In this year’s NordAnd conference, Lomeu Gomes, Pesch, and Sollid organised the panel “Transition as in-between space in multilingual educational settings”. The panel showcased original results of the ongoing project entitled “Multilingualism in Transitions” (2021-2026). Specifically, the individual contributions offered nuanced insights into the ways in which language hierarchies are instantiated and negotiated in practice, in different formal and informal educational contexts. These contexts include early childhood education (Pesch and Hiss), primary school (Kosner), secondary school (Johnsen, Lomeu Gomes), and the transition after secondary school into multiple paths students might choose (Sollid).

Professor Joke Dewilde (University of Oslo) was an invited discussant and shared insightful comments and questions that initiated fruitful discussions touching on notions of contact zones (Pratt 1991) and pedagogical potential (De Wilde 2022), which helped us to thinking through transitions as in-between space in multilingual educational settings. Below, we present a summary of each contribution of the panel.

Coming, leaving, playing, resting, and making it your own: How children and staff create a dynamic multilingual space in the kindergarten’s wardrobe (Pesch and Hiss)

In our contribution, we explored the wardrobe of a mainly Norwegian speaking kindergarten as in-between space for multilingual children’s negotiations of educational rules and language policies. We furthermore discussed the emergence of spatiotemporal and internalized checkpoints (Milani & Levon 2024) in the semiotic landscape, and encounters of parents’, teachers’ and children’s language choices. We argued that these checkpoints emerge as dynamic and open to change.

Language and (un)belonging in the schoolscapes of language introduction classes (Johnsen)

Drawing on fieldwork observations and interviews with pupils in an introductory class, the presentation presented preliminary analyses of negotiations of language, space and belonging in school spaces and the different language ideologies circulating in the school spaces. In these spaces, multilingualism may be valued as a resource and used in artful expressions in the linguistic landscape and are also drawn upon in social processes of differentiation that create (un)belonging

Transition space: dilemmas, negotiations and choices in minority language learning in Norway (Kosner)

The presentation focused on micro-level transitions (Pedersen et al. 2023) between mainstream classes and the classes of Sámi, Kven or Finnish as a second language in Norwegian primary schools. In such moments, the classes coincide with each other, and choices must be made regarding pupils’ participation in time and space to bridge the dilemma gap created by educational policies. I showed how the (non)movements are made, and what consequences the different choices have for the pupils on shorter and longer timescales.

Navigating ideological and implementational spaces in upper secondary education in Northern Norway (Lomeu Gomes)

This presentation focused on the home-school intersection as a space for language learning and family making. Drawing on entries of a multimodal digital language journal authored by the focal participant – a 16-year-old student with transnational background – and interview data with him and with his mother has yielded a better understanding of how language hiearchies are structured in Norwegian society, the ways in which family membrers strategically deploy their multilingual linguistic repertoires as they go about their daily lives, and the family as a socialisation space that offers support and solidarity, countering broader societal structures that (re)produce inequality. It was argued that theorising the language practices of this family through a ubuntu translanguaging (Makalela 2016) lens may help us to reframe our understandings of language in formal and informal contexts of language learning and teaching.

Sámi as second language - a curricular space for language reclamation (Sollid)

In my talk I explored the subject Sámi as second language as a multidimensional curricular space for language reclamation based on discourse ethnographic data. Inspired by Line Møller Daugaard (2015) I suggested that we can conceive of Sámi as second language as a curricular limbo. Sámi as second language has structural limitations within the Norwegian school system, and at the same time it is a space with a transformative potential to change the colonial power structures and for students to claim the right to learn and speak Sámi.