Mainstream education maintains a monolingual habitus, constraining language learning and ignoring the increased multilingual practices in societies. Countries with multiple official languages typically have educational systems based on separation by the language of instruction, e.g. one Finnish medium and one Swedish medium for Finland. However, as a result of local economic exigency, there are a growing number of cases in which two autonomously administered schools with different languages of instruction have been co-located in a shared physical space. Unlike bilingual programs, with intentional, parallel language policies and selective pupil groups, co-located schools are non-choice and generated from economic concerns. These co-located schools serve as ‘accidental’ laboratories to examine the transformative potential of multilingual learning environments and bottom-up multilingual encounters. The emerging multilingual practices in such schools have been under-researched, even though their contribution to international theorizing in applied linguistics and educational research has significant potential. Our consortium seeks to deepen our understanding of co-located educational contexts in Finland and to gain a comparative perspective by including the multilingual province of South Tyrol, Italy. Our teams consist of researchers who have previously studied co-located schools in Finland, joined by Eurac Research as an external partner seated in Bozen/Bolzano. We ask: What is the transformative potential of the learning environments in co-located schools for enhancing multilingual interaction? First, we explore how co-located schools enhance emerging functional multilingual interaction. Secondly, we analyse how they support education that is inclusive and supportive of increasing cultural and linguistic diversity. Thirdly, we compare how co-located schools enact similar or different practices in the officially trilingual South Tyrol. The methodology of the project is based on a qualitative, inclusive and ethnographic application of the citizen science approach. We expect to generate knowledge and practices transferable to other multilingual educational settings, beyond Finland and South Tyrol.
