Conference Program

Educational encounters between families and institutions are central sites where social inequalities are reproduced, negotiated, or contested. This is particularly visible in increasingly multilingual societies, where institutional expectations about languages and parental involvement often reflect the norms of socially dominant groups. Such norms, often rooted in language ideologies (Gal & Irvine, 2019), can generate or reinforce inequalities, especially when institutional expectations diverge from those of families from minoritized or marginalized backgrounds. Against this backdrop, this presentation focuses on a project investigating educational transitions from pre-primary to primary schools in South Tyrol (Italy).

First, the presentation will briefly outline the context of the study. South Tyrol is an officially trilingual border region, and its school system is organized into separate monolingual tracks corresponding to the three official languages, namely German, Italian, and Ladin. This structure, based on a mother-tongue principle (Statute of Autonomy, 1972), was designed to protect minorities and guarantee balanced representation and participation. However, this ethno-linguistic separation has been increasingly challenged by migration patterns (Wisthaler et al., 2022; Carlà, 2022; Rocha & Costa, 2021) and new forms of multilingualism, e.g., among individuals whose repertoires differ from those officially recognized. In this context, German represents the dominant group and is a prestigious language tied access to educational opportunities and upward social mobility.

Building on these premises, the study follows two multilingual families with migration trajectories from Morocco and Ethiopia as their children transition into, respectively, the Italian and German school systems. Indeed, this transition has been described as a key event in family’s lives (Huf, 2013; Turunen, 2014; Jose et al., 2022). In South Tyrol, the choice of primary school attracts sustained attention from both political institutions and the media (e.g., Liberto, 10 December 2025). As such, it is a particularly revealing site for exploring the ideological tensions that underpin the separation of education along ethnolinguistic lines.

Methodologically, multi-sited ethnography was employed (Marcus, 1995; Dick & Arnold, 2017) and the data consist of field notes, interview transcripts, and artefacts generated during participant observation. This approach allows us to understand transitions not as discrete events, but as dynamic, co‑constructed processes embedded in everyday practices, institutional expectations, and ideological landscapes which, alongside the family’s own linguistic practices and choices regarding children’s education, “form the mechanisms […] through which social inequalities are reproduced” (Curdt-Christiansen et al., 2023).

The study examines how language becomes salient in these moments, how families mobilize their funds of knowledge, and how institutional discourses frame parental involvement and appropriateness. The presentation will also exemplify on how families navigate the school system and, at the same time, grapple with intersecting processes of marginalization such as gender-based violence and housing precarity.