Schoolscapes Aren’t Neutral: Language Teaching for Inclusion

When we are frustrated by our learners, we might be tempted to think that they don’t learn much — which is untrue, because there’s never a moment when people don’t learn. It’s just that they learn many different things from many different sources, not just the things we teach them. This is one of the reasons the linguistic landscape of schools (or ‘schoolscape’) is so important. I recently blogged about linguistic landscapes, prompted by an article I had read where teachers used these to promote inclusion, and discussed how these can reproduce or challenge what some call a ‘monolingual habitus’.¹ In this post, I would like to follow up by exploring some more concrete practical examples that someone might try out, if they wanted to disrupt these norms.

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What is a schoolscape?

A PowerPoint version of these slides is also available for download. Feel free to use this for your teacher education needs (CC BY-NC)

A definition…

The term ‘schoolscape’ refers to the linguistic landscape in educational settings, i.e., the written, aural and multimodal language that surrounds us and forms the backdrop of our learning. Linguistic landscapes are easy to overlook, and more often than not, we might dismiss such content as mere ‘decoration’. Yet, the schoolscape is more than that: the posters, announcements, and signs in our schools represent whose language is welcome in the setting. They are markers of linguistic identity and aspiration; or —put otherwise— they signal whose language is undesirable.

Seen through this perspective, linguistic schoolscapes are “the school-based environment where place and text, both written (graphic) and oral, constitute, reproduce, and transform language ideologies” (Brown, 2012, p. 282). The choices we make about which languages are visible, and what their relative order and salience is, communicate subtle but lasting lessons to learners about which languages matter in our world.²

…and its implications

To echo Barthes,³ language is never innocent, and neither are schoolscapes. No matter what the instrumental purpose of a sign on a school wall is, its ideological impact is to optically reinforce the language in which it was written. They are tools through which linguistic dominance is enacted. For example, Brown (2005) discusses how schoolscapes in Estonia add to the marginalisation of Võro, a regional language. Similarly, Biró (2016) reports on the dynamics of schoolscapes in Romania, where Romanian and Hungarian signs competed for public space and visibility. What this shows, however, is not that schoolscapes are instruments of linguistic oppression; it is that they are powerful instruments in shaping how we think about language, and that teachers can use these instruments to promote inclusive ways of thinking. In the following section, I would like to share some examples of how this might happen.

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Challenging linguistic hierarchies through the purposeful schoolscape use

So, how can we use or even shape schoolscapes to promote inclusion and visibility of underrepresented languages? I have chosen the examples below to show how teachers can act as agents of change,⁴ even when they work in contexts where monolinugalism is the norm. Most examples are drawn from or inspired by work of teachers that I had the privilege to come across over the last few years in the context of our with whom I worked in the context of our MA in Language Education for Refugees and Migrants.

These activities are not intended to replace the essential work that takes place in language education settings. Fostering critical awareness and interrogating linguistic ideologies is important, but not always the learners’ more pressing priority. Rather, what I am trying to show through these examples is how we might re-imagine activities that have a primary focus on developing fluency or accuracy (e.g., vocabulary learning, poster-making, writing practice), and enriched them with a critical dimension.

Language Awareness Walks

A language awareness walk is an activity that helps to raise the students’ critical awareness of the linguistic environment that surrounds them. This involves asking students to observe signage, displays, and texts in their school and then reflect on which languages are visible (and which are excluded).

A language awareness walk can be integrated into activities such as orientations or school trips. Zoë, one of the teachers in our course, who was working with unaccompanied refugee minors in a supervised apartment setting, would regularly take her students on discovery trips (“short adventures”) to “discover monuments, museums, entertainment and events in the city”. In these adventures, students took photos of signs, which they later discussed for vocabulary learning. Another teacher, Stella, asked students to document signs in their school environment and share their findings in a padlet board. Following that, students worked together to work out the meaning of the signs as a reading comprehension exercise. Although not a ‘walk’ per se, this activity too encouraged students to critically notice their environment and imagine a multilingual schoolscape while practicing language.

Comparative Schoolscape Tasks

Another way to use schoolscapes is to encourage comparisons between different settings. Such comparisons can be a stepping stone for exploring how language reflects values and ideologies.

To illustrate, Eirini, one of the teachers in the MA, wanted to her students to practice functions, such as comparison and contrast. To do this, she used a Task-Based Learning format in which students compared signage in their classroom with similar signage in schools at their countries of origin (this also involved artistic reconstructions of these schools). The students’ presentations then provided starting points for discussion on different language norms.

Creative Redesign of Schoolscapes

Creative redesign tasks involve learners creating alternative classroom or school signage that is representative of the linguistic and cultural diversity of the student population.

For example, Eleftheria, who was working with young refugees at a Junior High School in a large setting, facilitated an intervention where students worked in groups to create signs for city features (e.g., bus stops, markets, playgrounds) in both Modern Greek and Arabic. They then displayed these multilingual signs in their classroom, where they served as springboards for discussing students’ aspirations and rights. This discussion got excited, and as Eleftheria noted, “the students were eager to express themselves with clarity, using the target language [i.e., Modern Greek] flexibly and effectively” as they debated which signs were most useful, what degree of detail is necessary, and in what order languages should appear.

In a more ambitious (and perhaps somewhat more controversial) task, another teacher, Sophia, and her Roma students replicated signs and posters in their classroom using Romani transliterated into the Greek alphabet. For example, they created a bilingual artefact listing children’s rights, which was later (briefly) displayed on the classroom wall. Here’s how she described the experience in a teaching report:

In the last activity, the children made their own list of the rights and obligations […] in two languages, Greek and Romani. […] They decided to use simple numbering (1,2,3 etc.) in front of their rights and obligations and, because they concern the whole class and not each child individually, they also agreed to use the first plural person (we). […] They decided between them who will write the rights and obligations in Greek and who in Romani. […] On the one side of the sheet their rights and obligations were written in Greek, while on the other side they were written in their mother tongue, Romani, using the Greek alphabet characters as it is an oral language.

Schoolscape Audits for Policy Awareness

A schoolscape audit is a systematic examination of the language(s) visible in a school. As a first step, an audit involves documenting and examining artefacts like posters, signs, displays, and official notices. This may involve include taking photos of signage, and categorising language use (e.g., monolingual, bilingual, translated). Next, we can use this information to evaluate how well this enacted language policy aligns with the institution’s stated policies. Students can work together with teachers to reach conclusions about which languages are represented (or absent), and about how the linguistic environment reflects (or contradicts) the values the school claims to uphold.

The truth is that I struggled to find examples of such audits in the teacher reports in my records (although it is a recurring topic in our MA courses). This could reflect the fact that such a project requires resources and a climate of openness that are not always easy to find in school contexts. However, they have considerable potential in teacher education: for example, one of the things we have found useful in our programme involves asking teachers to document the presence or absence of multilingual signage during practicum visits and reflect on its implications for equity and inclusion.

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Why schoolscapes matter

Doing schoolscape work in language education builds on the idea that schoolscapes aren’t just aesthetic; they are implicitly political. Schoolscapes act as everyday texts that mediate inclusion, identity, and visibility in the classroom. As Shohamy (2006, p. 110) notes, “the presence (or absence) of language displays in the public space communicates a message, intentional or not, conscious or not that affects, manipulates or imposes de facto language policy or practice”. It is a powerful move that legitimises voices (and speakers) within a space whose are marginalised.

The presence (or absence) of language displays in the public space
communicates a message, intentional or not, conscious or not
that affects, manipulates or imposes de facto language policy or practice.

Shohamy, E. (2006). Language policy: Hidden agendas and new approaches. Routledge.

What our learners see and hear around them matters. A multilingual poster, a sign in a child’s home language, or an announcement acknowledging different scripts and cultures can all validate learners’ identities. Conversely, the absence of such representations can reinforce exclusion and marginality.

Using schoolscapes critically helps educators challenge dominant norms, affirm minoritized identities, and co-create inclusive learning environments. As Sophia observed in her work with Roma students, “they experienced a sense of pride in their language, as it became an object of respect and wider acceptance.” Such practitioner reflections illustrate how schoolscapes can transform classrooms into spaces of empowerment and recognition.

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Over to you

In the paragraphs above, I reflected on how teachers and learners can work together to challenge linguistic hierarchies in their schools. I also interrogated the belief that schoolscapes are innocent. I would now like to invite you to reflect on what your classroom says about language.

Perhaps you’d like to try one of the ideas above and, if you’d like, you might use the comment space or social media to share how it goes. Better yet, you could invite your students to help redesign your school’s linguistic landscape. You might be surprised at what they have to say!

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Notes

1. Just to provide some background, the term ‘habitus’ was introduced by Pierre Bourdieu, who argued that many of our preferences, thoughts and choices are not quite the product of our free will; rather they are ingrained through our social upbringing. This line of thought was picked up, in language education by Ingrid Gogolin, who noted that lessons (even language lessons) tend to be monolingual: for example, a French class in Greece might try to work exclusively in French. Such choices are not generally informed by conscious pedagogical choice, scholarly authority or empirical evidence: they just happen because this is what always happened (I sometimes call this ‘normative monolingualism’). This suggests that, in the western world at least, monolingualism is perceived as ‘good’. ↩︎
2. Such lessons can sometimes be very powerful. Some time ago, I was interviewing a Kurdish boy, who told me that he could speak Turkish, Arabic, English and German. I I remarked that four languages in addition to Kurdish was an impressive feat; he seemed genuinely perplexed by this, and clarified that “Kurdish is not a language, it’s just what we speak at home. Languages are what you see all around you”. ↩︎
3. Le degré zéro de l’écriture, 1953. I use this quote a lot, I admit. In my defence, it’s a good one. ↩︎
4. I have written more extensively about such change in an article that appeared in Teaching and Teacher Education. In brief, I acknowledge that placing trainee teachers in schools has a risk that they will be exposed to very different beliefs and practices from the ones we try to foster in university-based education. But a constant flow of trainee teachers can also trigger and sustain change in the way schools do things. ↩︎

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More to explore

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