Plenaristas

Tamás Péter Szabó

Adjunct Professor, University of Jyväskylä, Finland

Tamás Péter Szabó is Senior Lecturer of Multilingualism and the Internationalization of Teacher Education in the Department of Teacher Education as well as Adjunct Professor of Linguistic Landscape Studies in the Centre for Applied Language Studies at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. He teaches courses on multilingual pedagogies, translanguaging, linguistic landscapes, creativity and qualitative research methods.

In the context of FORTHEM Alliance, Tamás serves as Co-chair of the Labs and Co-creation Mission Board. Since 2019, he has been Alliance level Coordinator for FORTHEM Multilingualism in School and Higher Education Lab. He has been co-chair the Forum of European Universities (FOREU) Subgroup Multilingualism since 2020.

Tamás studies and develops multilingual pedagogies and the internationalization of teacher education, with a special regard to language ideologies and the agency of learners and teachers. He applies a linguistic landscape approach to learning environments and develops ethnographic research methods. Learners, teachers, policy makers and education developers make use of his results.

Abstract: Discussing multilingual learning environments in research-based teacher education

In this contribution I discuss a topical trend of multilingual learning environments research in the light of international teacher education that prepares to work with linguistically diverse learners’ groups (cf., Wernicke et al. eds., 2021). Such teacher education follows the recommendations of the European Commission (2019) that calls its member states to build language aware and multilingual pedagogies and embrace a holistic approach to the diverse literacy practices of learners.

Based on a narrative review of 161 papers (Szabó and Brown 2023), I first outline a theoretical framework of learning environment research from a linguistic landscape approach. This framework demonstrates how the concept of schoolscape, i.e., the linguistic landscape of educational spaces, enables educators to conceptualize learning and teaching as multisensory, multimodal, materialized, embodied, spatialized and cognitively distributed (e.g., Laihonen and Szabó 2018, 2023; Malinowski, Maxim and Dubreil 2020, 2023; Krompák, Fernández-Mallat and Meyer 2022; Gorter and Cenoz 2023).

Showing practical applications of the outlined framework, I take examples from a recently developed course “Multilingual Learning Environments” (Szabó, Moate and From 2022) that helps future experts build their theoretical understanding and methodological repertoire to co-create learning environments that foster a wide range of literacy practices. This course was prepared between 2020 and 2022 by the FORTHEM Multilingualism in School and Higher Education Lab, a transnational multi-stakeholder expert network of students, academics and academia-external professionals. FORTHEM being one of the first generation European University Alliances, the lessons learned from the recent three iterations of the course shed light on several advantages and some challenges of developing and carrying out international teacher education courses in the context of the integration of the European Higher Education Area. More specifically, I draw conclusion and further avenues for research from the course work of 46 students who voluntarily participate in the follow-up study on this course. Doing so, I focus on students’ work on language educational policies fostering multilingualism.

Keywords: teacher education; integration of European higher education; language aware and multilingual pedagogy; schoolscape; follow-up research

References

European Commission (2019). Council Recommendation on Improving the Teaching and Learning of Languages. Publications Office of the EU. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:32019H0605(02)&from=EN (Accessed: 18 January 2024).
Gorter, D. and Cenoz, J. (2023). A Panorama of Linguistic Landscape Studies. Multilingual Matters.
Krompák, E., Fernández-Mallat, V. and Meyer, S. (2022). The Symbolic Value of Educationscapes – Expanding the Intersections Between Linguistic Landscape and Education. In: Linguistic Landscapes and Educational Spaces (eds. E. Krompák, V. Fernández-Mallat and S. Meyer), 1–28. Multilingual Matters.
Laihonen, P. and Szabó, T. P. (2018). Studying the visual and material dimensions of education and learning. Linguistics and Education, 44: 1–3.
Laihonen, P. and Szabó, T. P. (2023). Material Change: The Case of Co-located Schools. In: New Materialist Explorations into Language Education (eds. J. Ennser-Kananen, T. Saarinen), 93–110. Springer.
Malinowski, D., Maxim, H. H. and Dubreil, S. (2020). Introduction. In: Language Teaching in the Linguistic Landscape (eds. D. Malinowski, H. H. Maxim, S. Dubreil), 1–13. Springer.
Malinowski, D., Maxim, H. H. and Dubreil, S. (2023). Introduction: Spatializing Language Studies in the Linguistic Landscape. In: Spatializing Language Studies (eds. S. Dubreil, D. Malinowski, H. H. Maxim), 1–17. Springer.
Szabó, T. P. and Brown, K. D. (2023). Transitions and border crossings in schoolscape studies: towards a comprehensive understanding of the linguistic landscape of education. Paper presented at the FERA Conference on Education, Åbo Akademi University, 24 November 2023.
Szabó, T. P., Moate, J. and From, T. (2022). The course ‘Multilingual Learning Environments’ welcomes its first students in this semester. FORTHEM Blog. Available at: https://www.forthem-alliance.eu/blog/the-course-multilingual-learning-environments-welcomes-its-first-students-in-this-semester (Accessed: 18 January 2024).