About this project

How is the learning and instruction of languages (like Swedish, Swedish as a 2nd language, home-language, foreign language, bilingualism, Swedish Sign Language (SSL), literacy, etc) organised within institutionalised educational settings? How are multilingual and multicultural experiences and competencies of pupils and teachers evoked and operationlised in communication-practices within language focused learning and instructional settings? In what ways do pupils and teachers understand and make use of multilingual and multicultural experiences for democratic, meaning making processes within education? These are the didactically oriented research questions that are posed in the LISA-21 empirical project ?Language and Identities in School Arenas. Communication-practices in plurilingual and multicultural settings at the beginning of the 21st century?. The project brings together traditionally separate research fields and knowledge domains through specific research questions and thereby aims to challenge the common prescriptive understanding that, for instance, normalizes current ways of categorizing pupil groups. It is argued that such categorizing needs to be critically and empirically examined in the linguistic and culturally pluralistic Swedish school that is part of an increasing local-globalized society. Taking sociocultural and postcolonial theoretical frameworks as points of departure and taking research conducted within different fields such as communication-culture-identities and ethnicity research, language related educational research and the academic areas known as Disability Studies and Deaf Studies, the project aims to simultaneously study different language focused learning environments in secondary schools. The following types of secondary school environments constitute the empirically sites in the ongoing project: a Swedish school for the deaf, an English profile school and a multicultural school. A pluralistic point of departure also denotes the methodologies in the fieldwork in project LISA-21. These include ethnography, deep interviews and text-analysis. In other words, the project aims to create new empirical, analytical and theoretical intersections and the results that will emanate here, it is hoped, will contribute towards more refined knowledge about the similarities, differences and complexities of linguistic and culturally plu

Researchers

Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta