This open access book addresses the challenges of language teacher professional development (PD) and motivation by exploring how they can learn to be teachers of creativity and empathy.
It does so through the lens of online teacher PD in digital literacy. Alison Porter and Suzanne Graham report on how teachers of young language learners learn about creativity and empathy and how far collaborative learning can be linked with their motivation and wellbeing. They use a range of longitudinal data to examine the process of knowledge and skills development as well as the importance of factors underpinning motivation: competence, autonomy and relatedness. The book's novel approach showcases evidence to illustrate that both creativity and empathy are crucial in teacher motivation and also that they can be fostered in primary languages classrooms as part of global citizenship and intercultural understanding. Teachers' perspectives are central to this work and teacher 'journeys' or narratives are presented to document teacher learning and practical experimentation through supported engagement. An interactive resource bank accompanies the book, supporting reader access to relevant resources and a scaffolded classroom research toolkit.
The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on Bloomsbury Collections.