Schoolscapes: Participation in Educational Spaces

Schoolscape research is a relatively recent strand of linguistic landscape research (Brown, 2005). It offers valuable insight into the linguistic landscapes of education. It combines sociolinguistics and landscape research in an educational context. This presentation addresses the role of schoolscape participants, who are not only shaped by the schoolscapes as recipients, but who also shape the schoolscapes as authors.

I have created a schoolscape specific data annotation scheme based on Barni and Bagna (2009). It is a complex multimodal data annotation scheme, which can be used to address the role of schoolscape participants as both the audience and the authors of schoolscapes. It addresses salience of languages (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996; Scollon & Wong Scollon, 2003), translation and code-mixing (Reh, 2004) and spatial features (Barni & Bagna, 2009). It also reflects the different functions of the items present in schoolscapes: Bourdieusard power relations, Boudonian good reasons, Goffmanian presentation of self and collective identity (Ben-Rafael, Shohamy & Barni, 2010). This data driven approach makes it possible to examine different aspects and patterns of schoolscapes from large sets of data, for example, by participant, by educational stage or by space. The findings provide extensive information on educational spaces and on the active role of their participants.

A schoolscape is not a mere physical space where education takes place. It is a process, not a state. It is a reflection of the top-down socialization processes of education and language policies that shape its participants, as well as a reflection of the various bottom-up processes that shape it. In other words, the schoolscape participants have an active role in shaping the ordering of reality that in turn shapes them. A schoolscape is a process in which the participants have an important role influencing the social situation they are involved.