Our project BOLD was presented in the inspiring symposium on “Empowering Change: Inclusive Pedagogy, Linguistic Diversity, and Social Activism in Pre-Service and In-Service Teacher Professional Development for Students in Canada, The Netherlands, Germany, and Kanaky New Caledonia”. The moderator of the symposium, Emmanuelle Le Pichon, created a space in which we could present four ways of empowering change in different national and international context. The presentation by Emmanuelle and her colleague Ellen-Rose Kampel on multilingual pedagogies and the language-friendly schools was a perfect introduction to the symposium. In our presentation of the BOLD project, we focused on how service learning in teacher education programs can help to foster linguistic activism and multilingual pedagogies across the curriculum. The European context that we presented was then enriched by perspectives from Kanaky New Caledonia in the presentation by Elatiana Razafi who shows important examples of pluriartistic mediation decentering linguistic expertise in (post)colonial contexts. The presentations were complemented by the last presentation by Rahat Zaidi on intersectionality as a basis for hope and change in the classroom. Rahat summarised how the symposium addressed the need for updated skills in linguistically and culturally responsive pedagogy, presented perspectives from diverse research contexts, and highlighted global challenges in supporting inclusive pedagogy to empower change. And we cannot agree more with her. The audience was also highly interested and inspired by the examples and resources shared. We look forward to highlighting and putting multilingualism and cultural diversity into bold letters in further cooperations with our colleagues. Merci à toutes les présentatrices et l’organisatrice du symposium et aussi aux participant.e.s.
