Russian with Art… and with Arqus

The University of Granada Press has just published the book “Russian with Art: a Russian language manual through art and creativity”, the result of the Arqus project “Arts and Creativity in the Foreign Language Classroom”, which was carried out during the 2025-2026 academic year. The universities of Vilnius, Wrocław and Granada participated in the project and, as a result, teaching materials in Russian and Polish have been designed, bringing art and language learning together in a single space.

Irina Votyakova Chubukova, the project coordinator, explains that the idea of combining art with the learning of Slavic languages arose some time ago, but she could not find a suitable call for proposals to turn it into a project. After participating in a training activity on the possibilities offered by the Arqus Alliance, she says that she “immediately saw that it was a timely opportunity to carry out the idea in an international context”.

“The call has allowed us to broaden our horizons and create new contacts. While we have collaborated with the University of Granada on several occasions, the University of Vilnius was a new contact that we probably would not have made without this project,” says Dorota Drużyłowska, the participating professor from the University of Wrocław.

Tatjana Portnova and Tamara Gorozhankina, the participants from the University of Granada, highlight how much they enjoyed the process of developing the materials in a creative and innovative environment: “Working in an international team allowed us to create a space for exchanging ideas and enabled us to expand our possibilities and take our ideas beyond our offices. Moving between the cities of Vilnius and Granada served as a stimulus: in the team meetings, we have been feeding off one another and we consider that the final product reflects this creative atmosphere of the rather intense final months of work,” they state.

One of the project’s most prominent activities was the seminar «Arts and Development of Creativity in Slavic Language Teaching», held in May 2026 and aimed at teachers of Slavic languages. During the seminar, an innovative methodology combining language teaching with the development of creativity from an interdisciplinary approach was presented. The seminar brought together 30 teachers and doctoral students from seven countries, who rated the results of the project very positively and highlighted the originality of the methodology presented.

Both the Russian and Polish teachers highlight the implementation phase of the materials in the classroom. “We have seen the motivation and the smiles on our students’ faces and it has been the best reward,” the four of them state. “Our idea from the outset was to create the materials as open access so that any interested teacher could use them in the classroom without any difficulty,” they add.

“In one week, we have disseminated the manual internationally through social media and it has been very well received; we have received messages of congratulations for the innovative materials and, what is not common, as we are told, for being open access,” comments coordinator Irina Votyakova Chubukova. “We are grateful to the Arqus Alliance for the opportunity and hope to participate in similar calls in the future,” she adds.

The authors express their gratitude to the University of Granada Press for its help in publishing the manual. The book is available for free download at the following link: