Curriculum Policy, Planning and Professional Development

This chapter focuses on our research findings related to curriculum policy, planning and professional development. From the outset, our multilingual digital storytelling project was about working closely with lead teachers to shape our pedagogical approach and discuss how this way of learning languages could be embedded within and across the curriculum. Lotherington (2014) rightly states that practice is key to sustainability and it is vital to discover ways to work with digital technology in our classrooms: ‘it is one thing to have a brave new idea about teaching language and literacy using contemporary media, and another thing to translate this into classroom practice’ (ibid.: 89). At the core of the success of our project was classroom teachers who were willing to take risks, experiment and learn new skills. Holmes in writing about our project in relation to creative multilingualism commented that all the projects mentioned had three common features: ‘their impact on young people; their acknowledgement of the complexities of multilingual learning; and their finely tuned models dependent on the time and expertise of highly skilled practitioners’ (2014: 8)