), Dobrochna Futro (University of Glasgow), Antonella Sorace (University of Edinburgh and Bilingualism Matters), Robson Carrapeto-Conceição (IDEAL Project), alongside other distinguished scholars and educators. The full programme will be announced by 15 November 2026.

Key questions

  • In what ways do multilingual contexts drive instructional and learning practices across diverse educational settings?
  • How can educators draw on learners’ and their own full linguistic and cultural repertoires as resources for learning?
  • What forms of creativity emerge when learners move between languages, cultures, media, and modes of communication?
  • What can community-based, family, cultural, and digital learning environments contribute to plurilingual and creative education?
  • How might creative pedagogies support participation, inclusion, identity formation, and intercultural dialogue?
  • What roles do arts, storytelling, performance, digital media, technology, and multimodal communication play in the development of plurilingual competence?
  • How can research and educational practices from different parts of the world inform one another without assuming that educational models are universally transferable?
  • What tensions, challenges, and opportunities arise when multilingual and creative approaches are introduced into formal education systems?

The symposium will provide the context for dialogue between academics in different fields of study, early career and experienced teachers and researchers, policymakers, public engagement, social enterprise and advocacy networks in order to strengthen connections between research and educational practice, highlight innovative plurilingual and creative approaches to teaching and learning, and develop a shared understanding of how formal and informal learning environments can contribute to multilingual and creative education.

The symposium may also provide a foundation for a subsequent publication.

Core themes

Our contributors may address, but are not limited to, the following areas:

  1. Plurilingual pedagogies and practices: Plurilingual education, language-aware pedagogy, multi-/plurilingual literacy, language learning, and the use of linguistic repertoires in teaching and learning.
  2. Creativity and creative pedagogies: Arts-based learning and teaching, storytelling, drama, music, visual expression, design, creative writing, play, problem-solving, and other approaches that expand how learning can be experienced and communicated.
  3. Multimodality, digital learning, and technology: Digital storytelling, social media, online communities, AI, multimodal communication, and emerging technologies as spaces for multilingual and creative learning.
  4. Formal education: Schools, universities, teacher education, adult education, and other institutional learning environments.
  5. Informal and community learning: Families, neighbourhoods, museums, libraries, cultural organisations, community initiatives, workplaces, and peer learning.
  6. Language, identity, and belonging: The relationships between language, identity, culture, participation, inclusion, and learners’ sense of belonging.
  7. International and Europeanperspectives: Research and practice from different regions and linguistic contexts, with attention to local histories, educational traditions, inequalities, and sociocultural conditions.

Connecting Languages, Creativity, and Learning Across Contexts

The symposium brings together voices from Europe, Brazil, and India. One of its central points is that plurilingual and creative education takes many forms around the world. Rather than assuming a single model of effective practice, the symposium will provide opportunities for different perspectives, from diverse geographical and linguistic contexts, to engage in dialogue. Comparative and transnational research, as well as locally situated studies, can illuminate both shared challenges and context-specific approaches. The symposium will also consider whose languages, knowledge, and creative practices are recognised within educational systems and whose may remain marginalised.