Developing Multilingual Pedagogies in Early Childhood: a review of the project MuLiPEC

Developing Multilingual Pedagogies in Early Childhood: a review of the project
The project MuLiPEC (2016-2019) addresses the need for multilingual pedagogies in early childhood education in Luxembourg. It offered a professional development (PD) course to develop the practitioners’ knowledge and skills in relation to multilingualism and effective pedagogies as well as their practices, and analysed the effects of the PD on the practitioners and the children’s languaging. We offered a first 15-hour course to 46 practitioners from formal and non-formal education settings. Of these, seven continued during one academic year. They were coached and took part in six network meetings where we discussed their practices. To analyse the results, we drew on observations of the PD and in the research settings, video-recorded activities, and interviews. The results show that all 46 participants opened up to multilingual education and deepened their understanding of multilingualism, language development and multilingual pedagogies. Furthermore, the seven focus practitioners implemented activities in multiple languages and deployed effective language supportive strategies. Five of them developed holistic and child-centred multilingual pedagogies. This paper presents these positive findings and raises questions related to the sustainability of PD course and the need to continue the implementation of these effective pedagogies.