490049 PS Communication Spaces (2022W)

Goals:
By the end of this seminar, participants will:
- understand the multilingual turn in education and be familiar with central concepts related to it;
- get to know the point of view from different school actors (e.g. teachers, school students and parents) in relation to their experiences in super-diverse school environments;
- deconstruct monolingual bias and develop a critical point of view from a multilingual perspective;
- identify challenges in relation to multilingualism in the school settings (from the perspective of school students, teachers and parents) and propose solutions to turn them into resources in the school practice;
- get to know different language sensitive approaches and methods of multilingual pedagogy, and use them for designing own classes in all different school subjects.

Content:
In this seminar, students from all subject-teaching degrees are invited to challenge their perspectives in relation to multilingualism in order to prepare themselves to work responsively in culturally and linguistically diverse school settings. The seminar is divided into three parts that are interconnected and overlap: 1. learning theoretical concepts, 2. understanding the school context, and 3. putting in practice. In the first part, participants will come across central concepts and discourses on migrant-related multilingualism in education and identity construction. In the second part, the multilingual school context will be addressed from different points of view, such as experiences from teachers in practice, multilingual school students, and multilingual parents/families. The third part will be dedicated to learning methods of multilingual pedagogy and language sensitive approaches to be applied to the teaching practice inside and outside of the classroom, as well as deal with (so-called) challenges in the school space in relation to multilingualism. In all of these moments, participants will be driven to reflect upon and deconstruct conceptualizations based on monolingual bias and build a critical point of view from a multilingual perspective. Although the European context will be in focus, examples from other multilingual settings (e.g. from the Global South) will also be considered in order to broaden participants’ horizon. Besides the focus on the school context, the topic of the seminar also aims to provoke reflections on participants’ own multilingual identity and teaching practice.
As the connection to practical contexts is an important aspect of this course, in addition to classroom work, this seminar offers participants the opportunity to build real practical experience by supporting multilingual school students at the UniClub, a project of the University of Vienna.

Methods:
Traditional lecture will be held in combination with communicative methods, such as plenary discussion, group work and presentation. The invitation of specialist guests to enrich the discussions are planned.
The seminar will be held mainly in English, but other language resources will be available and are welcome in the class.