Material Change: The Case of Co-located Schools

Abstract

In this chapter, our context is a co-located Swedish and Finnish medium high school campus. From a posthumanist viewpoint, we study the roles and functions of language(s) in the semiotic assemblages of learning environments and ask how language(s) feature as an integral and material part of the change in the spatial repertoire of learning environments. We investigate how the principle of separation of schools by medium of instruction, typical for Finnish education, becomes undermined through a new multilingual soundscape in the co-located schools, where the school community hears and uses many languages every day. In doing this, the co-located schools not only challenge Finnish language ideologies and practices, but may also promote language learning in a more effective manner than structured, curriculum based ‘planned’ forms of multilingual education. In the long run, the placing of Finnish and Swedish language schools in one location has led to teachers’ recognition of the new assemblage as a resource for pedagogical change.

Introduction

In an article of Helsingin Sanomat (HS), a major Finnish newspaper, the journalist Jussi Konttinen asks who decided to design Finnish schools as open spaces and why. He concludes that new pedagogical norms of e.g. collaborative, student-centred learning call for work in flexible groups of pupils and teachers. Further, the newspaper article argues that the old school buildings with permanent classroom walls do not enable such learning, because they are designed for static, set size groups and teacher-fronted teaching arrangements (Konttinen, 2020.)

Teachers might cling on the pedagogical tradition and thus resist reform initiatives (cf. Brooks & Waters, 2018) such as the promotion of co-teaching, mentioned in the new Finnish National Core Curriculum (NCC, 2014) in force since 2016. However, according to the Helsingin Sanomat article cited above, there is no explicit normative central policy behind the trend of building open spaces. Konttinen (2020) argues that the decisions are made by private school architecture developers. In the opinion of the developers cited in the HS article, a change in the learning environment by building open learning environments, will help break teacher resistance and has the potential to bring about the needed change in pedagogical practices.

In this chapter, which we approach from a posthumanist viewpoint (Pennycook, 2018), our focus lies on the roles and functions of language(s) in the spatial and semiotic assemblages of learning environments. Our goal is to investigate how language(s) feature as an integral and material part of the change in the spatial repertoire of learning environments with a focus on the undermining of the monolingual habitus and separation of languages in education. More specifically we ask, how changes in the physical learning environment initiate change in language practices and language ideologies circulated in the given school community?

The significance of spatial arrangements, material objects (e.g. furniture), things, embodiment, senses and their potential with change in educational practices have been recognized by school environment developers in Finland (see Luminen et al., 2018; Konttinen, 2020) and elsewhere (see e.g. Chiles & Care, 2015; Brooks & Waters, 2018). However, language(s), their presence, forms of use and functions for learning have barely been included in such general level discussions on developing learning environments and their design.

From a posthumanist perspective, Pennycook (2018, p. 43) proposes that things or objects may have (partial) agency (see also Muhonen & Vaarala, Chap. 3, this volume). In this framework, material objects play a crucial role (they have “thing-power”, Pennycook, 2018, p. 53) in shaping the activities such as communicative routines in a given context. Practices, that is, “repeated social and material acts that have gained sufficient stability to reproduce themselves” (p. 53), as well as places, things, senses and bodies constitute the semiotic assemblage in which agency is distributed together with human intentions and competencies. Pennycook’s idea of spatial repertoires of languages or communicative resources explains the distribution of agency further. That is, sociolinguistic repertoires enacted for instance on a busy marketplace are understood best in terms of “spatial distribution, social practices and material embodiment rather than individual competence of the sociolinguistic actor” (Pennycook, 2018, p. 47). Pennycook (2018, p. 54) notices that the idea of assemblages was developed partly as “an argument against an overemphasis on the stability of things and […] languages as systems.” In this manner, an element of change in practices, or fluidity of language is always included in these assemblages.

Monolingual Habitus and the Separation of Languages in Education

The separation of different languages through and in schooling has a long history in language education (Gogolin, 1997). Typically, only one language operates as the language of instruction and administration nationwide. In most educational systems, the prevailing approach is to devote formal language arts classes to specific languages and, in the varied contexts of bilingual education, regulate how much each language is used in the teaching and learning of subject matter (see Gogolin, 1997; Piller, 2016; Gorter & Cenoz, 2017.)

On the level of curricula, the question of separation of languages is changing in Finnish educational policy documents. In the current Finnish National Core Curriculum (NCC, 2014), there is on the one hand, an emphasis on multiculturalism and language awareness, and on the other hand, passages stressing language separation (e.g. recurrent reference to parallel multilingualism). That is, cultural and linguistic diversity is conceptualized as the parallel or separate existence and learning of different languages and associated cultural identities. For instance, in the case of bilingual education the teacher is stated to have “a monolingual role in the group” (NCC, 2014, p. 154) and that “as the language of instruction changes, so does the teacher” (p. 154). In sum, on the ideological level there is change, but in practice the traditional language education policy, as described by Gorter and Cenoz (2017, p. 235), prevails: “When two or more languages are used at school, each language is usually assigned a specific time in the school timetable and it is often thought as desirable that only the target language is used in class.” It is thus clear that language pedagogies in Finland are designed to reproduce the monolingual habitus (Gogolin, 1997). In other words, in a traditional (Gorter & Cenoz, 2017, p. 235) setup like the Finnish one, education is organized institutionally in a monolingual manner, following the principle of language separation and language isolation in bi/multilingual situations (Gorter & Cenoz, 2017), even though the participants of education are often multilingual (see also Piller, 2016, p. 31).

In a similar vein, Pennycook in Posthumanist Applied Linguistics criticizes the still current mainstream communicative language teaching method:

Communicative language teaching assumes that to understand each other we should use one and only one language, thereby presupposing the notions that communication is the purpose of language, that single languages guarantee understanding and that intersubjective conformity is the goal of language education. (Pennycook, 2018, p. 104)

In other words, Pennycook finds the strive for total, diversity-free, shared and context independent understanding as the underlying reason for separating languages in education. On the top of its ontological and epistemological problems, this language ideology misses “the plurilingual nature of classroom interaction and communicative repertoires of both learners and teachers in multilingual settings” (Lin, 2013, p. 522, cited in Pennycook, 2018, p. 104). More recent theories of language include among others translanguaging, which promises a non-authoritative, genuinely multilingual, practice oriented and context sensitive approach to language teaching (see e.g. Li, 2018). However, as Pennycook (2018, p. 130) warns, translanguaging pedagogies can easily get reduced to immaterial, cognitive bilingual activities, which often get further reduced to parallel use of two languages (see Heller, 2006).

Schoolscapes and Linguistic Soundscapes

There is now a fairly established field investigating how school premises and the material conditions are perceived and interpreted as facilitating or restricting school community members’ actions or pedagogical design (e.g. Chiles & Care, 2015). Ideas by Luminen et al. (2018) on learning environments serving the pedagogical reform (e.g. co-teaching) introduced in the current Finnish national curriculum (NCC, 2014) are based on the concept of open learning spaces, but they also include insights on furniture, learning technologies and details such as the use of colours or the suitable materials for sound insulation. However, language is notably absent from the guidelines of designing learning environments. Thus, the most influential sources behind many recently built schools in Finland (cf. Konttinen, 2020) offer no guidance on how material change could provide a remedy to the problem of the monolingual habitus in education.

The concept of schoolscapes was introduced by Kara Brown (e.g. 2012) to build a theoretical lens to deal with language in materials terms. The concept of schoolscape has its history in the field of Linguistic Landscape research. Linguistic Landscape studies has begun as investigation of texts and later as study of broader visual semiotics. Schoolscape studies (see Szabó, 2015; Laihonen & Szabó, 2018) also look beyond policy and language practices and frame language and educational practices as spatialized and embodied.

The term schoolscape, similarly to Pennycook’s (2018) semiotic assemblages, draws attention to the broad notion of varied and functional uses of language(s) (or (trans)languaging, see Jakonen et al., 2018) including traditional texts, images, sounds, digital literacy, mobile screens, virtual communication and all kinds of spatial and material arrangements of interaction in the learning environment (see also Muhonen & Vaarala, Chap. 3, this volume). Our rapidly changing and highly mobile contemporary world shapes and is shaped by the linguistic ecology of public spaces including schoolscapes. It is especially this spatial and material approach that can add significant insights to how schoolscapes shared by students and school staff with different language backgrounds can shape and enhance functional multilingual practices. Envisioning and designing learning environments that meet the needs of current and future learners both inside traditional school settings and outside them ‘in the wild’ is an essential task in applied linguistics and education research searching for new models of language teaching and learning (e.g. Kajander et al., 2015).

The emerging body of schoolscape studies has asked among others, what does the environment offer for learning, and how images, multimodal texts and artefacts can be used to enhance (language) learning and communication? The topics have become very diverse (for an overview see Laihonen & Szabó, 2018) and capturing change has been among the most popular ones. For example, Brown (2018) has explored changes triggered by the introduction of a new national and regional language educational policy in Estonia. Menken et al. (2018) in turn report on a project redesigning the linguistic landscapes of twenty-three New York City schools which resulted in an impressive policy and language pedagogy impact. For example, a school acquired multilingual resources for the school library (p. 112). Such acquisitions enable learners to access demanding reading assignments, such as a novel, in their first language (p. 115). Further, some schools replaced their English-only program to bilingual instruction as a result of a chain of changes induced by the redesign of the schoolscape (p. 121).

In his attempt to break the hierarchy of senses and investigate significant aspects of languages and senses – as part of semiotic assemblages – Pennycook (2018, Chap. 4), introduces the study of different scapes such as sensory, semiotic and linguistic landscapes, smellscapes, soundscapes and skinscapes. His research program manifests a recent extension of Linguistic Landscape research reaching to other senses, such as smell, touch and taste. Following Pennycook (2018, p. 58) seeing and hearing have been considered as “higher” senses in comparison to smell, touch and taste, which have been long neglected in research. However, there have been few studies on the soundscape either. According to Scarvaglieri et al. (2013, p. 62), soundscape has been mainly studied from the perspective of acoustics. Human voices have been mentioned most often as disturbing noise, which should be controlled by the use of noise absorbing materials and other solutions (Mäkelä et al., 2018; Luminen et al., 2018). However, according to Scarvaglieri et al. (2013, p. 644): “it is linguistic action that serves as a bridge between a physical space and its soundscape and the social space in which people live and interact”. Backhaus’ study (2016), investigating the pragmatics of English railroad announcements in Japan and Scarvaglieri et al. (2013) and Pappenhagen et al.’s (2016) investigation of “oral language diversity” at different districts of Hamburg, have been among the few examinations of languages in the soundscape yet. This chapter will extend the notion of schoolscape to include the soundscape as well.

The Case of Co-located Schools in Finland

Our ongoing research on co-located schools has been carried out in co-operation with Kati Kajander, Tuuli From, Fritjof Sahlström, Riikka Alanen and Hannele Dufva. We are grateful for their input to this chapter.

Finland is officially a bilingual country. Countries with more official languages typically have educational systems based on separation by the language of instruction (see Gorter & Cenoz, 2017). In the case of Finland there is a Finnish medium and a Swedish medium educational system, and Finnish-medium and Swedish-medium institutions typically have separate campuses. This might be the only way to provide equal opportunities for education for all speakers of the official languages and to shelter the lesser used national language, Swedish, from language shift to the language spoken by a numerical majority of inhabitants, Finnish. However, as a result of local economic exigency in Finland, there are a growing number of cases – approximately 40 to date (2020) – in which two autonomously administered schools with different languages of instruction have been co-located in a shared physical space (see From, 2020.) These schools have varying degrees of shared infrastructure and interaction, though mostly not with the intent of advancing pedagogical change or multilingualism in Finnish school environments (see Helakorpi et al., 2013; From, 2020).

According to the Finnish regulations, a school can have only one language of instruction (and administration), and thus these co-located schools retain their institutional autonomy and they cannot formally merge due to the different languages of instruction (see From, 2020). Co-operation between the schools is not forbidden, and most often the co-located schools have begun to co-operate to a varying degree. For our research, co-located schools serve as accidental laboratories to examine the transformative potential of multilingual learning environments. Unlike bilingual programs, with parallel language policies and select pupil groups, co-located schools are non-choice and generated from economic concerns, making the use of educational spaces more efficient, which has been another justification behind the current trend of building open learning spaces in Finland (see Luminen et al., 2018).

Lack of Policy and Co-located Schools

According to the HS article we cited in the beginning of this chapter, there is “no law, official recommendation or a national political decision” behind the trend of building open learning environments in Finland. According to the journalist (Konttinen, 2020), in practice, architectural instructions, regulations and recommendations (cf. Luminen et al., 2018) have standardised open space schools in Finland. In the case of co-located schools there is no national policy either. Even though the phenomenon is quite widespread (ca. 40 shared campuses), the category of co-located schools has not been included in any policy documents. For example, Pyykkö (2017) in her comprehensive overview of the situation of multilingualism in Finland, does not mention co-located schools at all. There is no relevant pedagogical design in the Finnish National Curriculum either that could be connected to the tendency of co-locating schools. The only policy traceable behind the trend is the efficient and economical use of public-school space.

Even though no national policy or recommendations on co-located schools can be found, there have been political discussions, mainly among the Swedish speaking public and political circles in Finland. The debates on co-located schools have focused on questions of space (i.e. the issue of a sheltered svenska rum [Swedish space] for Swedish language) rather than pedagogical programs or curriculum. There have been certain concerns about maintaining the autonomy of Swedish medium education in Finland and on the feared negative effects the sharing of premises might have on the language development of the Swedish speaking pupils (see From, 2020). However, the discussions have reached a conclusion that the effects of co-locating depend heavily on local conditions, and thus the decision should be left to the municipal level (see Slotte-Lüttge et al., 2013). Local educational policy, even though covert, resonates with Pennycook’s criticisms of universalism (2018, p. 36). In other words, a national one size fits all policy most often fails to do justice to diversity and the local cultural and material relations.

Insights from an Investigation of a Co-located High School Campus

The empirical part of this chapter is based on the project Multilingual school – multilingual learning environment (see Szabó et al., 2018). We have been cooperating with two co-located high schools since their moving together in 2013. To generate data, we have initiated specific activities such as teacher- and student-led walking tours (see Szabó, 2015, Szabó & Troyer, 2017) on campus, and a video recording session with students with the goal of presenting the co-located character of their schools to external audiences. We have been partners in the self-reflection process of the school communities to foster the renewal of their organizational practices. Both schools are located in a town with a Swedish speaking majority population in Western Finland. In 2013, the Finnish-medium general upper secondary school (in Finnish: lukio) moved to the building of the Swedish-medium general upper secondary school (in Swedish: gymnasium). Lukio’s buildings had poor indoor air quality and the town leadership considered moving the two schools together as the most cost-effective solution. The process of moving together took place on a tight schedule, the planning focused on infrastructure, facilities and spaces, and, according to our research participants, there was no plan on pedagogical co-operation (see Szabó et al., 2018).

Changes in the Linguistic Landscape and Soundscape

In our example, a Finnish medium high school (lukio hereafter) had moved into the Swedish medium high school’s (gymnasium hereafter) premises. However, as mentioned above, no pedagogical or administrative merger of the two schools took place. Instead, they remained two autonomous schools with different languages of instruction and administration. The merger was material, but some spaces remained separated. Most importantly, the staff’s premises were constructed separately. The distance between them was also considerable: the teachers’ lounge and offices for the gymnasium remained on the top floor and the new teachers’ lounge for lukio was constructed on the bottom floor. Also, the signs for the two teachers’ lounges and different offices have remained monolingual, Swedish only for gymnasium and Finnish only for lukio. According to From’s (2020, p. 8) analysis of a similar case, the organisation of separate teachers’ lounges enables the maintenance of separate social spaces and thus separate communities.

The co-located schools sometimes have separate classrooms as well (see Helakorpi et al., 2013; From, 2020, p. 6) for both schools, but this was not the case here. The schools shared most classrooms and all the larger spaces, such as the canteen and the gym. The signs in these locations were most often in Swedish, but also bilingual signs had begun to appear.

The sign on Fig. 6.1 has Finnish above Swedish. It appeared at the door of a storage room, mainly used by the Finnish medium school, since it was attached to an arts classroom used by a lukio teacher. Since the Finnish medium high-school moved into the building of a Swedish medium high-school this sign was most likely placed by lukio in the shared space. In this manner, the Finnish medium lukio, smaller also in size, indicates attunement in (re)construction of the schoolscape through the inclusion of Swedish in their signage. The movement towards bilingual schoolscape in such top-down regulatory signs indicates a change from separate spaces to a shared social space. On other occasions, signs in Finnish have appeared next to Swedish, which could be interpreted as symbolic occupation of a space.

Fig. 6.1

Keep the door closed! in Finnish (top) and Swedish (bottom). (Photograph by Tamás Péter Szabó)

The two posters in Fig. 6.2 can be found side by side in the school canteen. The posters are a part of Vilkas campaign by two major Finnish food companies promoting Finnish food products in canteens. Thus the images display vegetables and berries grown in Finland. They have a similar text in Swedish and Finnish (Eat well, every day in Swedish and You can always eat well in Finnish). The images display slightly different meals, typically lunch and breakfast. This kind of doubling of similar messages can be described as parallel monolingualism (cf. NCC, 2014; Gorter & Cenoz, 2017) and in this context the independent but parallel use of Swedish and Finnish can be read as occupying the space by two equal educational institutions. At the same time, the canteen was one of the spaces, which was shared by the schools both in principle and in everyday practice.

Fig. 6.2

Eat well, every day in Swedish and You can always eat well in Finnish. (Photograph by Tamás Péter Szabó)

The posters contribute a multimodal message of what “eating well always/every day” could mean in the Finnish school canteen context, thus adding up an element of Finnish food and (parallel) bilingualism to the semiotic assemblage of a shared campus. In Finland, all high-school students are entitled to a free lunch, and consequently there are few commercial advertisements in these public-school canteens. These quasi-public posters thus seem to transmit an ideology of Finnish food as “better”, that is, safe, healthy and tasty food. In general, such bilingual, but parallel visual schoolscape elements can already be seen to undermine the basic spatial ideology (see From, 2020) of keeping Finland’s two national languages administratively separate as languages of education.

Looking at less institutional or top-down controlled signs and spaces, more multilingualism pops up. One example of a bottom-up schoolscape was photographed in a room called Calmer. It displayed student agency in two ways: it had been designed by a student and it was used and controlled by students.

The Calmer is a room, which was designed by a gymnasium student for an art project. It is a small room with some pillows and a blackboard. It has functioned as a place where anybody could retreat for a moment. The blackboard on Fig. 6.3 was placed in the room. Blackboards are typical objects in the school semiotic assemblages. In traditional frontal teaching practice, teachers write on a blackboard and students typically copy the texts. In this case, the writings on the blackboard display the agency of students and convey less formal, even graffiti type messages.

Fig. 6.3

Blackboard in the Calmer room. (Photograph by Tamás Péter Szabó)

On the calmer blackboard, there were writings in Swedish, Finnish and English, while most of the writing appeared to be in Swedish. However, there was no grouping of texts according to language nor parallel texts as in the previous top-down institutional signs. The blackboard indicates a spontaneous direction of change, creating a community across the language border indicated in the institutional schoolscape.

So far, we have investigated the visual dimension of languages in the learning environment. Next, we move on to the investigation of the soundscape. On the soundscape we did not gather systematic data due to lack of permits (cf. Scarvaglieri et al., 2013). We did, however, observe the soundscape during our fieldwork, and it was a frequent topic in the (walking) interviews (see Szabó et al., 2018). It seemed that the soundscape often displayed parallel monolingualism in a similar manner as the texts, but there were certain meeting places where a multilingual soundscape appeared as a rule, such as the canteen.

To begin with classrooms, the students had the possibility to take courses from the other high school. Only few students used this resource. Institutionally shared courses were organized in foreign languages (German, French and Russian), where there would not have been enough students to organize the courses separately (see Szabó et al., 2018). In the discussions, the language choice during such shared foreign language classes was mentioned as very flexible.

Various school festivities were the most often mentioned multilingual soundscapes. They were shared events, such as Christmas parties and (Finland) Swedish and Finnish traditional events, where the other school was invited as a guest. In the shared events, the program was in both languages, in some cases the Swedish medium students performed in Finnish and vice versa. The events are examples of planned and even promoted multilingual new soundscapes as an outcome of co-locating the schools.

In the next example, we explore an everyday meeting place, the student’s café, where a multilingual soundscape emerges in a less planned and structured way. The following excerpt was recorded during a walking interview. In the course of the interview, a daily meeting place and a shared project for the students of the two high schools is discussed between a student (S) and a researcher (R) in Finnish. The interviewee is a female student of lukio, she uses us and them to refer to students of lukio (us) and gymnasium (them).

Excerpt 6.1 Students’ Café (Original Interview in Finnish) [R = researcher, S = student]

• S: this is the students’ café

• R: yeah

• S: the students’ union runs it and it is open two breaks a day usually it is shared with the Swedish speaking so: that Monday Wednesday Friday is theirs and

• R: yeah

• S: Tuesday Thursday ours. it changes always in midterm.

• R: are ya working there yourself

• S: yea I do I am also here

• R: uhhuh (.) how about (.) are the customers always the same though?

• S: pretty much. Mostly people want coffee so-

• R: and what you serve is the same

• S: yeah (.) the Swedish speaking though might have more money they have then cash machines and such- otherwise it’s pretty same we serve, there is coffee and-

• R: what about do you speak Finnish when you are selling and Swedish when they are or what

• S: well yeah, if people can speak Swedish that’s the Finnish speaking they do speak with them but there aren’t much communication going on it’s more like just one coffee and-

• R: that’s it

• S: yeah

• R: what about the tables here do you sit mixed here?

• S: yeah people do a lot of homework here in free periods and sit around during breaks

• R: yeah ok

• S: there is no-

• R: are the Finnish speaking and Swedish speaking mixed [here]?

• S: [yea they are] it connects a lot that we come to the same school many friends are connected Finnish and Swedish speaking-

The student recycles a typical historical and social (see Meinander, 2016) stereotype (‘Swedish speakers are richer’) circulated among the Finnish speaking population: “the Swedish speaking … have more money”. This leads to a further material difference in the student café when it is run by the Swedish medium students: “they have cash machines”. In this manner, the student describes the semiotic assemblage (Pennycook, 2018) of the café. She also sets a contrast based on some nuances between gymnasium and lukio running the café in a somewhat stereotypical way; that is, constructing different social identities and thus slightly different assemblages through material means and objects, such as “having more money” or the “cash machine”. It is remarkable that, in the view of the student, language or communication seem to play very little role in the café: “it’s more like just one coffee”.

The first function of the tables in the café seems to be study: “people do a lot of homework here”. However, the answer to the question regarding whether the different student bodies mingle in this space (“are the Finnish speaking and Swedish speaking mixed [here]?”) asserts that “coming” to the same school connects “Finnish and Swedish speaking” students, among which there are “many friends”. It is such meeting spaces as the student café, during breaks, where the students can hear other language(s) spoken and used every day. It is also mentioned, by this lukio student, that the Finnish speaking will provide service in the café in Swedish “if they can speak it”. This is a reference to the common Finnish-Swedish bilingual repertoire of local people, and it sets a contrast with the otherwise systematic discursive separation of Finnish and Swedish speakers which is re-constructed in the interview by both the interviewer (e.g. “Finnish speaking and Swedish speaking mixed”) and the interviewee (e.g. “us” and “them”). In sum, it appears that wherever there is bottom-up shared space, the students mingle and fluid bilingualism (aka translanguaging) will appear. Furthermore, different objects, such as furniture (tables and chairs, sofas) seem to facilitate such meetings, and material objects (coffee, cash-machines, blackboards etc.) have agency or ‘thing power’ (Pennycook, 2018, p. 53) in shaping the communication in these spaces or discourses about them.

In the classrooms, the national monolingual language of instruction policy dominates (i.e., use either Finnish or Swedish but not both). As mentioned above, this policy is undermined regularly only during the shared less popular foreign language classes (e.g. Russian, French and German) in this co-located school campus (see Szabó et al., 2018). The “breaks” and “free-time” are mentioned as time slots when the students use shared spaces of uncontrolled communication and (potentially) fluid multilingual soundscape. Such spaces, and the fluid multilingual practices there have emerged beyond any curriculum or top-down policy, due to the spontaneous need to occupy a space and use material objects without paying attention to the language barrier (cf. From, 2020). All this has emerged because the two student bodies now share a building. The teachers’ lounges, as mentioned above, were kept separate. This is in line with our general observation (see Szabó et al., 2018) that there is a clear difference between the teachers and students in their practices, policies and views about languages in education and how they have changed since moving together.

Language Ideological Changes Among the Students

In this part, we will briefly outline some discourses and views of the students and teachers with regards to the new developments of the roles and functions of language(s) in the semiotic assemblages of learning environments. How has the co-locating changed not only the schoolscapes but also the views and discourses about spatial language repertoires in education? According to a series of online questionnaire surveys among students conducted in 2013, 2014 and 2015 (Kajander et al., 2015), students had a mainly positive view of the change, although they reported that their use of languages, including Finnish, Swedish and English, was more diverse and flexible in out-of-school contexts than in the school. In 2016, when we visited the schools, there was a growing optimism with regards to the future of the co-located schools. For example, during walking interviews, students repeatedly claimed that being co-located is a resource, which could prove beneficial already for pupils in basic education. Furthermore, the students envisioned a school where there would be no single language of instruction. In the following walking interview, three gymnasium students discuss whether a future school would be co-located or have separate buildings.

Excerpt 6.2 Win-win (Originally in Swedish) [R = researcher, S = student]

• R: if you think about both schools in the future, how will it be, will there be two separate buildings [or?]

• S1: [I ho]pe n[ot]

• S2: [no]

• S1: [I hope not]

• S2: [If I can have] a word no

• S1: mm mm

• S2: It is nice and it works

• S3: It is unnecessary to have two

• S2: um there is that too

• S1: I think it is cheaper to have only one building than several: mm mm I see- I see only advantages so it- it is a win-win situation…

In this excerpt, the three students unanimously state that a co-located school is better than a single school per campus arrangement. The expressions “I hope” and “if I can have a word” indicate that the students do not have a say in the decisions on school buildings. That is, the semiotic assemblage in schools (schoolscape) is mostly the result of top-down, central (municipal or national) decisions (see also Brooks & Waters, 2018, p. 33). However, the comment “it is cheaper to have only one building” indicates that the official justification for moving together has been internalized by a student. There are also more emotional responses, “it is nice”, and an overall conclusion that there are only advantages in having two schools in one building (“it is a win-win situation”). In this way, the students give preference to a shared campus and larger social space with more diverse and vibrant semiotic assemblages (Pennycook, 2018, p. 52.). Separate spaces, in turn, are deemed “unnecessary” by one of the students. The language dimensions, such as the lack of protection for a minority language in a shared space, were not mentioned in this discussion.

Language Ideological Changes Among the Teachers

Both principals stated in the interviews that the teachers were not in favour of co-locating the two schools when it happened. From the teachers’ perspective, the change was deemed as a significant one. According to Brooke and Waters (2018, p. 33), teachers most likely resist any large scale transformation of the learning environment and often prefer incremental reforms and continuity. In comparison to the students, there were many explicit and transparent discourses about language in the teacher interviews and language was mentioned as the major challenge in co-location. Teachers’ professional identity was often described as fundamentally monolingual (cf. From, 2020).

In this bilingual environment, a teacher could still work monolingually, since teachers were not expected to use any other language than the language of instruction at work. As one teacher at lukio stated in an interview about his memories of change in the linguistic environment from the time before becoming co-located: “this work in Finnish-speaking schools was like, well it was in Finnish with Finnish speaking people and Finnish-speaking parents in, and so on, you know, it was the Finnish language”. In this manner, the teacher is aware that in an otherwise bilingual, but Swedish dominant city, the Finnish school was a Finnish speaking oasis (see Heller, 2006, p. 114 for the idea of a school as a linguistic and cultural oasis), that is, a monolingual Finnish social space and community (cf. From, 2020, p. 9).

In a similar manner, the principal of the gymnasium at the time of the moving together stressed that the gymnasium was a monolingual Swedish language environment before the co-location:

and I think that we should respect it, that they have been employed in a Swedish school, their work is entirely Swedish-speaking. Ah, then we have to say okay, that’s the way. and we have also expressed it, mmhm, especially at the beginning, very clearly that you do not have to speak Finnish.

In sum, through the change of moving together into a shared building the professional identity of high-school teachers as monolingual professionals was made explicit. The fears were further exacerbated for example so that teachers were stressed about having to use the other language (Finnish or Swedish) with colleagues from the other high school. This could also have motivated the construction of separate teachers’ lounges and the big distance between them, lukio on the bottom floor and gymnasium on the top floor. In this way, separate social spaces were created and maintained to avoid linguistic diversity in the language ecology of the teachers (cf. Pennycook, 2018, p. 134).

In 2016, after several years have passed since the co-locating, teachers’ views have changed and the fears and presumptions about the change had turned to acceptance and among some to a curiosity and openness towards cooperation across the language border. Now, also some shared staff meetings have been organized to coordinate co-operation, creating a regular meeting place for teachers as well.

Mainly the principals have become to stress the discourse of having two schools in the same building as a resource for both schools. In an interview in 2016, one of them concluded:

and really it’s because we now had time for pedagogical planning. We can now plan together. and you know teaching and, let’s say, use shared resources. In both sides teachers have really good qualities which you notice, if you keep your eyes open so ((laughs)), so it’s worth taking the whole building into use picking the good sides of what there is.

In this manner, the principal is seeing the larger diversity of teachers as a pedagogical asset. The principal also suggests “taking the whole building into use”, which can be interpreted as a maximal sharing of the material environment, instead of maintaining separate spaces. That is, resources and agency are understood as both human and material (cf. Pennycook, 2018, p. 141).

Conclusions

Our analysis of a co-located campus as collection of “local language practices and assemblages” and “the ways in which people, politics, place, economics, policy and things come together” (Pennycook, 2018, p. 142), indicates that a change in the material learning environment may promote linguistic diversity in education in a more forceful manner than structured, curriculum-based forms of designed multilingualism.

The new, more vibrant and diverse semiotic assemblage of a co-located Swedish and Finnish medium high school analyzed in this chapter was in general becoming more multilingual and flexible. The schoolscape contained bilingual top-down signs, indicating that some spaces, such as the canteen or the student café, were actively shared by two institutions with different languages of instruction. Top-down signs and teachers’ language ideologies indicated a slow, gradual and cautious transformation, from the monolingual habitus and practices in the schoolscape as well as communicative practices and traditional educational language ideologies, towards an acceptance of bilingualism and opening up of spaces for community level bilingual activities (Pennycook, 2018, p. 130). According to the teacher interviews, bilingualism did not include the professional level. On a professional level, the traditional idea (see Gorter & Cenoz, 2017) of the monolingual role model of a teacher as mentioned in the Finnish National Core Curriculum (2014, p. 154), holds sway.

Bottom-up signs in a space controlled by students display fluid linguistic diversity, in other words, translanguaging practices. One token of transformation of spaces and typically normative objects to ‘common’ use (Pennycook, 2018, p. 139) can be seen in the emerging translanguaging practices documented on the blackboard of the Calmer (see Fig. 6.3), where no central authority appears to control the language practices (Pennycook, 2018, p. 139).

The student interviews in turn convinced us that the monolingual habitus in education can change already through a new multilingual soundscape, where the school community hears many languages every day. The shared, regular meeting places, such as the student café, were designed and transformed by the students and the material objects (e.g. furniture) and actions (e.g. buying coffee), where language as communication or as competences were argued to play a marginal role. This indicates that linguistic diversity is by no means conceptualized as a problem for the students unlike it was by the teachers in interviews.

The semiotic assemblages of bottom-up meeting places were not designed according to the language of instruction (such as classrooms) or separated ownership and location according to the institution (such as teachers lounges). Thus, they appeared to be more open to ‘occupation’ (Pennycook, 2018, p. 141) of the resources offered by the space and material objects there. This resulted in undermining the monolingual habitus of the national core curriculum and teacher profession, both defined by traditional norms of language use in education.