The contributions of this symposium will explore the interplay between language(s) and education in transnational spaces and its implications for transnational educational fields between Brazil and Europe. Since the early 2000s, transnational education has become a topic of central interest for researchers, practitioners and policy makers (Waters und Brooks 2011). Research in this field focuses on higher education, with less emphasis on private international schools that may be considered part of a globalised educational market (Adick 2005; Hayden 2011). Global languages, predominantly English, are a prerequisite for participation in these educational markets. This acts as an impediment for those who cannot afford to acquire the language capital and reinforces already existing language hegemonies. The globalisation of education entrenches – not only in the sociolinguistic sense – “new modes of reproducing social inequality in education” (Zanten van, 2005). In the research as well in practice the term “transnational education” appears to be reserved for social elites. Until now the discourse on transnational education has not explored the extent to which non-elite migrant families also promote the acquisition of the “human capital” needed to gain access to transnational educational fields. A few studies indicate that transnational mobility may also be a strategy of social advancement for young people from non-elite migrant families (Fürstenau 2008). Mainstream schools, however, rarely prepare their students for transnational careers. If teenagers from social minorities manage to turn their migration-related multilingual competencies into cultural capital on the labour market, then this success is mainly due to their transnational language biographies and to informal language courses offered by their ethnic communities, rather than to formal schooling. Many migrant families invest time and money in their children’s future, providing opportunities to study heritage languages and mobility within transnational social spaces.

Poverty and social inequality in Brazilian society have been important drivers of migration between Brazil and Europe since the 1980s, but at the same time there has been labour migration of qualified employees from social elites (Evans et al. 2013). Some studies point to the high costs of a quality education in Brazil as a reason to migrate or to stay at the host countries of migration (DeBiaggi 2002; Fürstenau 2015). Education is of course the key motivation of Brazilian international students migrating to other countries. According to its own figures, the Brazilian government student mobility programme Ciências sem Fronteiras has sent about 101,000 students to tertiary institutions abroad in the last four years. The main destination is the United States, while in Europe Brazilian students favour the United Kingdom, France and Germany.[1]

Migration between Brazil and Europe gives rise to social heterogeneous educational spaces. These should be viewed as the result of transnational educational provisions for social elites and related to the educational careers of young people from non-elite migrant families – i.e. as the result of transnationalisation processes “from above” and “from below” (Guarnizo und Smith 1998). The study of language in educational spaces provides insights into the multiple ways in which these processes (from above and below) influence each other. As in other contexts, transnational educational spaces constitute “linguistic markets” (Bourdieu) in which the social value of the speaker and of his language is mutually shaped. The empirical studies discussed in this symposium approach the linguistic markets of transnational educational spaces between Brazil and Europe from different perspectives. Exploring the different functions and ascribed values of different languages and multilingual capacities, they discuss the impact of transnational language practices on public education within nation-states and highlight the challenges of educational and linguistic policies.

[1] Ciência sem Fronteiras http://www.cienciasemfronteiras.gov.br/web/csf/o-programa, retrieved October 10, 2015

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