Our new publication on schoolscape research

With my colleague Petteri Laihonen, we have just published a paper on schoolscape research, focusing on language ideologies and organizational cultures in different sociocultural settings:

Laihonen, P. & T. P. Szabó 2017. Investigating visual practices in educational settings: schoolscapes, language ideologies and organizational cultures. In: M. Martin-Jones & D. Martin (eds.), Researching multilingualism: Critical and ethnographic approaches. Routledge, pp. 121–138.

Book cover from the publisher's website

In our introduction we summarized the aims of the paper as follows:

My new paper on Hungarian schoolscapes

Recently I published a paper on agency and the management of diversity in Hungarian schoolscapes. In this paper I study agency from two points of view. First, I investigate how reflections on the schoolscape help us to reconstruct educational practices and understand the role of various agents (students, teachers, parents, external agents like politicians, publishing companies, etc.) in processes of teaching and learning. Second, I am interested how the researcher's agency influences the fieldwork situation in which we generate the data together with the research participants. I analyze walking tours in four Hungarian school buildings (I wrote about my walking-based method tourist guide technique earlier in another paper as well). 

Multilingual schoolscape – Multilingual learning environment

I co-organize the following workshop – welcome!

Monikielinen koulumaisema – monikielinen oppimisympäristö

Mångspråkigt språklandskap – mångspråkig inlärningsmiljö

Multilingual schoolscape – Multilingual learning environment

We invite you to discuss current issues in the development and research of co-located Finnish and Swedish medium schools in Finland to a workshop at the University of Jyväskylä on 2 December 2016 from 11:00 to 15:30.

Co-located schools (kieliparikoulut/samlokaliserade skolor) are cases where a Finnish and a Swedish medium school have moved together. Currently there are 35–45 such schools in Finland, and their number is growing. We see co-located schools as clear examples of educational institutions where a multilingual learning environment is given. In this workshop we explore good practices and visions of how such cases could be used as a resource for language practice and learning.

Participation is free of charge, the language of the presentations is English.

The registration period is over.

Preliminary program (updated on November 26)