Bridging Communities: Developing Digital Literacies and Introducing Digital Technologies in the Montessori Early Childhood Education Classroom

The Prepared Montessori environment assists children to develop an ordered mind. Implementing a new digital technologies curriculum presents a particular challenge to Montessori schools because there is no agreed strategy for how to introduce these digital technologies and no Montessori curricula include structured lessons for the development of digital literacies. In 2018, an action research project to identify whether there were authentic methods to develop digital literacies and introduce digital technologies into a prepared Montessori environment was run at River Montessori School. With a focus on the early childhood education classrooms, this chapter discusses the whole school project we ran to investigate how digital literacies can be developed and to experiment with possible strategies for digital technologies implementation in a way that aligns with the Montessori philosophy and curriculum.