Co-designing a sense of belonging: Practical strategies for the transformation of the schoolscape in primary school

Although intimately linked to the concept of place, context and location, belonging encompasses cultural and social aspects that connect people, creating a sense of common bonding that is not purely physical (Vallentin, 2017). This view conceives belonging as a place characterized by relationships and emotions, where multiple and complex belongings are developed, negotiated in each person's daily life. Public places, such as schools, are catalysts of multiple and diverse belongings, places that welcome both children with varied linguistic repertoires and their families. However, even though today’s schools are characterized by a constant increase of pupils with a migratory background (Iannaccaro, Fiorentini, 2021), in Italy an increase of 4.9% of children with a diverse linguistic background is observed, the school linguistic space and representation, the so-called schoolscape (Brown, 2012), does not reflect this diversity, or is limited to the display of welcome posters in different languages, but without involving the community itself. Set within a transformative paradigm (Kawulich, 2012), which draws on the pedagogy of the oppressed (Freire, 1970) and Social Justice, the research aims to present some best practices of schoolscape transformation through teacher training and the development of reflective thinking (Dewey, 1910), which involves the intertwining of pragmatic experience with critical thinking. Specifically, the qualitative study (Creswell, 2003) adopted a Professional Development Action Research methodology (Zecca, 2018), was conducted in the San Siro neighbourhood of Milan, an area marked by 38% of families with a migrant background, and involved 13 teachers of one Primary School and their classes. The teachers were involved in a 6-month training course on translanguaging, during which they took part in 7 training meetings and two focus groups (pre-intervention and post-intervention) and kept track of their classroom experiments through the practitioners’ diary and visual documentation (photos and videos). Through the thematic analysis, it is possible to observe two levels of schoolscape change due to the change in teachers' perspectives. A first level is marked by the Physical Change of the context through the multilingual bulletin boards, which present didactical experiences in the languages of the classroom. The second level is Relational Change, which has seen the involvement of migrant families indirectly through the sharing of multilingual documentation and directly through classroom invitations to teach about their own culture and language. In conclusion, the themes provide not only a theoretical understanding of language and cultural representation, but offer practical input for effective schoolscape transformation.