Technical Data |
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A Quick Recap of Phases 1-3 |
Since 2013, #TeamCaL has inquired about the presence of second language literacy practices (mostly English, but our data has expanded to any language rather than Spanish) in the city, musing over time how these languages help shape a new understanding of the city. We emphasize here the idea of musing because while it holds true that we have data that describes where and how all those L2 literacies have surfaced, we have never fully asked the question about the overall understanding. During this time, we also proposed a constantly mutating conceptual framework we coined “City as Literacy” (Herrera & Jaramillo, 2020; Mora, et al., 2015, 2016a, 2016b, 2018, 2021) to talk about this connection between literacies and our view of the city. This framework has evolved throughout the three previous phases of our project, looking at messages in static locations (physical spaces), as language in transit and individual narratives (cultural spaces) and as socially constructed narratives (community spaces).
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Emerging Questions About the City |
As we revisited the data from the previous phases, a series of questions started emerging: What are the different ways in which we construct and make sense of the city? How are our language experiences morphing as a consequence of inhabiting the multiple spaces of, in our case, “Medellín City”? What new possibilities for learning, collaboration, and re/co/constructing the city can the presence of these languages afford us? It is important to situate this question in light of the existing D/discourses (Gee, 1999) about languages (and bilingualism) in Medellín, our hometown and current place of residence for most of our team (for disclosure, our PI was raised in Medellín but recently relocated to Norway), as not all of our team was born in this city (our life journeys will eventually add a layer of complexity to this relationship, but we will return to this later).
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Third Space:
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In our conversations about the next frontier of this project, we agreed that the idea of Third Space is a concept that will add a further layer of mutation to the City as Literacy framework. Although we had made references to this idea back in Phase 1, with direct mentions to Edward Soja’s work in Phase 1, only now are we adding this to the framework directly. For this phase, we will draw from ideas about Third Space by Edward Soja (1996, in Schuck, et al. 2016) and Kris Gutiérrez (Gutiérrez, 2008; Gutiérrez, et al., 1999).
For this study, even though we draw from the previous work, Stefany and Daniel proposed a working definition for Third Space. This is the definition that guides this project: Third Space is a learning zone, recognizable through counter-scripts or counter-discourses from symbolic and epistemic settings. The Third Space, therefore, becomes critical consciousness, as it involves social, historical, and cultural aspects in the participants of that zone. The way connotations change depends entirely on the discourse. |
Revisiting the Routes, Again,
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We make that brief reference to that famous poem by T.S. Eliot as it illustrates where we stand. As we envision Phase 4 to be the launchpad for the retcon longitudinal study, we find it fitting to return to some of the routes we had profiled for the previous three phases, return to the original data sets, update them with new data, and go deeper in our polyangulated data analysis with the current team. In this process, we also returned to routes that we had profiled but didn't take off due to lack of time or invested researchers.
As always, we have let each researcher look at the existing routes and choose the ones that interests them. This is the current outlook for our Phase 4 routes:
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