Western education systems have traditionally depended on the fundamental myth of homogeneity of language and culture in a ‘national’ democracy. The monolingual habitus of the classroom - derived from the Bourdieuian “habitus” that refers to the embodiment of social structures that are reproduced through social practices (Bourdieu 1977) - is reflected in educational norms, structures and content of teaching that perpetuate assumptions about language and learning implicit in the idea of a national language (Gogolin 1994). This notion of normality has dramatically failed to reflect or accommodate the multicultural and multilingual realities of contemporary classrooms across Europe. Under the conditions of globalisation, encounters with multilingualism are part of everyday life. The ability to communicate in several languages is becoming increasingly important for participation within and across diverse democracies. The facilitation of individual multilingual competences and the establishment of conditions that are favourable for multilingualism are thus important tasks for education.

This overall symposium (divided into two smaller symposia) regards multilingualism as a resource for both the individual and society, which can be harnessed through empirical investigation and scholarly intervention in the classroom. Its overall objective is not just to expose the myth of the monolingual habitus, but to demonstrate how the institutionalisation of the multilingual habitus can be achieved through educational research. We take a comprehensive approach looking at multilingual skills for educational attainment across subject areas, sources of agency that mobilize those skills, multilingual development across the lifespan, and its significance for personal and economic development. Taken all together, we aim to expose the significance of multilingual skills for the individual, the classroom experience and in later life. Moreover, we will demonstrate how scholarly findings and interventions can result in changing perspectives for, on the one hand, those pupils whose multilingual abilities have been traditionally cast in a problematic light (i.e. pupils with a migration background who may speak a non-dominant language in the home) and, on the other hand, those actors with responsibility for the educational habitus (i.e. teachers, policymakers).

The central focus of the overall symposium is on multilingualism in education. In our consideration of realities beyond the classroom, this symposium is structured in a chronological fashion from pre-school to career transitions. We begin with papers from France, Belgium and England on the creative inclusion of multilingualism as a classroom resource where a monolingual ideology persists. The first paper follows one pre-school teacher to observe how she facilitates linguistic inclusion, in the transition from the home to school, for the well-being, learning and personal development of plurilingual children. In Flanders, primary school pupils created a translanguaging-based radio show. This research highlights the opportunities and challenges faced by both pupils and teachers when tasked with the active inclusion of home languages. Through poetry and literature, secondary school pupils in the superdiverse London borough of Tower Hamlets explored their own multilingualism. The author considers the outcomes of this project and ways to embed multilingualism in pedagogic practice. Throughout the language biography, children and teenagers perceive the value attributed to their languages and the final paper in this symposium develops this point further in the context of Germany. It takes a longitudinal perspective to examine the linguistic and non-linguistic factors that positively or negatively affect multilingual development for educational attainment and career transitions.

Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge, UK/Malden, MA: Polity Press. Gogolin, I. (1994). Der monolinguale Habitus der multilingualen Schule. Münster/New York: Waxmann.