LEVEL 2. EXPLORE BEST PRACTICE

Introduction

BiMo is a four-country Erasmus+ project (Spain, Italy, Romania, Lithuania, 2020–2023) coordinated by UNED. It surveyed 489 families and interviewed teachers, headmasters and international CLIL experts on bilingual education in monolingual contexts, then produced three multilingual MOOCs (headmasters, teachers, families), a Policy Recommendation Book and a case-study database, all freely available under Creative Commons licencing for schools across Europe.

The Challenge

What social issue does it address?

Bilingual/CLIL education is expanding in monolingual secondary schools across Spain, Italy, Romania and Lithuania, but institutional responses to the resulting linguistic and cultural diversity remain fragmented: families lack information, teachers lack certification, training and coordination time, and access is geographically and socioeconomically unequal.

Why is it important?

Without coherent frameworks, the quality and accessibility of bilingual education depend on local school initiative and individual teacher commitment, reproducing geographic, socioeconomic and institutional inequalities documented across all four countries studied.

How does it contribute to the BRIDGE Challenge?

BiMo documents concrete institutional gaps — family information deficits, teacher certification and coordination shortfalls, absent policy frameworks — and translates them into a transnational, evidence-based Policy Recommendation Book for educational authorities.

How does it work?

Researchers surveyed 489 families and interviewed teachers, headmasters and international CLIL experts across four countries, then built three multilingual MOOCs, a Policy Recommendation Book, and a case-study database, all openly licensed and freely accessible online.

What might inspire you?

Ideas for adaptation

1. Combine questionnaires with interviews across four countries. [61]
2. Design a MOOC for each stakeholder group: heads, teachers, families. [68]
3. Turn survey findings into a Policy Recommendation Book for authorities. [71]
4. Build a shared case-study database of successes and failures. [61]
5. License all outputs openly (CC BY-NC-SA) for free EU-wide reuse. [64]
6. Treat families as informants, not just recipients, of the research. [67]
7. Consult international experts to ground MOOCs in current evidence. [66]
8. Compare four national contexts to reveal shared and distinct barriers. [70]
9. Distinguish consultation, contribution and expert co-production roles. [70]
10. Target policy change on class size, coordination time, certification. [69]

Resources created