Writing The Future: Collective Creation of Ecolinguistic Stories

Résumé En

This paper presents experiments in community and educational practice based on the collaborative writing, illustrating, and editing of children’s books about harmonious multilingualism and eco-civilizations. The workshop methodology which forms the basis for the experiments is promoted by the French nonprofit organisation BookHoof whose mission is to promote reading by producing and distributing copyright-free books for children. Two constraints have been added to the original methodology: the stories should promote linguistic and bio diversity, thereby contributing to the collective invention of new stories to live by. This approach is currently being developed in two contexts in Southern Brittany: at the University of Rennes in an undergraduate English for Specific Purposes class (social and educational mediation), and in a community centre in Redon, with refugee families and community volunteers from the Soutien Migrants Redon organisation. Another workshop is planned at Jendouba University, Tunisia, with postgraduates on the Masters programme in Teaching French as a Second Language. The workshops share the common objectives of raising awareness of linguistic and bio diversity and imagining future ecocivilizations. In addition, each Workshop has specific educational aims in relation to the participants’ needs, such as developing second language skills and training participants to run workshops in future professional contexts. For the refugee families, the aim is to promote bilingual literacy developmentfor parents and children and to contribute to the families’ integration in the community by providing a context for communal creativity towards a common goal: the well-being of the local environment. The paper will report on two analyses. Firstly, how do the authors of the stories produced represent the themes of linguistic and ecological diversity and future eco-civilizations? And secondly, what forms of bilingual linguistic behaviour and translanguaging strategies are employed by participants during collective text production ?