Building participatory video projects for multilingual schoolscapes

Abstract

Educational actions that establish connections between language, culture, and power construct ideologies of languages and their speakers. The study of linguistic landscapes in education (i.e. schoolscapes) offers a lens to analyse the material manifestation of such ideologies. As a venture in participatory research, this paper investigates how young learners construct and represent their schoolscapes while documenting and interpreting them in video projects. We bring data from projects carried out with the Moldavian Csángó in Romania as well as Finnish and Swedish speaking Finns in Finland. In both cases, young people learning in multilingual educational contexts were engaged in video projects. In this way, the authors have introduced participants’ self-recorded videos to their research practice to gain materials which are less influenced by researchers. We present examples of traditional, i.e. one-angle-at-a-time and 360° videography projects and discuss their suitability for collaborative projects that investigate multilingual practices, including the use of minoritised languages. The qualitative analysis of grassroots literacy and oral interaction in the videos indicates that participatory projects offer considerable advances to schoolscape research in collaboratively studying the moment-to-moment nature of language practices and the related language ideologies in and across multilingual spaces.