An online workshop for postgraduate specialists on the implementation of multilingual education “Ways of designing bilingual curricula and lessons: European experience, information and methodological support” were held at the end of August 2020. The event was supported by the Council of Europe project “Protecting national minorities, including Roma, and minority languages in Ukraine”, which is implemented within the framework of the Council of Europe Action Plan for Ukraine 2018–2021.

35 educators from different regions of Ukraine – Zakarpattia, Chernivtsi, Odesa, Kyiv, Kherson, Zaporizhia, Dnipropetrovsk, Lviv, Kharkiv – learned the best practices of multilingual education in Austria and Italy, as well as common approaches and educational policy of the Council of Europe on support for minority language education in accordance with the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages.

The seminar was opened by Yurii Kononenko, head of the Main Department of School Education of the Directorate of School Education, the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine, who stressed the paramount importance of preserving minority languages in Ukraine and the need to study the experience of the Council of Europe member states on this issue.

Ursula Doleschal, Professor of the Department of Slavonic Studies at the University of Klagenfurt (Austria), and Vesna Mikolič, Professor of the Department of Humanities of the University of Trieste (Italy), shared their experience. Ukrainian educators learned about the methods, forms and approaches to teaching various school subjects in minority languages in these countries, the specifics of developing bilingual textbooks and the organisation of education in bilingual and trilingual schools.

The presentation by Mervi Patosalmi, the Gender Advisor at the Council of Europe Office, on gender mainstreaming in school education, as well as examples of overcoming gender discrimination in school and in class, was also interesting for the event audience.

Participants discussed the matrix of implementation of multilingual education in Ukrainian schools, which should be taken into account in action plans of the Ministry of Education of Ukraine. It was presented by Svitlana Kharchenko, Chief Specialist of the Department of Education Content, Language Policy and Education of National Minorities of the Main Department of School Education of the Ministry of Education of Ukraine.