New publication on co-located schools

Our co-authored paper about co-located schools has just been published. Earlier I wrote about co-located schools in this blog; briefly, co-locatedness means that schools that are administratively separate institutions share premises. Sharing space often leads to increased cooperation but might also trigger conflicts.

The abstract of our paper summarizes our findings:

Our study investigates new language ideologies to emerge as the consequence of a Swedish and a Finnish medium high-school moving together and sharing premises. We explore two co-located schools in Finland which are located in a bilingual municipality with a Swedish speaking majority. The study shows how local language policies, that is, language ideologies and their manifestations in discourses and languaging practices, emerge when members of the Swedish and Finnish medium school communities meet and interact. In this paper we devote special attention to teachers’ ideologies because we consider them powerful professionals that profoundly shape the educational landscape. We found that after the moving together, teachers have started to build on the co-locatedness of the Swedish and the Finnish medium school which has renewed, among others, their language teaching practices.

The paper got published in the German journal Der Deutschunterricht in a special issue on Linguistic Landscape studies. The editors Claus Ehrhardt and Heiko F. Marten invited us to publish there – thank you! It is a pleasure to be in a good company of leading experts in this issue. Further, we are grateful for Sabrina Zöller and Heiko F. Marten for translating our paper to German.

Szabó, Tamás Péter, Kati Kajander, Riikka Alanen & Petteri Laihonen 2018. Zusammenarbeit über Sprachgrenzen hinweg: Sprachauffassungen von Lehrern in örtlich zusammengelegten Schulen mit Schwedisch und Finnisch als Unterrichtssprachen [Cooperation across language boundaries: teachers’ language ideologies in co-located Swedish and Finnish medium schools]. Der Deutschunterricht, issue 4, pp. 53–59.