Place-Based Learning and the Language Classroom

May 17, 2016
Place-based learning & the language classroom
CLS 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

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)

VirtualTravel
Diary
Dreamland 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?

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

Using Empirical
Data
✤ Most commonly spoken languages
in New York City

Using Empirical
Data
in New York City
in New York City (excluding
Spanish)

Using Empirical
Data
in New York City
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 NewYork!

Strategy 1: Use theTL to investigate, analyze, critique
English inYale/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-Telecom ParisTech telecollaboration, March 2015 (C. Skorupa)

Strategy 3:Translate New Haven

Strategy 3:Translate New Haven
=?

Find examples from the
LL in places where your
language is visible to
compare & contrast
How would a Japanese translation be diﬀerent for
the Yale community and visitors to Japan vs. for a
university in Tokyo?
How does Google translate this, and how
would you? What’s diﬀerent, and why?
Where on campus do you see these signs?
Document & add to the map
What does “authorization” even
mean, and who counts as “authorized
personnel” and “their guests”?

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 80Wor(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?

Place-Based Learning and the Language Classroom

Place-Based Learning and the Language Classroom

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