No abstract

Educational institutions have a responsibility to ensure that all children receive care and equal possibilities for development, independent of their linguistic and cultural background. However, there is little knowledge about how kindergartens ensure a welcoming and inspiring place for both transnational migrants, Indigenous children, and children from the majority population. Through a semiotic landscape analysis from two kindergartens in Northern Norway, this article contributes to this knowledge gap. Our starting point is that educational spaces are social, cultural, and political places. Applying a Bakhtinian perspective on semiotic landscapes as dialogues, the analysis focuses on two discourses. The first concerns diversity as an individual or shared value, and the second concerns balancing the ordinary and the exotic. We find that diversity related to transnational migration seems to be more integrated into the semiotic landscape, while the minoritised Indigenous Sámi people is stereotypically represented in kindergartens.

This article explores the construction of multilingualism in the semiotic landscapes of two kindergartens, one in Norway and one in Germany. Semiotic landscape is here understood as the visual linguistic environment, including various semiotic resources, such as texts, symbols, drawings or pictures. In kindergarten, semiotic landscapes construct and transform views on languages and multilingualism as well as pedagogical aims. The data material for this study was collected during ethnographic fieldwork. Using a nexus analytic approach the paper explores which discourses on multilingualism are constructed in the semiotic landscapes, whose voices are represented and which interaction order they involve. While the semiotic landscape in the Norwegian kindergarten constructs the kindergarten as multilingual, the semiotic landscape in the German kindergarten points to a predominance of German. However, a closer analysis also shows practices that erase linguistic diversity and devalue multilingualism in the Norwegian kindergarten and practices that encourage multilingualism in the German kindergarten. An important part of this is the oral communication practice which at times contrasts the overall discourses in the semiotic landscapes.