Europe is a favourite destination for many migrants and Europeans migrate to other countries. To Europe, migrants come from other European countries and from countries that differ in far more regards. Directions as well as reasons for migration are diverse. Regions with strong emigration or immigration experience societal changes while the way of change depends on the direction and on the reason of migration as well as on the way regions and people in these regions deal with it. Educational research can contribute to form these changes, for example by increasing the understanding of educational processes and by distributing research findings. The aim of this paper is to share ideas and research findings in respect of the potentials of multimodality for participation in diverse settings.

In Berlin, shortly immigrated children attend so-called welcome classes. The aim of these classes is to prepare children to join regular classes, especially regarding German language skills. The underlaying concept is that these children would not be able to attend a regular class from the very beginning. This practice is highly controversial. Not only is it far away from inclusion but even from integration – it is segregation instead of welcoming (Karakayali 2018). From children in similar so-called language learning classes in Bavaria we know, that they preferred to join the regular classes and make friendship with the (supposed) German kids, meanwhile the other way round children’s utterances were unexpectedly hostile (Peleki 2008). However, even in these separated classes we find cultural and linguistic diversity, maybe a kind of Super-Diversity (Gogolin 2010), and teachers and children dealing with it. In these classes, as generally in all classes and contexts, it is crucial to organize settings in which all children can participate. Here, the notion of participation is used in a wide theoretical sense comprehending not only the ideas of democracy (learning) as in educational science (Knauer/Sturzenhecker 2011) and of inclusion as in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child but also the idea of a pragmatic phenomenon as in linguistics (Haldimann/Hauser/Nell-Tuor 2017). The focus is on social interaction and language learning across cultural and linguistic diversity, although in awareness of the importance of macro-factors (Brizić 2006).

The presentation focusses on an ongoing research project, which convoyed an independently developed storytelling project in four so-called welcome classes in a Berlin primary school. The research project Erzählbrücken(Narrative Bridges) reconstructs the potentials of multimodal storytelling for participation in social interaction and for multilingual education (Naujok 2018 a, b). From February until July 2017, once a week, each of the four primary school classes enjoyed a storytelling session with a certified storyteller. The stories were performed in German language, with intense modulation, accompanied by strong facial expression, by different kinds of gesture and move, using pictures and objects – condensed: multimodally. Each week following a storytelling event, every pupil drew a picture in relation to the story they had heard and at the beginning of the following session everyone presented her/his picture in front of the group.

The research questions concerning this whole context are: How do different pupils participate in the storytelling phases? How do they cope with the picture presentations? How do they deal with the different modalities in these contexts? How do the storytellers and teachers interact with the children? How do they deal with the children’s diverse resources, especially with their languages and cultures? What are the chances in these settings?

Crucial theoretical concepts of the study are those of multimodality (Jewitt/Bezemer/O’Halloran 2016, Stein 2008), of participation (see above), and of holistic, (syn)aesthetic (Spinner 2008), mimetic (Wulf 2014), and dialogic learning (Bruner 1983).

The research project has an ethnographic approach. The focus is reconstructive. The research design includes observation and expert data. The researcher made field observations in thirty-five storytelling lessons. She wrote field notes, took pictures of subjects which were used by the storyteller, and copied children’s drawings. As often as the participants agreed, video recordings were taken. The field notes were used to write memory records which allow to search for key incidents (Kroon/Sturm 2002). If a key incident is video recorded, the researcher makes a (simplified) multimodal transcription and conducts an interpretative, multimodal interaction analysis (Schmitt 2015). The analysis of key incidents and their comparison leads to the research results. The expert data consists of interviews with the six storytellers and with the four teachers. The teachers were interviewed at the beginning and at the end of the project, the storytellers were interviewed once during the project. They can provide information about their perspectives on the welcome classes and the potentials of storytelling, but this is not part of the paper.

The study reconstructs that the pupils experienced the storytelling not only listening, but also watching, moving, acting, making sounds, and imitating words themselves. They took part in the storytelling process with their body and mind, with their head, heart and hands. It seems as if they try to enter the story in order to make sense of it. The fewer words a child understood, the more intensely it went into it. On the other hand, children, who already knew many words even supplemented own ideas to the story or used writing in order to learn new words. The study reveals also that the children were able to present their pictures from the very beginning. This performance includes far more than the use of (German) words. Both experiencing storytelling and presenting own pictures was performed individually in different ways. The diversity in these classes obviously included more than the children’s age. So, the study shows, that and how multimodal storytelling in a second (third, fourth, …) language allows pupils to enter a story, a language, and a culture which are new to them – all at the same time. In this complex context, it becomes obvious that and how multimodality allows participation. The awareness and acceptance of multimodality (next to the spoken word) and the purposeful use of multimodality offer good opportunities for children with different linguistic and cultural backgrounds to participate in interactions (Stein 2008). In storytelling, multimodality is inherent. It is probable, that other educational contexts could gain through an awareness of multimodality, too. As all language resources are included in the educational concept of translanguaging (Panagiotopoulou 2016), all modal resources should be included in multimodal or transmodal (language) education settings.

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