The city as a text: Raising awareness of urban semiotic

landscapes for language and literacy education

Amparo Clavijo Olarte PhD, Kewin Prieto Gonzalez, Rosa Medina PhD.
Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas
Bogotá, COLOMBIA

13th Linguistic Landscape Workshop

 Outline
• Sociopolitical and geographical contexts
• Origins of the project
• Theoretical framework
• The study
• Methodology (Ethnography of place)
• Data collection
• Analysis
• Findings
• Implications and Recommendations
• Conclusions
Sociopolitical and geographical Context
Colombia is in the process of
constructing peace in its territory
after 60 years of civic conflict and
violence. Killing social leaders has
been an issue in rural Colombia.
Education is expected to be a
means of peace building in
classrooms in all the territory
(Trigos-Carrillo, et al., 2020)

https://mapamundi.online/america/del-sur/colombia/
 Two schools in the historic district

Candelaria school, K-12

Policarpa school, Elementary branch

Origins of the multi-year project
• Seminar on Literacy at the Masters Program in Applied Linguistics to TEFL at the Universidad
Distrital Francisco José de Caldas, the public university of Bogotá.
• A transnational collaboration with Judy Sharkey from UNH started in 2009. We used field
assignments to engage inservice teachers in Bogotá, Colombia and future teachers in
Manchester, NH, USA in exploring the linguistic landscape of their students´ neighborhoods.
We shared the assignments outcomes with the two groups and reflected upon the learning
that occured in the experience.
• Since then, we have carried out three research projects with school teachers in five localities in
Bogotá funded by Universidad Distrital. We have done community mapping with teachers in
the schools to identify local resources (linguistic, cultural and economic), useful for teaching;
connected those resources with the standards for each subject area; designed curricular units;
implemented pedagogical innovations and written chapters about their innovations.
• More than 15 graduate theses have been developed using the linguistic landscape as a
resource for teaching.
Theoretical Framework
Urban literacies

We understand urban literacies as social, artistic, political, cultural and pedagogical manifestations
and practices that connect different community actors with diverse texts.

For Lozano et al. (2020) Studying urban literacies contributes to connecting students' cultural and
linguistic resources with those of communities. Urban literacies are framed within the social and
spatial turn in language education. “The spatial turn emphasizes critical reading of texts and other
semiotic resources within and across different spaces (classrooms, homes, schools, communities,
virtual) that are embodied, interactive, multimodal/multisensory, and that evolve over time (Mills
2016; Kramsch 2018) “( P,19 )
 Semiotic Landscape, Multiculturalism and Multilingualism

Jaworski & Thurlow (2011, p. 2) the Semiotic landscape as "any public space with a visible
inscription made through deliberate human intervention for the construction of meaning“.

Malinoski (2016). LL research allow students to explore the politics of multilingual expression in
public space through first hand documentation and interpretation.

Sayer (2009). “Involving students in LL projects decentralizes the practice of language learning and
ensures language learner interaction with a variety of highly contextualized and authentic texts in
the public area” (p.101).

Pennycook (2010) “Language is part of social and local activity, both locality and language emerge
from the activities engaged in” (p. 2).
Kress and van Leeuwen (2010) The new realities of the semiotic

landscape are brought about by social, cultural and economic factors.

Shohamy and Gorter (2009) define the linguistic landscape as the

linguistic objects that mark the public space.

 The study
Purpose: To explore the semiotic landscape of the historic district of Bogotá to document the
multicultural signs, urban art (graffiti, murals, stencils, posters), historical plaques, and local
economy and invite school teachers to use the semiotic resources for the school curriculum.

The Team: The ethnographic study (2019-2020) involved five university researchers, two graduate
and four undergraduate students from three different language teacher education programs at
Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas.

Participants: Teachers from two schools (12+33), urban artists (4), a resident, and university
students (5).

Question
How does exploring urban multimodal, multicultural and multilingual resources contribute to
language and literacy education?
Methodology: Ethnography of
place

➢ Walking as an Ethnographic method implies sensory and

embodied experiences.
➢ It is an alternative and critical way to engage in urban
spaces (Aoki & Yoshimizu, 2015; Falzon, 2009; Pink, 2008).
➢ It allows experiencing places, texts, community
participation in the historic center.
Data collection

Two year ethnography (2019-2020).

➢ Ethnographic walks to map the places and the text plurality of the historic district.
➢ Photographic corpus (387)
➢ Interviews (teachers and urban artists)
➢ Six workshops with teachers in schools.
➢ Researchers´ field notes.
Data Analysis

➢ We collaboratively studied how local

(teachers, artists) engaged with the
complexities of texts within places.
➢ Collaboration involved epistemological
negotiations within the group at every
point in the ethnographic process.
(Lassiter, 2005)
➢ NVIVO to display the connections
among data sources
➢ Data and Researcher Triangulation
(Angrosino, 2007; Fetterman, 1998;
Denzin & Lincoln, 2005 in Heighman &
Croker, 2009).
Findings
We found three dimensions of the semiotic and linguistic landscape in the Historic
District of Bogota.

➢ Political and ideological dimensions of semiotic landscapes

➢ The semiotic landscape as a multicultural and decolonizing space

➢ The semiotic landscape multilingualism and translanguaging

 Political and ideological dimensions of the SL

The use of English has ideological and political purposes as it is used to denounce police violence, especially against

graffiti artists. We encountered different signs that conveyed subaltern political and ideological messages. These signs

work as counternarratives to dominant ideologies such as capitalism, mestizo-whiteness, and patriarchy.

 Political and ideological dimensions

The graffiti message suggests a critical analysis of social and political meaning

embedded in it. English is used to deliver a political message.

“ A message on a wall is going to stay there a long time and specifically
it has a political importance .. it transforms spaces according to the
social and political situation” Interview, Cigarra- Urban artist, August,
19, 2020
The SL as a multicultural and decolonizing space
The multicultural analysis
represents the richness of the
ethnic, historic, linguistic, and
cultural realities of
Colombian peoples.

The African and femenine

symbols point at Black
intersectional feminism
(Crenshaw, 2017) by
centering the symbolic power
of racialized and gendered
bodies.
 The SL as a multicultural and decolonizing space

From a critical literacy perspective, reading semiotic landscapes in the larger historic, and sociological

contexts teachers, and students can contribute to decolonization beyond taking it merely as a metaphor

(Tuck & Yang, 2012).

Pereira Borelli, Viana Silvestre, and Rocha Pessoa (2020) reflecting on some of the multifaceted

challenges of decolonizing English teacher education affirm that one of the challenges teacher educators

have to face is the resignification of their praxis.

“ graffiti allows to see culture and ideology of different peoples and ethnic groups; that is why artists

decide to portray such ideologies, customs and traditions” Poligrafo Eclectico, August 12th, 2020
SL highlighting multilingualism and translanguaging

The multilingual practice includes the use of global languages in response to tourism
and transnational flows. (Canagarajah, 2013 and Pennycook, 2010).
 SL highlighting multilingualism and translanguaging

The signs allowed us to understand how Bogotá's urban texts show separate (monolingual) and

integrated language ideologies (translanguaging) for different purposes such as expressing feelings,

attracting customers, and displaying heritage.

Reading the semiotic and linguistic landscape that surrounds schools offers opportunities to develop

critical awareness and to recognize the purposes, audiences, and semiotic resources that students can

interpret and create.

 Implications and recommendations

In teacher preparation programs, places and semiotic landscapes constitute curricular resources.

Teachers and students can transform the school curriculum using multicultural and multilingual
resources that places offer.

Teachers and students can develop a critical posture from embracing semiotic, linguistic and
multicultural resources.

Teachers can use the semiotic landscapes and place explorations to decolonize their curriculum,
especially by centering linguistic diversity, multiculturalism, and social struggles that are
materialized on the walls of the city.
Conclusions
The political, multicultural and multilingual dimensions of texts in the historic district can help
situate the language curriculum in the complex local realities.

Connecting students with authentic cultural and linguistic experiences of places they inhabit
transforms teachers´pedagogical work and makes learning more meaningful (Lozano, et al. 2020)

We found that different actors were part of assemblages or networks of literacies in which different
individuals in the community interact with passersby, places, social discourses, and multimodal texts
that constitute urban literacy practices of their own.

Using semiotic landscapes as critical literacy resources leads to the recognition of multicultural and
linguistic diversity that is rarely reflected in traditional curricular content.
 Amparo Clavijo Olarte PhD
aclavijo@udistrital.edu.co
Gracias!!! https://comunidad.udistrital.edu.co/lectoescrinaut
as/
Thank you!!
Danke!!! Kewin Arley Prieto González M.A. Student
kaprietog@correo.udistrital.edu.co
https://comunidad.udistrital.edu.co/lectoescrinaut
as/