Abstract
Co-located schools are autonomously administered schools with different languages of instruction that are co-located in a shared physical space. In countries with several official languages, co-located schools have existed for a long time but today, the phenomenon increasingly inserts itself into an architectural trend towards multipurpose spaces and a general preference to place several educational institutions in shared buildings.
In this paper, we make use of existing research literature and look at the discourses and educational practices related to bilingualism and co-located schools in two officially bi- and multilingual contexts, Finland and South Tyrol. We deploy a spatially oriented theoretical framework to analyze the ideological and political landscapes where co-locations take place in each context. Finland, according to its constitution, is an officially bilingual country with two national languages, Finnish and Swedish. South Tyrol is the northernmost Italian province holding an autonomous status linked to the presence of a German- and Ladin-speaking community recognised as linguistic minorities. In both Finland and South Tyrol, the separation of the official languages is reconstructed both through policy and public discourse as well as material practices of institutional education. In these contexts, the educational system maintains separate tracks for schooling for the officially recognized language groups and any attempts to deconstruct the parallel system or even proposals for alternative bilingual models are in the public often deemed as problematic. These discourses become manifest also in the everyday spatial and social practices of co-located schools. However, the premise of language separation is also questioned and renegotiated in the context of co-located schools. Therefore, co-located schools can be viewed as contested spaces, where discourses and practices promoting linguistic diversity but also parallel monolingualism participate in the construction of linguistic landscapes.