Agenda

MILE conference 2026 - Cultivating Plurilingual Education across Different Learning Contexts through the Arts and Museums 
Venice, 15-16-17 October 2026

Contemporary education demands a shift away from monolingual biases toward flexible plurilingual practices that reflect the reality of our multilingual societies. Plurilingual education posits that communicative competence is not a collection of separate skills, but a single, complex competence where languages interrelate and interact. This dynamic view of communication extends beyond verbal language to include meaning-making practices that are both multimodal and plurilingual. It challenges us to look 'beyond' linguistic systems and explore how plurilingual actors utilise their full communicative potential to navigate complex environments. This process resonates deeply with the sensory and material nature of arts- and museum-based pedagogies (Wünsch-Nagy 2024).

This conference seeks to highlight how the synergistic connection between the arts, museums, and (language) classrooms can create third spaces (Bhabha 2010) or, in Li’s terms, “translanguaging spaces” (Li 2011, 2018). In such spaces, language users actively draw on their full range of resources and modalities (including visual, embodied, sensory, and social) to construct meanings in interaction, embracing their inner spaces, personal journeys, and aesthetic sensibilities (Anderson et al. 2018; Bradley et al. 2018; Lytra et al. 2022; Abdelhadi et al. 2020). Research has shown that promoting plurilingual communicative and pedagogical practices across different learning contexts (e.g. museums, botanical gardens, city spaces, etc.) and in integration with various art and creative methods (e.g. collage making, drama, creative writing, a/r/tography, etc.) can have a positive impact on learners’ deep and meaningful engagement with content, metalinguistic awareness, creativity, self-expression, and democratic citizenship (Bradley 2025; Meneghetti and Fazzi 2025; Macleroy and Shamsad 2020; Arshavskaya 2021; Futro 2022). Moreover, promoting plurilingualism in public spaces can help challenge linguistic and social hierarchies by integrating new narratives and perspectives, promoting the inclusion and empowerment of often marginalised communities, and supporting intercultural understanding (Meneghetti 2024; Fazzi 2025; Deroo 2022; Matras 2023; Lehman et al. 2018).