In the globalized world of today, many educational environments are situated in multicultural and multilingual settings (Blommaert, 2013; Rampton, 2006). This provides both educational challenges, as well as opportunities, as settings are becoming more linguistically diversified, creating complex educational scenarios (Larsen-Freeman, 1997).

Meanwhile, in the Swedish context of this study, recent surveys have revealed that preschools have not adapted to the new conditions that are imposed by the changing linguistic settings (The Swedish School Inspectorate, 2017). There is need for pedagogical practices to adapt to the changing educational environment and to create educational settings that are attuned to the enrolled children. Also, there is a need for researchers to find theoretical and analytical tools that can capture the new educational landscape (cf. Wei, 2017).

Recently, there has been a growing interest in research on how children can engage in learning environments using a range of communicational modes as resources in the practices of creating meaning. These approaches afford a view that not only the multiple languages that children use in their everyday learning experiences (Garcia & Wei, 2014), but moreover offers a perspective that includes an array of children’s resources for communication and understanding (c.f. Finnegan, 2014).

This project takes a sensory and multimodal approach to ethnographic research to explore the communicational affordances of a multicultural and multilingual early educational environment. By taking the view of the educational environment as a semiotic ecology (Kramsch & Whiteside, 2008) it examines the different resources that the educational environment an local community affords the children. The ethnographic project follows a group in a preschool department where none of the children speaks the majority language at home, and none of the children shares their first language.

The ethnography follows this group of preschool children during a project involving a popular children’s book. During the project, the preschool utilized a range of resources to engage the children and the multilingual environment of the community. This was represented in the teachers involving parents, sending them word-lists from the book for translation into their mother tongue, building play environments with scenes from the book, using dual-language translations of the children’s book, reading with the children and involving a local theatre to perform the book for the children.

The preschool thus presented both multilingual and multimodal ways for children to engage with themes from the children’s book. The actions of, as well as interviews with the teachers, revealed a positive attitude towards the multicultural and multilingual community, and this was represented in this active engagement with the local ecology of languages and educational resources.

In the interactions between children, peer-play, as well as interactions of teachers and children, it is shown that children engage with the themes of the children’s book. This is achieved both in linguistic communication, as well as by utilizing the multimodal resources that the preschool provided.

The ecological view afforded an analysis that did not only take children’s developing language into account but how several linguistic and multimodal resources could be used in pedagogical practices with children. Thus taking an ecological view of semiotic resources (Kramsch & Whiteside, 2008) allow for analytical views that take into account the complexity of learning in the multicultural and multilingual settings that are characteristic of many urban settings today (Cekaite & Evaldsson, 2019; Rampton, 2006).

The study holds critical pedagogical implications, as its theoretical and analytical frame move the units of analysis from single instances of language development to multilingual development in semiotically diverse educational settings (cf. Blommaert, 2013). The study also points to affordances of teacher approaches to children’s language, communication and understanding which are discussed.

The study uses an ethnographic approach inspired by sensory (Pink, 2015) and multimodal (Dicks et al., 2011) ethnography. In line with this style of ethnography tools including video recordings, formal and informal interviews, photographs, field-notes, and walking video (Pink, 2007) have been utilized to gather rich data children’s actions and communication in the studied setting. The ethnography took place in a preschool and the surrounding community in a low-SES area in Sweden that is characterized by being culturally and linguistically heterogeneous. The public discourse of the area is often negative in character, for example, a google-search returns results such as “shootings”, “car burnings”, “riots” and other violent and negative news. There has been debate and call for the need for good education in the area, making the local preschool’s into educational, as well as political, objects of interest. The current study follows a group of children (n=9), in a preschool department where none of the children speaks the majority language at home, and none of the children shares their first language. The preschool pedagogues overall have a long experience of work in the area and know it, and the conditions well. The data chosen for this study concerns the preschools work with a popular Swedish children’s book. The book became a project after the children had shown some interest in it, which spurred the pedagogues to start a project utilizing it in a way appropriated for this multilingual environment. The analytical approach was inspired by work on language use as set within a semiotic ecology (van Lier, 2004; Kramsch & Whiteside, 2008). This approach allowed for a broad inclusion of data in the initial instances of coding where not only linguistic instances of the children’s book was included: such as reading and sending word-lists to parents, but data that also could include non-verbal play on themes from the book, the use of digital applications based on the children’s book, and other references to the themes such as in creative art activities. The ecological style of analysis moreover focused on the relations between different communicative resources in the project. As such a broad interrelated and complex web of semiotic resources could be traced, where the preschool utilized parents a several local resources in the community, such as the library, outdoors and a theatre group. The ethnography examines this multitude of resources and analyses their affordances for children communication and understanding.

The results point toward a rich pedagogical work that is afforded by the engagement of the preschool with the multilingual children, their families and the local ecology of semiotic resources. This educational work is initiated by the preschool but spans across the children’s lives and the life-world of the children. What emerges is a rich multicultural and linguistically diversified practice that goes beyond the bounds of the preschool. The active engagement with these resources was used in ways by the teachers that both acknowledges children’s cultural and linguistic background as well as incorporating these in the pedagogical practices of the preschool. This practice allows the children to not only learn about the book in the majority language, but also to engage with it in their mother tongues, in play, and through an array of different representational modes. This affords children a pedagogical practice that takes local settings and their semiotic affordances as potentials for learning. The results show how an exchange of language use and other semiotic resources promotes children’s understanding and provide an example of multilingual educational practice (cf. Garcia & Wei, 2014). The study point to the possible affordances when early childhood practices move beyond a narrow focus on monolingual use of the majority language, but rather engages with the majority language in relation to the linguistic and semiotic resources of children and their environment. These results also provide a counter picture to the medialized public discourse about the area, where diversity often is portrayed as problematic. In the ethnography, a picture instead emerges of what is possible when a positive engagement with diverse resources of a globalized community such as this is taken. The study thus not only provides examples that are interesting in educational discussions but also in a wider societal importance.

Blommaert, J. (2013). Ethnography, superdiversity and linguistic landscapes: chronicles of complexity. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Cekaite, A. & Evaldsson, A.-C. (2019). Stance and footing in children’s multilingual play : Rescaling practices in a Swedish preschool. Journal of Pragmatics, 144, 127–140. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2017.11.011 Dicks, B., Flewitt, R.S., Lancaster, L., & Pahl, K. (2011). Multimodality and ethnography: working at the intersection. Qualitative Research, 11(3): 227–237. Finnegan, R. H. (2014). Communicating: the multiple modes of human communication (2. ed.). London: Routledge. Garcia, O. & Wei, L. (2014). Translanguaging: language, bilingualism and education. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Kramsch, C. & A. Whiteside (2008). Language ecology in multilingual settings: Towards a theory of symbolic competence. Applied Linguistics, 29(4), 645–671. Larsen-Freeman, D. (1997). Chaos/Complexity Science and Second Language Acquisition. Applied Linguistics, 18(2), 141–165. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/18.2.141 Pink, S. (2007) Walking with video. Visual Studies, 22:3, 240-252, DOI: 10.1080/14725860701657142 Pink, S. (2015). Doing sensory ethnography. (2. ed.) London: Sage. Rampton, B. (2006). Language in late modernity: interaction in an urban school. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. The Swedish School Inspectorate. (2017). Förskolans arbete med flerspråkiga barns språkutveckling [Preschools work with multilingual children’s language development. Rapport. Skolinspektionen. Van Lier, L. (2004). The ecology and semiotics of language learning: a sociocultural perspective. Boston: Kluwer Academic. Wei, L. (2017). Translanguaging as a Practical Theory of Language. Applied Lingustics, 39 (2), 261.