In today’s globalised economy, we are told that the successful transfer of knowledge is more important than ever. Economic success largely depends on the skills of so-called knowledge workers to transfer knowledge successfully through acquiring, assimilating and processing a constant stream of information in ways which are contextually relevant, meaningful and appropriate (Kale & Little, 2011; Eppler & Burkhard, 2004). Since these processes and trends not only affect an ever increasing part of the workforce but have spread pervasively across all aspects of life, it has become vital for societies to prepare all learners adequately for the challenges of living in a globalised and digitised economy of unprecedented levels of interconnectedness, and to help them become creative, responsible global citizens. However, in our current world, the chasms between societies on a global scale appear to be widening, with increasing numbers of people moving across national, cultural and social boundaries. It is therefore imperative that diversity is factored into our education approaches, not as a problem per se but as means of disrupting thinking and enriching what happens in our classrooms.

Britain in the century and a half running up to the millennium saw severe challenges, as its existing parts were conquered (or nearly so) by vikings, underwent radical internal change, or both. For these reasons the period is one of sharp contrasts. Crisis led into consolidation for two of the major powers in Britain, England and Alba, which emerged as the island’s superpowers in the tenth century. In this chapter we will look first at the vikings, who brought an important and dynamic new element to Britain when they raided, fought and settled. Subsequent sections will consider England, Alba and the Welsh kingdoms, including neighbouring units that were eventually incorporated by them, such as Strathclyde and Bamburgh.

As was noted in Chapter 2, few studies have focussed on the role of language teachers rather than the role of language in bilingual settings and their collaboration with subject specialists (Dale et al., 2018a). In this chapter we challenge the assumption that the language teacher’s principle contribution to CLIL contexts is expertise in language teaching and learning to support subject disciplines. This is not to minimise the importance of subject and language teacher collaboration – in some contexts this is extremely successful and pedagogically beneficial. However, we suggest an alternative which positions the language teacher as a subject specialist with a significant contribution to make in developing the pluriliteracies landscape. We explore ways in which the modern-, foreign- or second-language teacher (referred to where appropriate throughout this chapter as ‘language teacher’) can reframe their ‘subject’ as one which has increasing importance and value in our ‘post-truth’ world, not only in bilingual classrooms but also in monolingual contexts where the timetabled ‘language lesson’ provides an inclusive space for developing a critical understanding of languages, cultures and literatures.