The planned symposium addresses transnational and translingual social practices in school contexts focussing on tensions between discourse and practice in research, politics as well as institutions. The proposed contributions draw on findings from current research projects in three different national contexts and invite discussion of theoretical and methodological challenges.

Theoretically, we link to concepts of transnationalization as they have been developed in the discourses of education and educational science in the last decades. Following the transnational turn, these concepts enable us to look "beyond the national" (Gogolin & Pries 2004, Machold et al. 2020) and to examine processes that take place through transnational social practices at the level of educational policy, institutions and individual interaction.Thus, the focus is on social educational practices, fields and spaces that transcend national borders (Wimmer & Glick Schiller 2002; Pries 1997). We understand transnational practices not only as the institutional level of organisations and their transnationalization strategies (cf. Adick 2008, Hornberg 2010, Karakasoglu & Vogel 2019), but also focus on the micro level of the actors (cf. Fürstenau 2016, Carnicer 2019, Carnicer & Fürstenau 2019). In political and social discourses, migration is often idealised as a unidirectional process that aims at successful (linguistic) integration. This discourse continues in the formal education system: while Europeanisation and internationalisation of education are seen as elitist processes (Carnicer 2019, Hornberg 2010), transnational social practices of individuals are often discussed as deviations from the norm and consequently as deficient and hindering educational success (Neumann et al. 2003, Panagiotopoulou 2020).

The aim of the present symposium is to complement these existing discourses with a perspective on linguistic - translingual - practices and to investigate which facets of the 'national' appear in language education policies and practices (Karakaşoğlu et al. 2019) and how these shape the language experience and self-positioning of the actors (Busch 2015, Knappik 2016, Putjata 2019).

How are transnational and translingual practices constructed in education policy discourse and how has this discourse changed in recent years? How do educational institutions address these practices and what spaces do the individuals open in these rather national educational frameworks? The following three contributions explore these questions with a view to language and multilingualism:

In the first contribution, Melanie David-Erb and Galina Putjata analyse the extent to which schools in Frankfurt on the Main make transnationalization an aspect of their self-positioning in the context of their web-presentation. In the second contribution, BethAnne Paulsrud will present a study that examines translanguaging and policies in English-medium instruction in Sweden. For the third contribution, Clare Cunningham will address the discourses of mainstream teachers in England around translingual practices. Finally, we invite  Nadja Thoma and the public to discuss possibilities for questioning national frameworks of thinking not only in politics and education, but also in research, with regard to methodological and theoretical challenges.

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