Schoolscapes as sites of interculturality

The study analyzes how interculturality is discursively constructed in multicultural and multilingual schools in Chile through semiotic practices in their schoolscapes and how it is reproduced, maintained, and/or resisted by the school community. To this end, we worked with five different schools with a high proportion of international and multilingual students in Chile to explore their school settings. The corpus consists of 222 photographs taken in December 2022, which were analyzed multimodally to identify how different languages and cultures are conceptualized and enacted by the school communities and external institutional agencies. Results indicate that the school community is sensitive to their students’ diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds, thus challenging the normalized homogenization from institutional discourses through collective efforts from the extended school community. Conversely, institutionalized discourses in the schoolscape tend to address students as a homogenous collective, although their educational policies state otherwise.