The contribution of a plurilingual kamishibai in promoting creative writing and raising awareness of linguistic and cultural diversity in Primary School

Abstract

This text presents an action-research project that integrated the construction of a plurilingual kamishibai as a strategy for raising awareness of linguistic and cultural diversity and the development of creative writing skills in a primary school in a formal educational context. The project was developed in 2021 with children attending the 4th year of schooling in a primary school class, in the city of Aveiro, in the scope of the Supervised Pedagogical Practice curricular unit of a Master’s Degree in Teaching in the primary school and Portuguese and History of Portugal in the secondary school of basic education. On that account, photographic records, students’ answers to a questionnaire and in a focus group, and data from an interview with the teacher and a Brazilian boy, recently arrived in Portugal, were analysed. The results show that, effectively, the activities, using plurilingual kamishibai, carried out throughout the project, allowed the children to overcome some of their difficulties, specifically at the level of creative writing, and to raise awareness of linguistic and cultural diversity, promoting interest in new languages and cultures when discovering the linguistic diversity existing around them. Lastly, the results also suggest that there was a learning development in the different curricular fields such as portuguese, mathematics, environmental studies and plastic expressions.