Preparing teachers for multilingualism in Norwegian early childhood education and care provision through student active learning methods

In this chapter, we describe experiences from a module on multilingualism in early childhood teacher education at a Norwegian university. In this module, student teachers worked with their language portraits, filled in a questionnaire about multilingualism as represented in their ECEC centres and wrote narratives of practice documenting situations where multiple languages were used. Student teachers were encouraged to discuss and reflect upon their collected data and experiences from these course assignments. Anchoring our work in the sociocultural theories of learning and previous research on teacher beliefs and practices regarding multilingualism, we discuss how student active learning methods can provide opportunities for student teachers to explore such a complex topic as multilingualism, develop a more nuanced understanding of the topic and encourage them to develop multilingual didactics. Our data suggest that such methods may also create positive synergy effects between teacher education, practice field and ECEC research.