Engaging the City: Multimodal Narratives of Language and Latina/o Identities in an Urban Community

• In Event: 28.089 - MTCC Roundtable Session 10
  In Roundtable Session: 28.089-5 - Space, Identity, and Language: Contexts of Teaching Multilingual Learners

Abstract

Places have always been pedagogical (Greenwood, 2011) and recent studies point to the importance of place (Leander, Phillips, & Taylor 2010) for supporting students’ learning in mathematics, science, and literacy education (Mills & Comber, 2015; Rubel, Hall-Wieckert, & Lim 2017; Schindel Dimick, 2016). This presentation discusses a project, designed with principles of inquiry-guided learning, in which learners of Spanish collaboratively produced multimodal narratives about Latina/o identities in public art in New York City. Overall, self-reflection and peer feedback from multiple sources (students, instructor, librarian) allowed students to develop deeper understandings of Spanish-speaking cultures and of the role of public art as an important community resource to represent collective identity and cultural memory.

Author

• Lee B. Abraham, Columbia University