Architectural and Design based Education and Practice through Content & Language Integrated Learning using Immersive Virtual Environments for 21st Century Skills

The mobility, cooperation and employability within Europe of architectural and design learners, educators and practitioners can be restrained by the emerging diversity and inequality of language learning opportunities in Higher Education and adult learning organisations. A contributing factor may be the little evidence of language teacher training professional development and commercially available language learning materials in these disciplines.
Virtual worlds, a new design field for innovative architectural and design practices, can facilitate language learning and teaching which is relevant to the real-world needs of the future architect and bridge the gap between language and content learning. The combination of immersive 3D virtual environments with social networking media and Web 2.0 are tools of architectural experimentation today for some but are unknown to many architectural practitioners and students.
ARCHI21 will promote awareness to the potential of these environments in architectural and design education using a Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) approach and will reach HE students and educators, adult learners, language professionals, practicing architects and the wider community.
It will apply semi-experimental research to action learning to gather formative and summative data in the areas of a) CLIL in higher and vocational education sectors, b) the inter-relationship between linguistic competence and design competence building in project-based learning and c) the intercultural issues to be considered.
To create and pilot:
* 3D in-world induction courses for language mediators and learners, educators and practitioners of architecture and design;
* A CLIL model for HE and specifically in architecture and design education
* A collection of reusable Learning Objects;
* Best practice guidelines based on architectural and design case studies.
Products will be made available under a Creative Commons License in Slovenian, French and English.

Funded by the EU Lifelong Learning programme (Key Activity 2: Languages)