May 17, 2016

Place-based learning & the language classroomCLS Instructional Innovation Workshop 2016 – Yale University

Stéphane Charitos, Columbia University

Dave Malinowski, Yale University

Outline for today

Hour 1: Inspiration

1. Warm-up

2. Orientation: Rationales and goals for PBLL

3. Moving toward “deep mapping”: Models, tools and activities

4. Linguistic landscape as approach to language study

5. PBLL projects

6. Discussion

Open Google doc w/ today’s materials: http://bit.ly/CLS-PBLL

Outline for today

Hour 2: Application

1. Making a map together: “Among the languages of New Haven”

2. Small-group brainstorming and planning

3. Introduction to Google’s My Maps

4. Map-making project time

5. Reflections and wrap-up

Open Google doc w/ today’s materials: http://bit.ly/CLS-PBLL

1. Warm-upBo

dy Languages

2. Orientations

What is PBE?

✤ PBE is an educational philosophy that promotes learning rooted in the local (the unique histories, cultures, landscapes, opportunities and experiences of a particular place) and uses it as the foundation for the study of all subjects in the curriculum.

✤ It draws upon and feeds into two paradigm shifts in the humanities and the social sciences: the social and spatial turns.

Yale example: Yale nature walk

Professor Marta Wells, EE&B 223L Evolution, Functional Traits, and the Tree of Life

A growing imperative: Place in L2 learning (I)

The social turn in SLA and Applied Lx ✤ Firth & Wagner, 2007; Lantolf, 2000; Kramsch, 2002; Block, 2003; Byrnes & Sprang 2004

Multimodality & new and multi-literacies approaches to literacy and language studies ✤ New London Group, 1996; Kress & van Leeuwen, 2010; Lankshear & Knobel, 2011

The spatial turn in social theory and the humanities ✤ Lefebvre, 1991; Harvey, 1989; Soja, 1989; Massey, 1994

ACTFL Standards: Connections, Comparisons, Communities (“Students use the language both within and beyond the school setting”)

Intercultural communicative competence cultivates learners’ “attitudes of curiosity and openness, readiness to suspend disbelief about other cultures and belief about one’s own” (Byram 1997, p. 50)

Discourses in place “signal the sociocultural organization of [a] particular society” (Scollon & Scollon, 2003, p. 201)

A growing imperative: Place in L2 learning (II)

3. Moving toward “deep mapping”: Models, tools and activities

“All spaces contain embedded stories based on what has happened there. These stories are both individual and collective, and each of them link geography (space) and history (time).”

–David Bodenhammer

Deep mapping

“the essaying of place”

A deep map is both a platform and an expanding set of processes for expressing, exploring, and juxtaposing spatial narratives.

A methodology that allows us to combine multiple quantitative, qualitative and multimedia data about a space/place with the purpose of building a spatial narrative.

Deep mapping helps your students think both in terms of patterns of objects in space (where), and of the processes that produce these patterns (how and why there)

Multimedia walking tours and podcasts

Alan Dein eavesdrops on a day in the life of Oldhill Street in Hackney and creates a riveting, personal reading of the history of a particular place: “It’s the Babel of London.”

Activities

✤ Ask your students to create a podcast or a digital story that chronicles a particular street, a neighborhood, an activity, or a community of their choice. (e.g. New York Graffiti Tour)

✤ Ask your students to produce and distribute self-guided tours of specific locations providing users with maps, instructions, directions, and information about what they are seeing. (e.g. New York City, New Haven)

Explore the rhythms of the city

City rhythm is a metaphor for the regular coming and going that occur regularly in cities. The concept of city rhythm makes it possible to understand the multitude of aspects of city life.

✤ Marseille at night (created with Google Night Walk)

Virtual Travel DiaryDreamland is a virtual travel diary created by Olivier Hodasava that takes the reader on tours that mix the real with the virtual.

Activities

✤ Using maps, photos (their own or photos available on photo sharing sites such as Flickr, Panoramio, 360Cities, etc.), or screen captures from Google Street View ask students to create their own virtual travel journal or diary that chronicles their travel though virtual worlds of their own choosing.

✤ Using their smartphones, ask students to shoot, group and annotate pictures that chronicle a daily “journey” in their life and covert it into a travel journal-style post that can be shared digitally.

Psychogeography and drifting in the city

Psychogeography helps us understand the world we inhabit by studying how space effects our subjective experience.

A drift (“dérive”) defined as a “technique of locomotion without a goal” allows you to explore the built environment without preconceptions.

Liminaire

Seeing space through time

What do signs tell us about how a particular space has been shaped and reshaped several times over successive generations?

NYC Through Time

Activities

✤ Ask students to look around their local urban landscape and seek examples of old posters that peek out through the overlaying layers of torn subsequent posters. Can they see the past emerging through the present?

✤ Ask students to detect and take a photograph of old, faded adverts (“ghost signs”) painted on walls in their surrounding neighborhood (alternatively, they can look for photographs on photo sharing sites).

Context How does context affect our interpretation of space and the objects that exist in that space?

Context How does context affect our interpretation of space and the objects that exist in that space?

4. Linguistic landscape and language study

What are Linguistic Landscapes?“The language of public road signs, advertising billboards, street names, place names, commercial shop signs, and public signs on government building combines to form the linguistic landscape of a given territory, region or urban agglomeration.”

Landry, R., & Bourhis, R. Y. (1997). Linguistic Landscape and Ethnolinguistic Vitality. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 16(1), 23–49.

Why Linguistic Landscapes?

✤ They connect students to the world outside the classroom.

✤ They cast students as active investigators.

✤ They expose students to authentic, contextualized linguistic input.

✤ They help students think about the social, historical, and cultural roles of language and analyze the sociolinguistic ecology of a local environment.

How to approach LL?: Multiple ways of knowing language in place

How to approach LL?: Multiple ways of knowing language in place

How to approach LL?: Multiple ways of knowing language in place

Using Empirical Data

Using Empirical Data

✤ Most commonly spoken languages in New York City

Using Empirical Data

✤ Most commonly spoken languages in New York City

✤ Most commonly spoken languages in New York City (excluding Spanish)

Using Empirical Data

✤ Most commonly spoken languages in New York City

✤ Most commonly spoken languages in New York City (excluding Spanish)

✤ New York City ancestry map

Cityscape

a tool that allows for the layering of user-generated linguistic data upon a topographical map in order to document the linguistic landscape of a particular environment.

cityscape.lrc.columbia.edu

Cityscape

✤ What does it do?

✤ How does it work?

✤ How has it been used?

✤ Future? (GIS enabled mapping)(Open Street Map)

Testing, supporting, and challenging hypotheses

Refle

Specula

Obser

“Obviously the owner wanted both the English word “market” and a Greek word that evoked food shopping as well and balanced the word “market”

typographically. Manavi (“Μανάβης”) the Greek word for “grocer” did the trick.”

Time for exploring Cityscape:http://cityscape.lrc.columbia.edu

✤ What interests you, surprises you on Cityscape?

✤ What leaves you wanting more? (what features would you like to see here?)

✤ Could an LL approach inform your teaching contexts?

✤ What benefits can you imagine? What challenges can you foresee?

Very cool…

but we don’t teach in New York!

Strategy 1: Use the TL to investigate, analyze, critique English in Yale/New Haven

e.g. “How are historical

narratives of gender and

race reproduced and/or

challenged in the Yale

campus landscape?

http://news.yale.edu/2015/11/05/new-gender-neutral-bathroom-signs-unveiled

Strategy 2: Conduct virtual trips and utilize remote partnerships

Yale-Télécom ParisTech telecollaboration, March 2015 (C. Skorupa)

Strategy 2: Conduct virtual trips and utilize remote partnerships

Yale-Télécom ParisTech telecollaboration, March 2015 (C. Skorupa)

Strategy 2: Conduct virtual trips and utilize remote partnerships

Yale-Telecom ParisTech telecollaboration, March 2015 (C. Skorupa)

Strategy 3: Translate New Haven

Strategy 3: Translate New Haven

=?

Strategy 3: Translate!

FindexamplesfromtheLLinplaceswhereyourlanguageisvisibletocompare&contrast

HowwouldaJapanesetranslationbedifferentfortheYalecommunityandvisitorstoJapanvs.forauniversityinTokyo?

HowdoesGoogletranslatethis,andhowwouldyou?What’sdifferent,andwhy?

Whereoncampusdoyouseethesesigns?Document&addtothemap

Whatdoes“authorization”evenmean,andwhocountsas“authorizedpersonnel”and“theirguests”?

Strategy 3: Translate!

Strategy 3: Translate!

5. A few PBLL games…

✤ Mentira (http://www.mentira.org/; Julie Sykes and Chris Holden)

✤ Chrono-Ops (http://survivethefuturepast.blogspot.com/; Steve Thorne & colleagues)

✤ Find Japan on Campus (http://pebll.uoregon.edu/site/project-page?id=28; Kazumi Hatasa)

6. Making a map together this fall: Around the Day in 80 Wor(l)ds

6. Making a map together today

Please sit with a colleague or two - ideally a few people who share a ‘language of the heart’ - and log in to your computers, launch a web

browser

6. Making a map together today: “The Languages of New Haven”

6. Making a map together: “The Languages of New Haven”

Goal: Create a map that reflects and builds upon the linguistic diversity and resources of New Haven

✤ Where are our languages spoken, heard and seen?

✤ Where are our languages taught and learned?

✤ Where do we remember languages here? Where do we imagine them?