Schoolscapes for Linguistic Equity: Exploring the Impact of Language Contact on Identity representation in Educational contexts

The late 1980s marked an exponential increase in immigrant flows to Italy, enriching the already varied national linguistic landscape (Chini, 2011). The linguistic space, which has only recently seen a consolidated common language, is now experiencing exogenous neoplurilinguism (Vedovelli, 2015). This polymorphous landscape, characterised by public places, such as schools, which promote multiple and diverse coexistences, on one hand entails the breaking down of geographical and cultural barriers, and on the other the erection of new social and linguistic obstacles. Obstacles that limit the exercise of the right to receive a fair education, which not only guarantees equal opportunities for all, as recommended by the 2030 Agenda (UN, 2015), but which also knows how to respect the linguistic diversity of all, a founding principle of a multilingual Europe (Galante et al., 2022). However, schools fall short of these recommendations, proposing practices anchored in traditional pedagogical approaches (Dewey, 1916) and promoting unchanging schoolscapes that fail to represent language contact. The schoolscape construct (Bagna, Bellinzona, 2022; Carbonara, Scibetta, 2022), which attempts to understand the uses behind multiple forms of languages and the as they are physically displayed in educational contexts, could support the construction of new linguistic identity, that arise from language contact. In this regard, children, if correctly guided, can become aware of their own experience and make the most of it, stimulating the maturation of their relational abilities, the search for their own identity in the affective and social dimension, and the cognitive decentralisation of their own experience (Brasca, Zambelli, 1992). Inserted in the pragmatic paradigm (Peirce, 2003), the study intends, on one hand to investigate, from an ethnolinguistic perspective (Iannaccaro, 2018), children's different representations of belonging and to understand how language contact has modified their identity; on the other, according to a pedagogical approach, it wants to understand which educational strategies can foster linguistic-cultural richness in school contexts in order to guarantee a representative schoolscape for all. Through a Professional Development Action Research methodology (Zecca, 2018) 12 teachers and 111 children (6-8 years old) from one primary school in Milan were involved. A content analysis (Tipaldo, 2007) identifies recurring themes related to children's perceptions of linguistic and cultural diversity and challenges teachers face in fostering inclusive schoolscapes. While children show a strong potential for linguistic flexibility, these capacities are underutilized due to rigid, monolingual educational practices. Teachers, despite willing to embrace multilingualism, expressed difficulties in navigating language contact in classroom.