Vision

To transform our society’s multilinguism into a lever to favor equal opportunities and fight discrimination.

Findings

Our action stems from 3 findings:
• One in four children in France grows up with another language apart from French (2008 INSEE-INED report) ; and for many decades now, research has pointed out that plurilingualism is a chance.
• Students from an immigrant background show a stronger motivation to succeed than other students (2018 OCDE)
• Still, children’s languages aren’t taken into account within the educational framework, and inequalities between immigrant and native populations seem to repeat themselves throughout academic and professional life – from first grade results up to professional integration (Vers le Haut, 2021).

Approach

As a response to these findings, Dulala chooses to accompany workers from educational, cultural, social or health fields to establish language friendly projects.
The association offers three main types of activities:
Production of informative and pedagogical resources: to help educational actors make languages a common resource
Organization of training programs, colloquiums, discussion groups, etc.: to raise awareness and train professionals to face the challenges of multilingual education for the 21st century’s educational structures.
Leading of workshops : to give every child a taste for languages and accompany the bilingualism of children growing up daily with another language than French.
A real laboratory, Dulala leans on networks of researchers and professionals, as well as on children and their families themselves, to devise practices and resources that are tested in the field.

Advisory Board

The association leans on an advisory board (see the members list below) made of linguists, pedagogues, ethnologists, designers and education specialists with experience in the field.
The association regularly enlists a network of experts, service providers and volunteers in the framework of its missions. If, like us, you wish to commit yourself to a project fostering linguistic and cultural diversity; to put your skills voluntarily at use; to participate in committees, administration, communication, event planning… Then don’t hesitate to conctact us!
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Board members

Linguist, Professor Emeritus
Daniel Coste is a French linguist and didacticist, Professor Emeritus (language sciences and language didactics) at the École normale supérieure de Fontenay-Saint-Cloud, director of CREDIF (Centre de recherches et d’études pour la diffusion du français), and at the University of Geneva. He is also an expert serving in the Council of Europe.

Maryse Adam-Maillet

School inspector – regional pedagogic inspector and Casnav manager
Maryse Adam-Maillet became an associate professor of literature after studying human sciences. She worked for twenty years as a teacher for various audiences in secondary and higher education, and then as a regional school inspector in the arts. From 2008 to 2020, a time span during which she was in charge of the CASNAV of the Besançon academy, she became interested in multilingual didactics and language policy.

Ruedi Baur

Franco-swiss designer born in Paris.
Since the 1980s, Ruedi Baur has been thinking about his design activity in the context of public space. He works on issues related to identification, multilingualism, scenography and, more broadly, the representation of institutions, urban spaces and political territories. He has also designed the visual identity and signage for the Centre Pompidou, the Cité internationale de Lyon and the Parc de Chambord. For Dulala, he designed the visual identity in collaboration with Marco Maione. Ruedi Baur has published numerous works including Art contemporain (1988), Ruedi Baur, Intégral Concept (1994), Expo.02: la signétique (2002), Cinémathèque française (2006), Design in question (2012).

Marisa Cavalli

Consultant for the European Centre for Modern Languages of the Council of Europe

First a French teacher, then a teacher in charge of research at the IRRSAE and finally at the former IRRE (Institut Régional de Recherche Éducative) in Valle d’Aosta, she is currently a consultant for the European Centre for Modern Languages of the Council of Europe and a member of several associations working in the field of bilingualism and plurilingualism. She is also the author of numerous publications.

Yvanne Chenouf

Teacher, former researcher at the National Institute for Educational Research (INRP)
Yvanne Chenouf is a teacher (notably in an experimental district for 10 years) and worked for twenty years at the National Institute for Educational Research on reading and writing issues. A former project manager at the Seine-Saint-Denis academic inspectorate and former ESPE teacher, she is also a member of the French Association for Reading, editor of Actes de Lecture and Secretary-General of Dulala.

Audrey Dessertine

Director of the ethnoArt association

Audrey Dessertine has a master’s degree in social and cultural anthropology. She became fascinated by a dance practice, the Senegalese Sabar, a rich object of study for questions of transmission and representations of the feminine and masculine. She quickly wanted to share her knowledge with non-initiated audiences and this wish was fulfilled when she met ethnoArt in 2012. Today, she is the association’s director and runs numerous training sessions for professionals.

Bien Dobui

Assistant Professor at the University of Picardy Jules Verne and at the INSPE of Beauvais
Bien Dobui is a linguist working on rare or endangered languages in a migrant situation, and also trains school teachers in the didactics of English using a plurilingual approach. Her research and fieldwork have resulted in a grammar of Amuzgo, a language of Mexico and Queens, New York, and dialectal research of sister languages. As a Vietnamese-American, she is also interested in the place of minority languages in France, her adopted country.

Christine Hélot

President of Dulala, professor emeritus at the University of Strasbourg.
Christine Hélot is a sociolinguist, specialising in issues of bi- and plurilingualism in the family and educational context. A teacher trainer in Ireland and France and in many other countries, she has published a dozen books in English and French, including in 2007 Du bilinguisme en famille au plurilinguisme à l’école (“From family bilingualism to school plurilingualism”) (L’Harmattan), and in 2016 L’Education bilingue en France: Politiques linguistiques, modèles, pratiques (Lambert Lucas).

Michel Launey

Professor emeritus at the University of Paris VII
Director of the Centre for the Study of Indigenous American Languages. A specialist in French overseas territories, Michel Launey has worked extensively in French Guiana where he discovered the issues of multilingualism in schools.

Delphine Leroy

Lecturer in educational sciences (Experice Laboratory, University of Paris VIII). Related to the Migration Convergence Institute.
Delphine Leroy is an anthropologist and is particularly interested in learning in transculturalities. It is from the life stories of people involved in migration that scriptural practices and their modes of access (languages) are highlighted. She co-edits the collection Singulières migrations at PUV and is a founding member of the journal “Polygraphes, approches métissées des actes graphiques” at FMSH. Her latest book: 2019, “Écritures et/en migrations. Expériences, tensions, transformations”, Petra editions.

Marie-Paule Lory

Assistant Professor in the Department of Language Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga in Canada, she is also a member of the Centre de recherches en éducation franco-ontarienne (CREFO).
Her main research interests are in the area of social representations of languages in the school context. She has extensive experience in teacher training on plurilingual pedagogical practices in the Canadian provinces of Quebec and Ontario. She is also involved in several innovative research projects that support language development through creative expression. Since 2017, she is the president of the international association EDILIC (Education and Diversity Linguistic and Cultural).

Corinne Mencé-Caster

University teacher in Hispanic linguistics at the University of Paris IV-Sorbonne.
Former president of the University of the West Indies and French Guiana, Corinne Mencé-Caster is now a professor of Hispanic linguistics at the University of Paris IV-Sorbonne. She is also in charge of the Research Master in Foreign and Regional Languages and Cultures, and is the author of several novels.

Sandrine Mini

Director of publishers Syros and L’Agrume
After studying literature at the Sorbonne Nouvelle (Master’s degree in children’s literature) and a postgraduate diploma in publishing (Villetaneuse), Sandrine Mini worked for the publishers Albin Michel and Mango before launching the children’s department of the publisher Autrement, which she directed for five years. She took over the management of Syros in May 2005. Since July 2019, she has also been the director of the publisher L’Agrume, which has joined the Nathan Univers jeunesse division, alongside Syros.

Isabelle Nocus

Senior Lecturer in Developmental Psychology at the University of Nantes
Isabelle Nocus specialises in bi- and plurilingual development – the impact of plurilingual teaching on children’s skills (cognitive and conative dimensions). Isabelle Nocus is a researcher with a lot of field experience, especially in plurilingual settings in the French overseas territories.

Maud Serusclat-Natale

FLE/FLES, drama and literature teacher
Co-coordinator of the CASNAV of the Besançon academy, she is assigned by the academic delegation for cultural action (DAAC) to the national stage of Montbéliard “MA”. For the past two years, she has been working at “MA” on the corpus collected during the Parlemonde art project as part of a doctorate in language sciences entitled “Experiences of artistic creation and the development of language skills in allophone pupils: diversions or recourse?” directed by Professor Nathalie Auger at the University Paul Valéry Montpellier III.

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