490049 PS Communication Spaces (2024W)

Goals:
By the end of this seminar, participants will:
- understand the multilingual turn in education and be familiar with central concepts related to it;
- deconstruct monolingual bias and develop a critical and reflective point of view from a multilingual perspective;
- have reflected about their own linguistic identities and their positions while multilingual subjects;
- 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;
- identify challenges in relation to multilingualism in the school 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 and put their own linguistic identities into question 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 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. 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.

An important aspect of this seminar is the connection to practical contexts. Therefore, this seminar happens in cooperation with the UniClub. The UniClub is a learning support program for young people between the ages of 13 and 20 with refugee and migration experience on their way to their Matura. As part of the course, learning support for students in the UniClub is planned to the extent of 1 ECTS. More information on the learning support formats and registration for the UniClub is available at https://uniclub.at/unterstuetzen/

Methods:
Traditional lecture will be held in combination with communicative methods, such as plenary discussion, group work, peer feedback and presentation.
The seminar will be held mainly in English, but materials in other languages (e.g. German) will be available and the use of other languages in the discussions is also welcome in class. Written assessment will be accepted in English, German, Spanish, Portuguese or French.