1
The ability to leverage linguistic diversity in the classroom is one of the major challenges teachers face throughout their entire career. In Italy, pre-service teachers receive very little training in this field during their studies and experience only limited support once they set out to the school world. The research and professional development initiative COMPASS was designed to fill this gap. A two-year initiative conceived for and with in-service teachers of both Italian and German-speaking primary schools in South Tyrol, COMPASS originates from the need to collaborate with teachers so as to develop the necessary competences and tools that can help them embrace more inclusive and socially just forms of plurilingual education. This is intended here as education that makes the most of the linguistic resources students bring to the classroom by using them as teaching and learning capital to foster cognitive and language development, positive identity development as well as language and metalinguistic awareness (Conteh & Meier, 2014).
The COMPASS initiative has been conceived as an example of participatory action research (Macdonald, 2012), whose aim is that of transforming and improving teaching practices through active participation, collaboration and exchange among teachers and researchers. This process also requires a change in beliefs and perspectives towards linguistic diversity and language education as well as the ability to question and reframe longstanding practices (Skutnabb-Kangas et al., 2009).
To promote collaboration, exchange and reflexivity, COMPASS engages teams of teachers of all subjects in a professional development course consisting of 10 workshops equally spread over two years, the first of which concluded in June 2022. The choice of workshop contents draws from a recent framework for theory and research on plurilingual didactic competences (Guarda & Hofer, 2021), which was compiled to meet the needs of teachers working in increasingly hyperdiverse schools in South Tyrol and thus constitutes the basis for the entire initiative.
COMPASS also entails a research component, with data being collected to document whether the initiative has any impact on the participating teachers’ beliefs, knowledge and practices with regard to inclusive plurilingual education.
The present contribution intends to give insights into some of the preliminary results of data collection at the end of the first year. For reasons of space, the discussion draws on data from one of the school teams that has been participating in the initiative (nine teachers) and focuses in particular on the development of the participants’ beliefs and practices around the concept of the schoolscape. This is intended here as the display of language-related signs
For what concerns teacher beliefs, the chapter discusses whether the participants developed a more critical and responsive attitude to the issue of implicit and explicit language hierarchies present inside the school, thus challenging longstanding assumptions about languages and their relevance for teaching and learning. With regard to teaching practices, the chapter reports on whether and how the way languages are displayed and used in the participating school developed over time to give visibility and relevance to all the languages that students bring into the classroom. In outlining these aspects, the present contribution also traces the difficulties the participants encountered in their attempt to change their schoolscape.
Although the chapter reports on the experiences made by in-service teachers, we believe that the findings discussed here can offer valuable insights for pre-service teacher education. The discussion of the preliminary findings is preceded by an overview of the main theoretical concepts that underly the present study, namely schoolscapes and inclusive education. The latter is described with specific reference to the Italian school system to allow for better contextualization. This theoretical overview is followed by a brief description of the context in which COMPASS originates, i.e., the South Tyrolean school and teacher education system, as well as by an overview of COMPASS and of the framework that has informed its design and realization.
2 Theoretical Concepts
2.1 Schoolscapes and Their Pedagogical Potential
To unpack the concept of the schoolscape, it is necessary to draw on the realm of linguistic landscape studies. The central object of this area of research is the analysis of the written and semiotic dimension in public spaces, whereby the public sphere is understood as a generally accessible social space (Tophinke & Ziegler, 2019; Shohamy, 2019; Van Mensel et al., 2016).
As suggested by Scollon and Scollon (2003, p. 205), “each sign indexes a discourse that authorizes its placement”: signs in space thus gain their effectiveness and authority by referring to social discourses, i.e., structures of social knowledge that trigger effects of power. In multilingual societies, the analysis of linguistic landscapes can uncover social discourses, mostly from a perspective of power relations between the different languages (Backhaus, 2006; Van Mensel et al., 2016).
Drawing on this, the choice of the schoolscape as one of the concepts and training foci of the COMPASS professional development initiative is driven by our understanding of the linguistic landscape as playing a pivotal role in visualizing, valorizing and allowing for the strategic use of the students’ complex linguistic repertoires as a resource for inclusive teaching and learning. At a conceptual level, we believe that the notion of the schoolscape represents the first connection between a teacher’s positive attitudes towards linguistic diversity and the ability to use that diversity as learning capital. As will be seen in this chapter, if teachers want to embrace a more socially just form of education, one that is respectful of learners’ plurilingual practices and leverages them to enhance the learning process, they should be willing and able to valorize their students’ languages and cultures through their integration in the school environment.
Enriching the schoolscape with all the languages and varieties that students bring into the classroom has several advantages: first, it creates spaces for all language resources to be made visible and meaningful in class (Boeckmann et al., 2011), thus validating their use even when they are not the languages of schooling (Carbonara & Scibetta, 2020; Hesson et al., 2014). This, in turn, can encourage students to build a positive view of linguistic diversity, while also unveiling and challenging existing language hierarchies and ideologies (Laihonen & Szabó, 2017). The schoolscape can also function as an additional source of language input for students: recent research has shown that linguistic landscapes in educational settings can stimulate language and metalinguistic awareness as well as foster multilingual literacy skills and pragmatic competence (for a review see Gorter, 2018). Finally, purposefully tapping into the students’ linguistic resources as they are displayed in the schoolscape can also support students to mobilize their rich linguistic repertoires for learning, e.g.
As this brief overview has shown, schoolscapes can become an important means of social inclusion and learning under the condition that teachers’ awareness about their pedagogical potential is raised (Brown, 2012; Dressler, 2015; Gorter & Cenoz, 2015). Working on (re)designing the schoolscape clearly requires an ideological shift on the part of teachers, i.e. a change from a monolingual to a multilingual view of language education (Cummins, 2007). Such a shift should not be limited to the physical schoolscape (signs, posters, word walls etc.), but also foster an ability to question and reframe longstanding classroom practices and pedagogical decisions (Skutnabb-Kangas, 2009). The schoolscape is thus not an isolated concept or practice, but is to be considered holistically, i.e. with its connections to pedagogy, programming and language policies (Menken et al., 2018).
2.2 Inclusion in the Italian School System
On European level, the Salamanca statement and Framework of Action on Special Needs Education (1994), based on the Human Rights Declaration, was the first UNESCO document to introduce an international policy of inclusion that sanctioned the right to education for everyone, alongside the principle of non-discrimination. This agreement should ensure that every child, regardless of gender, cultural and social background, religion and ability is supported in their personal development and that each individual is given the possibility to unfold their full potential. Consequently, there is no “one-size-fits-all” solution to the issue, but rather new pedagogical approaches must be developed where inclusive learning environments are created that give space to diversity and recognize this diversity as a gain for the whole community.
In Italy, the first law regulating school inclusion was passed already in 1977 (Gazzetta Ufficiale Act: August 4, 1977, n. 517), almost twenty years before the Salamanca statement (for the history of inclusion in Italy, see Saturno, 2021). The law sanctioned the end of special needs schools in favor of inclusive classrooms. Thanks to this measure, all children and young adults with or without special needs were supposed to learn side by side in the same space. Specific strategies of intervention were designed to grant everyone successful participation in meaningful and pedagogically valuable learning processes. Thanks to these measures, today’s Italian school system is an inclusive one.
Inclusion is a concept that presupposes equity, i.e. the idea that difference and diversity favor the learning of the individual as well as of the group. The task of each educational institution is, therefore, to encourage and support each
In spite of such long tradition, inclusion in Italy has for a long time almost exclusively implied inclusion of impairment, focussing on children with additional needs due to physical or cognitive peculiarities. Globalization and the constantly growing interconnectedness between people around the world, however, have added a new layer of complexity: due to technological, political, economic but also environmental changes, the migration phenomenon has increased considerably over the last decades.
It is in this context that social inclusion has become increasingly important in the last decades in Italy as well. As the situation was having an impact on the school sector, schools needed to counteract and take effective measures (Dalosio & Mezzadri, 2021; Favaro, 2020; Benucci, 2020). Consequently, the Italian Ministry of Education intervened with a new law in 2012 (Note of MIUR n. 465, 27 January 2012). The measures undertaken were in accordance with the overall mission of the Italian school system, i.e., inclusion (MIUR, 2012; Italian Government ministerial decree 62/2017), and extended this principle to the promotion of social inclusion. Social inclusion fosters learning processes in which difference is seen as something valuable, and no one is devalued because of their provenance, language, religion, or colour of the skin. The aim is to equip students with the necessary competences to deal with diversity in inclusive ways and to recognize the potential of intercultural und multilingual interaction as fundamental aspects of the learning process. The Ministry’s guidelines for the inclusion of students with a migration background (MIUR, 2014), for instance, clearly suggest the importance for schools and teachers to be aware of the linguistic repertoires of their students, to give visibility to all languages in the linguistic landscape of the school, and to valorize linguistic diversity whenever possible. The underlying understanding of inclusion is that students of non-Italian origin are an occasion for change for the whole school community in that “linguistic diversity represents an enrichment for all, both for plurilingual students and for autochthonous students, who can early on experience the variety of codes and grow more open to the world and its languages” (MIUR, 2015, p. 4). Heterogeneous classes are a mirror of societal changes, in Italy as elsewhere. Therefore, they can become and in part already are workshops of peaceful coexistence, social justice, and new citizenship.
3
The COMPASS initiative is being carried out in South Tyrol, an autonomous region in the north of Italy where three official languages historically coexist, i.e. German, Italian, and Ladin. The latter is an ancient Raetho-romance language related to the Romansch varieties of Switzerland. According to the latest statistical census (Landesinstitut für Statistik ASTAT, 2022), the German-speaking group of South Tyrol encompasses almost 70% of the province’ entire population and outnumbers the Italian and Ladin language groups, which make up 26% and 4.5% of the whole population respectively.
The region has a contested political history (Steininger, 2014) which has also had an impact on language policy and planning. Nowadays, German and Ladin share the status of linguistic minorities, which is legally anchored in the second autonomy statute of South Tyrol released in 1972, while Italian remains the language of the state.
Multilingualism in South Tyrol is not just part of everyday life but is also present at the institutional level since the three languages share the same official status and their use in public domains is regulated by law (Alber et al., 2012). The development of this institutionalized form of multilingualism had consequences for the educational sector, too. Although on Italian territory, South Tyrol has three distinct school systems, one for each linguistic group, which are completely independent from one another, each with its own school board. These were created to fulfill the requirements and needs of each linguistic group and to safeguard the minority languages German and Ladin. Depending on which school system a student is enrolled in, the first language of schooling (L1) is thus respectively German, Italian or Ladin. The second language (L2) is Italian for German schools and German for Italian schools. According to a principle of language macro-allocation, the number of hours allocated to each language is fixed and can be changed only to a minimum percentage of hours (Landesgesetz zur Schulautonomie, 2000, n. 121). Ladin schools handle multilingualism differently, even if only to some extent: although the principle of macro-allocation of languages is maintained, an equal number of instruction hours is assigned to each language (German, Italian, Ladin) so that students experience a regular alternation of the three languages during one school day (for further details see Rifesser & Videsot, 2013). Given its dominant role in all socioeconomic sectors, English is the most-taught foreign language (L3) and is an integrated part of all school curricula. This means that in South Tyrolean schools three or four languages are compulsory school subjects right from the first school years. Other socioeconomically prestigious languages such as
Over the last decades, the traditional dominant language constellation of South Tyrolean society has undergone significant change: due to the ever-increasing phenomenon of migration, in fact, other heritage languages have changed the sociolinguistic landscape of the region (Landesinstitut für Statistik ASTAT, 2011). According to the latest ASTAT survey (Landesinstitut für Statistik ASTAT, 2022), almost 10% of the students enrolled in South Tyrolean schools with German as the first language of instruction have a migration background. In schools with Italian as the first language of instruction, the proportion raises to 24%. Albania, Morocco, Romania, Pakistan and Moldavia are the most frequent countries of origins.
Unlike socioeconomically prestigious languages, most of the languages of immigrant minoritized communities still have no or little foothold in schools (Engel & Hoffmann, 2016), and it is left to the initiative of single teachers or school heads to provide space for them and integrate them in teaching practice. Such a heterogeneity, however, calls for an adequate and more systematic response in pre-service and in-service teacher education (Cummins, 1989). Yet, at the national level, no exhaustive and unified guidelines have been produced so far, so that linguistic diversity is treated differently in every region across the country.
To guarantee high-quality pre-service teacher education for nursery and primary schoolteachers, the Faculty of Education was founded in South Tyrol in 1997. This should grant a teacher education that is tailored to the needs of each school system. A multilingual master’s degree programme in primary teacher education (MEd) was created with a minimum study duration of 10 semesters, during which students acquire knowledge and competences in various fields such as: pedagogy, didactics, sociology, anthropology and lesson planning, complemented by frequent traineeships. This Masters’ degree can boast itself with modules in all three official languages and, in addition to this, English as a foreign language. It is customary that courses are offered in a bilingual modality or make use of the L2/L3 as languages of instruction. The declared purpose is to foster pre-service teachers’ competences in the three official languages and to promote metalinguistic awareness.
Yet, as also some scholars have observed (Gross & Mastellotto, 2021; Mastellotto & Zanin, 2022), such initiatives are limited by the policy of linguistic separation that persists in the institutional sphere and which can pose an obstacle to the effective promotion of plurilingualism and cultural diversity. In South Tyrol this means that even if each linguistic group can rely on its own school system, the principle of macro-allocation of languages is still dominant in all
Due to the fact that a monolingual habitus (Gogolin, 1994) is still the underlying principle of the local school systems, plurilingual pedagogy and didactics have not yet fully become part of the university curriculum, which means that student teachers are instructed to teach German/Italian as a second and foreign language but receive neither any formation in the broad spectrum of existent plurilingual approaches such as intercomprehension, awakening to languages (Oomen-Welke, 2002), CLIL (Mehisto et al., 2008), translanguaging (García & Wei, 2014), nor do they extensively study the principles of plurilingual language acquisition, learning and use. Another issue that is hardly tackled is the inclusive handling of linguistic diversity in schools and in particular of languages with a lower socioeconomical status (Gross & Mastellotto, 2021) despite the fact that inclusion is one of the core principles of Italy’s educational system, as the previous section has shown.
4 Filling the Gap: The COMPASS Initiative
To fill this gap, the COMPASS initiative was launched in 2021 as part of the project “One school many languages” (SMS 2.0) by Eurac Research,1 a private research center in Bolzano. As suggested in the introduction, COMPASS entails two main components, i.e., a two-year professional development course for teams of primary schoolteachers and a longitudinal research study on the development of teachers’ beliefs, knowledge and practices. The themes that are touched upon in the professional development course include concepts, approaches and strategies such as the reconstruction of students’ linguistic repertoires and language biographies (Busch, 2014; Gogolin & Neumann, 1991), the critical reflection and (re)design of schoolscapes (Brown, 2012; Szabó, 2015) the promotion of metalinguistic awareness (Jessner, 2008) and the adoption of a classroom translanguaging approach that embraces plurilingual practices and considers them as a resource for teaching and learning (García, 2009). An overview of the workshop contents and objectives for the first training year can
As suggested above, the choice of workshop contents draws on Guarda and Hofer’s 2021 framework for theory and research on plurilingual didactic competences. In a region such as South Tyrol, where socioeconomically prestigious forms of plurilingualism play a key role in education as much as in the broader society (Engel & Hoffmann, 2016), the framework represents an element of innovation because it explicitly encourages the valorization and inclusion of all languages and varieties while addressing the competences that teachers involved in plurilingual education should possess. As such, the framework represents a useful tool to inform teacher education and professional development programs.
The notion of competence that is contained in Guarda and Hofer’s framework (2021) reflects the definition proposed by the Council of Europe (Council of Europe, 2018), in which competence is seen as including internal resources such as skills and knowledge, as well as personal factors linked to a person’s beliefs, attitudes, and values. These personal factors represent a teacher’s proactive readiness to mobilize their knowledge and skills to challenge language ideologies, reframe commonly established practices from an inclusive perspective, and take responsibility for their students’ development as plurilingual speakers. In Guarda and Hofer’s framework, such a multifaceted notion of competence is mirrored by the choice of distinguishing three macro-areas, namely Knowledge, Skills and Commitment, with the latter specifically describing the teacher’s personal factors leading them to act as social agents of change. To each macro-area belong two or more resources, or categories, which can be seen in Figure 11.1.
Teachers’ plurilingual didactic competences: macro-areas and resources/categories (from Guarda & Hofer, 2021, p. 6)
The 12 categories illustrated in Figure 11.1 are further broken down into components with the aim of capturing the various interrelated facets of the same phenomenon. Each component, in turn, is exemplified in the framework through one or more concretizations. While a thorough description of the framework extends the scopes of this chapter, we believe that illustrating some of its components may help the reader better understand the contents and aims of the COMPASS professional development course as well as the focus of the longitudinal research that accompanies it.
The first example comes from the Skills macro-area and corresponds to the teacher’s ability to reconstruct their students’ linguistic repertoires and language biographies (category 4). As shown in Table 11.1, component 4A highlights the importance of identifying the linguistic resources that students have at their disposal and of including these in the classroom environment while at
Extract from the framework showing component 4A and its concretizations (from Guarda & Hofer, 2021, p. 10)
| 4 | Reconstructing students’ linguistic repertoires and language biographies | |
|---|---|---|
| Component | Concretization | |
| 4A | Teachers reconstruct their students’ linguistic repertoires and language biographies by adopting appropriate tools and strategies. | In order to reconstruct their students’ linguistic repertoires and language biographies, teachers promote a variety of activities and tools that best suit their educational context: e.g., they invite students to interview each other or to complete their language portraits so as to visually represent their linguistic repertoire. They promote the use of the Language Biography, the Language Dossier and the Language Passport, and encourage them to write or tell language life stories that illustrate their language biographies and learning experiences. Teachers also motivate students to share language anecdotes in class and to bring examples of how they use and build on their linguistic repertoire outside the school. This can be done by asking students to report on their language experiences and linguistic landscapes (e.g., via photos or personal narratives) and by showing products of language use to the rest of the class (e.g., depending on the year of schooling, blogs, short fictional narratives, comic strips, self-recorded videos, self-composed song lyrics etc.). Under specific circumstances, teachers involve parents and cultural mediators in the process of reconstructing students’ language biographies and prior schooling and learning experiences. |
As suggested above, skills such as the one exemplified in Table 11.1 can only be effectively activated by the impulse of the individual’s attitudes, values, and beliefs. In Guarda and Hofer’s framework (2021), these are described in the “Language activism” category within the Commitment macro-area: component 11B reported in Table 11.2, in particular, describes the teacher’s positive attitudes towards plurilingualism and his/her role as active agent of change, both in the classroom and in the wider community. As can be seen in Table 11.2, a teacher that advocates for his/her plurilingual students is one that considers all students capable of developing a rich linguistic repertoire and empowers them to build a positive view of their own and of others’ plurilingualism, e.g., by making their language resources visible and meaningful in class and by leveraging them to enhance the learning process.
Extract from the framework showing component 11B and its concretizations (from Guarda & Hofer, 2021, p. 15)
| 11 | Language activism | |
|---|---|---|
| Component | Concretization | |
| 11B | Teachers consider all their students capable of developing a rich plurilingual repertoire and take initiatives that empower students to develop positive attitudes towards their own and others’ plurilingualism. | Teachers believe that plurilingualism is something for all, including those students who are yet to develop a rich plurilingual repertoire. They devote specific moments in class to encourage their students to reflect – both at the individual and collective level – on their own language biographies (see Component 4). Teachers encourage their students to build a positive view of their developing plurilingual repertoire. This can be achieved by making their language resources visible and meaningful in class; by creating an empowering classroom atmosphere where students can feel safe to share their language experiences. Teachers also encourage students to develop an awareness of diversity and to look at others’ repertoires as an enrichment, not only for the individual but also for the class and the community at large. This can be achieved through activities that leverage students’ linguistic resources and stimulate trans-linguistic mediation and metalinguistic reflection. |
5
Guarda and Hofer’s tripartite framework (2021) also informs the second component of the COMPASS initiative, namely a longitudinal research study on teachers’ beliefs, knowledge and practices. COMPASS is an example of
Data collection methods
| Method | Salient features |
|---|---|
| Individual pre-interviews | The one-to-one interviews took place before the start of the school year 2021–2022: their aim was to gather information about the participants’ linguistic repertoires, as well as to access introspective data with regard to their attitudes towards linguistic diversity and their experience, if any, with its inclusion and valorization in didactic practice. The interviews were semi-structured (Merriam, 2009), i.e., guided by a brief list of open-ended questions with no predetermined wording or order. Part of the questions used for the present study were adapted from Engel and Hoffmann’s (2016) preliminary study on multilingualism in South Tyrolean schools. All interviews were conducted in Italian, except for the interview with the German L2 teacher, during which Italian and German were used flexibly. |
| Visual documentation | Visual documentation, mostly in the form of pictures of language-related signs in the school environment, was collected at different points in time by the teachers themselves and/or by the researchers. |
| Final focus group interview | The focus group was conducted to collect insights into the teachers’ experience in the professional development course, as well as to participatively design the contents and modalities of the second year of training. A list of questions was prepared to prompt the participants’ reactions with regard to the various topics and strategies they had experienced in the workshops and the impact, if any, such input had on their attitudes, beliefs and practices. Unlike individual interviews, focus groups have the advantage of generating data through the participants’ co-construction and negotiation of meanings (Akyıldız & Ahmed, 2021). The list of questions was thus used flexibly to give the teachers the possibility to interact and raise further aspects for discussion. |
All data from the interviews and the focus group were transcribed, and all participants’ names were substituted by identifying tags (see Appendix B). Data subsequently went through a process of qualitative thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006): each text was thus carefully read by two raters and broken down into smaller chunks on the basis of the meanings they conveyed. During this process, two coding schemes, one for the pre-interviews and one for the focus group, were developed with a hybrid of deductive (based on Guarda and Hofer’s 2021 framework) and inductive (data-grounded) coding. The aim of the analytical process was to capture and make sense of the wealth of beliefs and practices that were expressed and shared by the participants. To support us in the analytical phase, the software NVivo was adopted.
In this chapter, the discussion focuses in particular on the development of the teachers’ beliefs and practices around the concept of the schoolscape, while a discussion of the knowledge dimension is not included due to space limitations. With regard to beliefs, the chapter explores whether the teacher team developed a more responsive attitude to the issue of implicit and explicit language hierarchies present inside the school. As for practices, the discussion centers around whether and how the participants, in collaboration with their students and students’ families, adapted the way languages are displayed and used for teaching and learning. While discussing these aspects, we will also trace the difficulties the teacher team encountered in their attempt to change the schoolscape to give visibility to the complex linguistic repertoires of their students.
6 The Impact of the COMPASS Initiative: Preliminary Findings
In this section, the discussion of our preliminary results follows the three methods for data collection described in Table 11.3, and thus distinguishes between the most relevant findings from the pre-interviews, the visual documentation
6.1
In the pre-interviews we conducted with eight teachers of the team – one being on leave at that time – most revealed they did not perceive their classes as having a high level of linguistic heterogeneity, and justified their answer by reporting on the low number of pupils that had a migration background (two or three per class), in many cases comparing their current situation with previous experiences in what they saw as more heterogeneous schools. Another reason they provided was that most students with a migration background were second-generation pupils whom they usually described as highly proficient in Italian, at least with regard to their basic interpersonal communicative skills (Cummins, 1979). In the extract reported below, all these aspects can be found. INT05PL explained her perception that her classes were “more homogeneous” as follows:
That is, in the school where I was before there were more foreign pupils. Instead here I find myself in for example in the first grade I only have one, and another one who left. That is, I see that they are more homogeneous classes. There are more Italian pupils. At least in the class, even in fifth grade I have one I think. Or maybe the parents are from other countries, but the children were born here.2
Interestingly, none of the teachers told us they had reconstructed their students’ repertoires in a systematic manner, e.g., through a linguistic biographical approach (Krumm & Jenkins, 2010), something which can make the complexity of pupils’ linguistic repertoires and the subjective experiences associated to them more tangible and usable as a resource. Of the two teachers who, on the contrary, felt that their classes were indeed linguistically heterogenous, one in particular reflected on linguistic diversity as embracing not only the languages of immigrant minoritized communities but also the dialects and the various registers used in the students’ families, including autochthonous families:
Yes [my classes are linguistically heterogeneous]. But not only from the fact that they perhaps have a migration background. Also simply from the families they have behind them (…) So yes, I see it [linguistic heterogeneity]. (INT10PL)
In the pre-interviews, most teachers stated they had some experience with plurilingual education, which they intended as the use of two or more languages in the classroom, yet not all of them had found ways to include their students’ full linguistic repertoires in their didactic practices and relied on the languages of schooling instead. Among those who did have some experience
Overall, the experiences reported by the participants represented a valuable first step in the inclusion of students’ complex linguistic repertoires, yet they appeared to be episodic special activities inserted in regular didactics, something which reminds us of the warning made by Windschitl with regard to constructivist pedagogies back in 1999, when he observed that a learning environment does not significantly change if constructivist-inspired activities are offered only on a sporadic basis. Also, the practices reported by the COMPASS participants mostly seemed to be driven by social-emotional and social-cultural goals such as making students receptive to linguistic diversity and fostering positive identity construction (Sierens & van Averamaet, 2014), while the potential of non-officially taught languages for an enhanced learning of both content and language did not appear to be exploited to its fullest.
With regard to beliefs, the teacher team seemed to possess many of the qualities that are described in the Commitment macro-area of Guarda and Hofer’s 2021 framework: all its members displayed positive attitudes towards all forms of plurilingualism and an awareness of the impact of their own beliefs and attitudes on their students (“if I want them to love my language, I have to love theirs,” INT08PL). In the pre-interviews, as well as in the workshops afterwards, the teachers seemed well disposed towards a more pedagogically-driven inclusion of all languages in their practice and keen to learn more about practices and strategies in line with more socially just forms of education. As one of the participants told us during the interview, the team’s main objective was to give all languages more space and relevance, e.g. by creating “dedicated moments to bring out the richness pupils bring with them” (INT10PL).
6.2 Findings from Visual Documentation
This open attitude also emerged during our second workshop together, in which the focus was on language biographic work and on the school’s linguistic
Schoolscape example (workshop 2): train with the days of the week in Italian Note: Each wagon contains the word for a day of the week (lunedì, martedì, etc.)
Schoolscape example (workshop 2): a classroom library, with books in Italian and German
During the discussion, the teachers noticed that the languages of schooling, namely Italian, German and English, largely dominated the schoolscape while other languages and varieties were completely absent. They also observed that the languages were generally kept separate, particularly in signs that had a pedagogic function, such as the one in Figure 11.2. This seems to indicate that the macro-allocation of languages does not only function at an institutional level to determine the number of hours dedicated to each language (see Section 3) but is also implicitly reflected in didactic practices that de facto reiterate the “two-solitudes assumption” by adopting separate monolingual instructional paths (Cummins, 2007). This may occur in spite of teachers’ best intentions to teach by making reference to the other languages of the curriculum: if such efforts, however, are not accompanied by a reframing of the schoolscape, their potential for teaching and learning cannot be fully capitalized on.
Further visual documentation collected by the teachers over the course of the school year was used as a prompt in the focus group interview, as will be shown below.
6.3 Findings from the Focus Group
In the focus group interview at the end of the first year of training, the teachers were asked to reflect again on their experience with the schoolscape during the second workshop and to report on any changes that they thought had occurred since then, both in their own perceptions and beliefs as well as in the linguistic environment of the school. The analysis of the interview transcripts revealed that, overall, the activity on the schoolscape had stimulated the teachers’ engagement with language and enhanced their awareness of the languages that dominated the school environment as well as of those that remained absent or marginalized. This seems to be in line with findings of previous research on linguistic landscapes and their potential to raise language awareness among pre-service and in-service teachers (e.g., Hancock, 2012; Scarvaglieri & Fadia Salem, 2015). The following extract from the focus group interview illustrates this point:
The teachers also reported that they felt stimulated by the reflective process they had started during the workshop and had adopted some first strategies to reshape the schoolscape to give visibility to their learners’ rich linguistic repertoires. Regarding Christmas celebrations, for instance, the teachers had the idea of creating bookmarks with greeting expressions in the languages and varieties of all their students. To do so, they asked the pupils and their families for collaboration (Figure 11.4). The greeting cards were first hung up outside the school building (Figure 11.5) and after some days shared among the students as Christmas gifts to take home.
Christmas cards in the students’ languages (French, Serbo-Croatian, Urdu, Sardinian)
The pupils’ Christmas cards become part of a mobile, outdoor schoolscape
The response to this initiative was reported as being very positive, with the pupils and their families feeling valued and more actively engaged in the
The example discussed above illustrates one of the initiatives that the team undertook to give more visibility and relevance to all their students’ languages. Interestingly, the work that the team did around the schoolscape since the second COMPASS workshop seems to have been inspired by the same social-emotional and social-cultural goals detected above (Sierens & van Avermaet, 2014), i.e., fostering positive attitudes towards all languages, encouraging positive identity construction, and making all students more receptive to linguistic
It’s more an idea that got through to us, where on some occasions or in some moments it occurs to you that … you can broaden, that you can insert, can include … or do differently that thing that you had already thought about in your old way. Personally, I don’t feel like I’ve gotten to the point where I can plan a multilingual or plurilingual version of that activity but … the idea got through to me. (INTO4PL)
As the extract suggests, the teachers recognized that they had started a process of reflection which helped them question and partially reframe their pedagogical decisions and classroom practices. Yet, they all agreed that this was only the beginning of a longer process to develop the competences that are needed to mobilize their students’ full linguistic repertoires for content and language learning, an aspect that will be explored into more depth during the second year of the professional development course.
7 Conclusions
The study described in this chapter is part of a larger longitudinal research initiative of which we could only discuss its main preliminary findings within a very specific focus, i.e. the schoolscape. While these findings will need to be complemented after further data collection and analysis are completed, we believe they shed light on a phenomenon, the (re)design of the schoolscape, that is of primary importance in multilingual educational environments: as suggested in Section 2.1, the display and use of language-related signs have a strong symbolic and pedagogic potential and are the first connection between a teacher’s commitment to inclusive plurilingual education and their teaching practice.
Although preliminary, our findings thus show that schoolscapes can contribute to the creation of a more culturally and linguistically inclusive school. The
Teachers in this context can be considered the messengers, i.e., the link between the learners, the school and the larger society. It depends mostly on them if the schoolscape is shaped, if it is shaped inclusively or not, and whether importance is given to the overall message the school wants to send. It is a fact hardly to be refuted that teachers, together with learners, are the main designers of the schoolscape. Going back to the framework that informed the whole COMPASS initiative, engaging learners in a process of critical reflection on and (re)arrangement of the schoolscape is one of the initiatives that teachers should take to empower their students to “develop positive attitudes towards their own and other’s plurilingualism” (Guarda & Hofer 2021, p. 15) and to use their linguistic resources as an asset for teaching and learning. It is thus of utmost importance that teachers’ awareness is raised in the first place.
The findings discussed above with regard to the pre-interviews (see Section 6.1), as well as the observations associated with Figures 11.2 and 11.3 (Section 6.2), suggest that this awareness may not instinctively present in all teachers and should thus not be given for granted. It is thus important to engage teachers in professional development opportunities such as the one described here, in which they can collectively reflect on the value of redesigning schoolscapes, identify the languages that are missing in their own school context and recognize that unspoken norms and routines play a relevant role in how the linguistic landscape of their school is shaped. The arrangement of schoolscapes should thus be a central concern in their teaching practice, and can become a way of including all students in creative, interesting and in culturally as well as socially relevant learning processes (Malinowski et al., 2020).
As our preliminary findings show, providing teachers with opportunities to observe and reflect on their schoolscape can help them question their own attitudes and practices. The findings also show that teachers display a surprising amount of creativity and flexibility in order to bypass house rules that are mandatory, i.e. when they design mobile landscapes that can also be moved outside the school building so that spaces are not occupied permanently.
Notes
The interview extracts presented here have been translated into English by the authors of this chapter.
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Appendix A: Contents and Objectives of the Professional Development Course (1st Year)
| Workshop number and theme | Contents and related objectives |
|---|---|
| Introduction: the fundamentals of inclusive plurilingual education |
|
| Language biographies and linguistic landscaping |
|
|
|
| Approaches for inclusive plurilingual education: focus on translanguaging (Part 2) |
|
| Final reflections and exchange |
|
| Identifying tag | Gender | Subject(s) taught |
|---|---|---|
| INT04PL | Female | Italian, history, music, art |
| INT05PL | Female | Mathematics, science, geography |
| INT06PL | Female | Italian, history, music, art |
| INT07PL | Female | English |
| INT08PL | Female | German |
| INT09PL | Female | Mathematics, science, geography |
| INT10PL | Female | Italian, history, music, art |
| INT11PL | Male | Mathematics, science, geography, ICT |
| INT12PL | Female | German |