Exploring Bilinguality, Agility, and Agency in a Welsh Classroom through Mobile Media-making: Visual Knowledge Creation and Critique

This video article reports on a film-making pilot study with a group of eleven- to twelve-year-olds, conducted in a bilingual (Welsh-English) secondary school in West Wales, in 2023. The study sought to explore how mobile media-making technology and creative processes might fit into the Expressive Arts Area of Learning and Experience (specifically, the ‘Film and Digital Media’ strand of the subject area) in the Curriculum for Wales (2022). It also aimed to understand how such production and creative processes might align and intermingle with the languaging practices present within a bilingual education context, to scaffold expressions of individual- and collective-identity. The written component of this article sets out the context of the study, including its parameters, and maps emergent patterns in relation to the cross-curricular concept of cynefin (‘belonging’). The video component of the article showcases a sample from the corpus of work created by the participants, with particular focus on the emergence of three key factors – bilinguality, agility, and agency – to illustrate the complexities of the participants’ content creation.