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A little bit of history
A little bit of history
From small acorns, mighty oaks grow...from small fabric squares, movements grow...but where did the Quilt of Welcome movement start?
At the beginning, there was research. Sabine Little, Professor of Literacy and Multilingualism at the University of Sheffield, has spent many years exploring links between multilingualism, identity, and belonging. Specifically, her work focused on "spaces" for multilingualism - the ways in which schools, libraries, and society at large have the potential to provide space (both physical and metaphorical) for multilingualism, and how this impacts on the identity development of multilingual children (and, on a larger scale, what it might do to support cohesiveness in a global society.
As part of this research, Sabine has led a wide variety of projects: working with Sheffield Libraries to create a multilingual children's library showed how important it was to ensure that a city's languages are represented in its public spaces - on bookshelves, but also in programming of events, in classrooms, etc. The project including a multilingual reading scheme, where children where rewarded (with a medal and a certificate) for reading books across multiple languages. This work, as well as another project, where children created a "River of Multilingual Reading" highlighted the importance of physical artefacts that have the potential to cross the barrier between home and schools, libraries, etc. - and the power these artefacts have to transform a child's sense of belonging.
The Quilt of Welcome is the continuation of that work, and an exercise in "scaling up" as well. In order to create it, all Sheffield schools were invited to participate. Thirteen schools took part immediately, and some blank squares were included in the quilt to ensure schools coming on board later had a chance to participate. Children wrote words that make them feel happy, welcome, and safe in their home and heritage languages, in English, as well as the name of their language. These were then stitched together by Sabine, before they were "quilted" (three layers stitched together) as part of the Festival of Social Science in November 2025. Both at the quilting event itself, and in every visit the quilt has made since, its importance gets reaffirmed. Wherever it goes, people look for languages and words they recognise. They engage with the words the children chose, and reflect on them. While some children chose words such as chocolate, ice cream, television, art, and science, others chose the people who make them feel happy, welcome, and safe - parents, teachers, etc. Some wrote entire phrases: "please don't be afraid of our language" is a plea written in Arabic and English. Some of the words show different concerns: clean water, doctors, and medicine all feature on the quilt.
The purpose of the quilt is to support connections - every time someone engages with it, regardless whether adult or child, they find something to connect with - a language they speak, a word they agree with, a flag they recognise. The Quilt of Welcome shows that there is far more that unites us than what separates us. As an artefact, it welcomes children from all backgrounds into the public spaces it visits, but it also welcomes everybody into a space where we consider how we live together in society, the stories we share, and what it takes to feel happy, welcome, and safe.
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