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Speaking from the heart: Fostering Intercultural Learning in Secondary Education

Speaking from the Heart is an educational initiative that helps secondary school students understand how language, culture, identity, and emotions shape one another. By exploring how feelings are expressed across different cultural and linguistic contexts, the project highlights that learning a language means also learning how a community thinks, feels, and communicates.

Through interactive workshops, literary and non-literary texts, music, games, and guided reflection, students discover how emotional expression is influenced by cultural values and how communication varies across societies. The project fosters empathy, curiosity, and critical thinking, supporting students in reflecting on their own emotional identity while learning to understand that of others.

The Team & How It All Began

Speaking from the Heart started when Raquel, researching the link between emotions and literary expression, realised how strongly feelings are shaped by culture. During the INGENIUM mobility days, she connected with Valentina, focused on languages and translation, and with Choayb, whose work in linguistics complemented the concept. Together, they combined their expertise to design a project that helps students explore how language, culture, and emotional expression influence one another.

Here are the people behind Speaking from the Heart, the team combining their disciplines to help students explore language, identity, and emotional expression across cultures:

Raquel

Raquel Maciá Burgueño

Student at:

Choayb

Choayb Djouiba

Student at:

valentina

Valentina Abbonizio

Student at:

Project Objectives

Explore Language–Emotion Connections
Help students understand how emotional expression is shaped by linguistic and cultural identity.

Develop Intercultural Awareness
Guide students in recognising differences in how emotions are expressed across cultures.

Create Engaging Classroom Workshops
Use texts, music, games, and dialogue to support reflection and intercultural learning.

Foster Lasting School–University Collaboration
Build a foundation for ongoing intercultural partnerships across European schools.

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What We’ve Achieved So Far

The team has completed the full design of the workshops, creating tailored activity workbooks, text selections, music materials, and original games for students in Italy, France, and Spain. They also coordinated with teachers to confirm school participation despite scheduling challenges.

With preparations finalized, the workshops are now ready to begin, marking the project’s move from planning to real classroom interaction. This first implementation phase will introduce students to intercultural emotional understanding and set the foundation for continued school–university collaboration.

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“Understanding a language means understanding the way of thinking of those who speak it, emotions, culture, identity and expression are inseparable.”

What’s Next

Next, the team will begin delivering the workshops in high schools across Italy, France, and Spain, bringing months of preparation into real student interaction. These sessions will allow students to explore how culture shapes emotional expression, how language influences identity, and how communication varies across societies.

Following the implementation phase, the project aims to strengthen its school–university connections and potentially establish the workshops as a recurring activity each academic year. By sharing results through presentations and potential publication, the team hopes to extend the project beyond its initial run, inspiring more educators to adopt intercultural and emotion-focused approaches to language learning

Find out more

Project Presentation