Keywords

1 Introduction

This paper recovers didactic experiences developed in a university subject of a teaching training course, a context we consider essential to foster a critical look at our immediate discursive environment. In our proposal, the look is mainly centered in the identification, denaturation and critical analysis of violent and resistance discourses in the linguistic landscape of the city.

The notion of linguistic landscape, linked to the work of Landry and Bourhis (1997) and to which we will pay special attention in a following paragraph, refers to the way in which the discourses are present in the public spaces, in different formats (posters, shop signs, graffiti, etc.) and environments (institutional, commercial, etc.).

From here we take the challenge to look at our surroundings again, and to do so in the context of university teachers’ education, also outlining a hybrid methodology which transcends the classroom limits employing the inclusion of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), not as an end but as a means to strengthen the experiences fostered from the subject. These challenges are oriented to the development of competences not only for the training but also for the teachers’ participation and support of didactic and practice decisions that we intend to analyze herein.

With this aim, we will briefly introduce the experiences to be analyzed within the institutional environment and also the decisions which support our subject project, which will allow us to interpret them as proposals located in and questioned by our didactic objectives but also by contextual factors. We will also explore the concept of linguistic landscape that we work to understand the way how this perspective let us place ourselves in front of violent discourses and discourse of resistance. In this framework, we are interested in revising the didactic decisions taken, in dialogue with our students’ voices, to recover the way how their experiences are narrated.

2 Some Contextual Dimensions for Our Experience

As we have anticipated in the headline of this chapter, our interest is placed in the mediations, practices and voices articulated in a proposal thought to go beyond time-space boundaries but also those imposed by our own looks, by those elements we naturalize, and thus, we stop seeing.

This proposal is part of the Linguistic Seminar in the last year of the Language and Literature Teachers’ training course in the Autonomous University of Entre Ríos (UADER), in Concepción del Uruguay,Footnote 1 and aims at the critical analysis of discursive materials included in the linguistic landscape of the city and its institutions. Departing from a look at our own institutional context, we know that every educational institution appears as a complex “ecological space where cultures cross” (Pérez Gómez 1995, p. 7, our translation) in which the public, academic, social, educational and private culture are tensed together and that this tension can only be addressed from the located knowledge which searches to promote not only reflection but also social transformation.

Methodologically, we aim at emphasizing the learning moments and the students’ prominence, using a project-based design. In this way, we direct our actions towards learner-centered learning which promotes learning by doing.

Within this framework, we are interested in reflecting on the way how a design based on a hybrid methodology or blended learning allows us to address linguistic resistance and violent landscapes with our students—notions which will be analyzed in the following paragraphs. We understand the blended learning as “the combination of different training ‘media’ (technologies, activities, and types of events) to create an optimum training program for a specific audience. The term ‘blended’ means that traditional instructor-led training is being supplemented with other electronic formats” (Bersin 2004, p. 15). This means a design which combines class activities and activities mediated by information and communication technologies, based on the objectives of the subject and the students’ needs.

In the subject proposal, the later activities involve the asynchronous exchange with other students and the interaction with the discourses provided in different formats, platforms, and applications, while class activities foster exchanges with small groups and with the class about tasks which are mainly practical, where teachersFootnote 2 adopt a guiding role. We also have face-to-face tutorial classes and an online consulting space to accompany the development of the two articulated projects: one group project that we will analyze in this chapter—mapping of linguistic landscape—and one individual project—discourse analysis of a corpus—which encloses the designed path.

The activities suggested to our students within the group project refer to a methodological design of the flipped classroom (DeLozier and Rhodes 2017; O’Flaherty and Phillips 2015) as a possible model for blended learning (Graham et al. 2014). The project that we will analyze involves collaborative work among pairs guided by the teaching staff during the face-to-face classes, while the students interact with the contents autonomously by the use of bibliographic materials and other resources available online, in extra-class time. However, even though the student-student and student-teacher transactions constitute the axis for the face-to-face activities (Denner 2019), in our proposal the contents are not relegated to a supporting role nor are the interactions limited to the face-to-face activities. Complementary reading material provided, both as pre-task and post-task activities performed before and after the face-to-face encounters and which consider reading as a strategic activity to think and learn (Solé 2005), are brought to life again and worked with in the classes, with a look into the content but also into the epistemological potential of reading and writing.

On the other hand, we would like to point out that the virtual activities of the subject focus on a closed group on Facebook, created in the year 2015 where students who have taken the subject since that school year take part. In this way we have a group which grows year after year and whose members—some are current students of the subject, others are students who have already passed the subject and finished their course of studies—not only have access to the materials, resources and instructions brought up by the teaching staff but also interact, provide their opinions, ask questions and suggest complementary material, from a polyphony which enriches us and let us think of ourselves as a “community of practice” (Wenger 2001, our translation), as a group of people who share their worries and decide to delve into their knowledge or experience interacting regularly (Wenger et al. 2002). The space also fosters a sustained dialogue between graduates, students and teachers, while also paving the way to strengthen the bond between those who have already graduated, the course of studies and the Faculty.

This group constitutes a space of privilege for exchanges about the subject in situations which are not face-to-face: here instructions are stated to foster the deepening of the analysis encouraged in class, advances are shared, the group share their doubts and collaboratively contribute to dispelling them, materials are exchanged, etc. Also, from this space, access to suggested readings is provided, together with the guides and subject documents, and to the narrative of the face-to-face encounters which take place among the students.

We understand that the use of ICT resources which we promote encourage an autonomous but also scaffolding work and an increase in students’ prominent role in the learning processes, from an ongoing process by doing. The design is presented as a continuous task which recovers advantages of both face-to-face interactions and distance interactions mediated by ICT, knowing that their use requires both a didactic project which provides the necessary framework and also an institutional plan.

However, we assume the potentialities and also the limitations of the methodological design, the specific time of the course of studies and the institutional context in which it is implemented. First, while we recognize the importance of defying the more stables methodologies in the teachers’ education, we also understand that our experience is very limited and that it shall be thought of as another instance in the interaction of our students, future teachers, with ICT tools and more dynamic ways of building up knowledge. A general look at the course of studies lets us observe that there is still an isolated use of them, which is not sufficiently articulated with other elements of the academic curriculum, and which is more at the service of information supply than as tools to expand the limits of the formative experiences we propose to our students. In this way, a secondary use, many times linked to the technical needs of the curriculum, is promoted. Thus, the ICT appear “more to reproduce elements which we used to reproduce without them, or to make those elements more attractive, than as elements which allow us to present new communication scenes for the learning where students and teachers interact in more innovative ways of teaching” (Cabero Almenara 2015, our translation).

Although we might think of the experience that we will analyze as a step towards a more autonomous and ongoing work lined up with our students, we also want to put the question, from this introduction, about the limits and possibilities offered by the ICTs in the development of proposals at university level and, in particular, in the teachers’ education. The orientation of the question aims at promoting, from our subject, a reflection about how the incorporation of ICT tools can let us establish, or not, more critical and transforming relations with our immediate contexts, encouraging a closer, less “mediated” and more committed look.

3 Linguistic Landscape, Violent Discourses and Discourses of Resistance

The notion of linguistic landscape lets us address the relationships existing between the language and the public and/or institutional space, from how it is expressed in posters, signs, graffiti and other discursive materials. Besides, it places us in front of a multidimensional and multidisciplinary object which forces us to look around again, to re-think the relationships between the subjects and objects of study, our research context and the methodological strategies we use.

The landscape has been the object of interest of different disciplines, which have addressed it from different methodological and theoretical perspectives. However, the studies of the linguistic landscape are relatively recent. In this way, as stated by Castillo Lluch y Sáez Rivera (2013), “to the history of the arts, architecture, urban design and gardening, sociology, anthropology, geography, ecology, literary theory, philosophy, aesthetics, etc., it has recently been added the linguistics, which takes the written signs from the public spaces and analyses them considering their social representations” (p. 11, our translation).

Thus, in their pioneer work and from the perspective of the sociolinguistic analysis, Landry y Bourhis (1997) link the linguistic landscape with “the visibility and salience of languages on public and commercial signs in a given territory or region” (p. 23).

The landscape is a product of a certain cultural perception and it is introduced through the distance. This distance explains, for example, the difference between the natural physical space and the landscape as a sociocultural construct. We can observe here a clear link with the “spatial turn” of the human sciences since the linguistic landscape is in charge of explaining how a social construct of the space is produced from the linguistic uses.

In this context, it is possible to differentiate between outdoor and indoor linguistic landscapes to refer, for example, to discursive materials that we find in squares, parks, streets, public transport, on the one hand, and those we can find in public spaces of institutions such as schools or universities or even in commercial environments. For example, we can think of the shop windows or signs inside a shop but placed in such a way that any passerby can see them.

Thus, we are in an environment full of signs of very different types: ephemeral, more or less long-lasting and permanent; static and mobiles; graphic, linguistic and multimodal; monolingual and multilingual; standing alone or in dialogue with other signs nearby; silenced, etc. Besides, these signs present important challenges, both at the theoretical and methodological level: where does the linguistic landscape end? Are the pieces of clothing we use part of it? A tattoo? What discursive materials of a private sphere integrate it? And we could continue placing more questions.

Even though we will leave these questions open, we assume here the importance of the personal space in the linguistic landscape since, as stated by Martín Rojo (2012), “the body is drafted as a representation space which carries the recognition or the critic to its displacement around the city” (p. 282, our translation) (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1
figure 1

Personal space and linguistic landscape (In the picture we can see a green scarf in favor of the legalization of abortion and an orange scarf belonging to the campaign that demands the separation between the State and the church in Argentina) (C. del Uruguay, 2018)

Full size image

Finally, in all the spaces mentioned we can find discourses which allow us to approach to different realities: linguistic diversity, ethnolinguistic vitality, languages cohabitation, presence of global languages, as well as discursive violence and resistances. Our teaching proposal is focused on this last point.

We can assert, with no doubts, that we daily cohabit with resistance and violent discourses which integrate our linguistic landscapes although we might not always recognize them. Our departing point is a wide relational conception of the violence since it is not defined as “a substance or an isolated fact, totally complete and standing alone, but as social relations, or in other words, as the position certain social relations take” (Martínez Pacheco 2016, p. 15, our translation).

Many of the violent discourses we interact with constitute everyday micro-aggressions but the prefix is not used to refer to their dimensions but to the way how they impregnate our practices, in our surroundings, up to the point we can get to naturalize them or make them invisible. We will be able to recover this feature later, from the testimony provided by our students.

Resistance discourses, on the other hand, try to evince, defy, stop, revert the direction of violent practices, among which we find the discursive ones.

Facing these realities, from the proposal of the subject we are interested in analyzing violent signs and signs of resistance with verbal content as a way of aggression and reply present in the linguistic landscape of our cities.Footnote 3 The implicit geolocation in the category of linguistic landscape demands not only to think about spatiality of those signs but also to bring it back in the context of our analysis; with this aim we resort to the application Urban Voices,Footnote 4 an online space of collaborative work which allows us to classify, locate and share photos to be analyzed later.

We understand that the proposal that we share herein also intends to face the tensions between the local and the global areas from the analysis proposed, at times when information and communication technology counts.

4 About Territories, Landscapes and Borders: A Look to the Didactic Decisions Taken

As a starting point for the analysis of the didactic decisions taken by the subject team, we would like to try to answer the question of why we propose to analyze our linguistic landscapes to our students.

Here we need to present complementary answers since the analysis of the linguistic landscape as part of the subject Linguistic Seminar is both a means and an end in itself. A means since it lets us collaboratively address some challenges typical of the linguistic research linked to the way how we think our relationship with the objects of knowledge, our role as researchers, the methodological strategies at stake, the difficulties involved in articulating theoretical paths to analytical practices linked to the discourse analysis when in front of texts we interact with daily and yet, we may not always see. An end, in the sense that the analysis proposed searches for a more critical look towards our surroundings, not only from the experiences suggested by the subject but also in the teaching and learning processes encouraged by our students and future teachers. It is hereby intended to “raise awareness” (Bruner 1997, our translation), to accompany our students so that they can adopt an engaged and transforming look about society.

This also involved knowing that it is the culture that provides the tools to build our own world and to understand ourselves (Bruner 1997, our translation), turning the notion of dialogic and dynamic culture more necessary. Thus, following Guitart (2008):

by “culture” we do not understand it as something merely physical, objective, far from human reality. On the contrary, people are responsible for the creation of realities when interpreting, valuing, discussing what happens to them, what surrounds them. In this way, culture is understood as shared symbols, concepts, meanings, practices which are defined and are generated through cultural units such as the family, the neighborhood, a community or a country. (p. 10, our translation)

From this perspective, education as a social practice is supported in a dialogical process which requires us to learn in and from the culture. It is set out in this way the need for mediation between cultural appearances and different ways of appropriation where the one who intercedes foster possibility conditions for the gathering, the dialogue and the transformation. Besides, it forces us to ask more questions: when and how is this context included in the classroom to be part of the object of knowledge? How much of what we teach encourages a critical and transforming look of the reality? The search for strategies to foster more critical-learning opportunities which encourage the demanded transformation, in this case, to accept that we are part of the environment we are analyzing, not only because we choose it as our object of study, but also because the same notion of context locates us inside it and it is from this place that we observe it and analyze it.

In our case, the decisions which support our work for this project—as we have previously explained, the first one of the school year—were articulated in a didactic sequence which started from the questioning about the notion of violence, addressed the notion of linguistic landscape, provided tools for the mapping and the work in the Urban Voices platform, accompanied the process of material analyzes and the writing of a report—in the school year 2018Footnote 5—and the oral presentation which closed the process. As supplementary activities, we requested our students to present their narrative expressing their experiences.

We can point out as a distinctive feature of the sequence the fact that it fosters an important interaction with different multimodal discourses—that is, discourses which include visual, audit and verbal resources, among others, to build senses—, both inside and outside the classroom. In this way, for example, the notion of violence is dealt with and questioned in class from the previous visualization of two videos of the Uruguayan band of street musicians Agarrate Catalina, both corresponding to the song “La violencia” (The violence). One is the official video clip of the song while the other shows a live presentation of this song performed by the street band.Footnote 6 Both discourses differ mainly in the graphic resources used and in the framework they are enclosed in. Thus, while the video clip starts with the song lyrics and shows different situations of violence taking place, in the live show one of the members starts talking about violence and includes a warning for the audience which results really meaningful for the objectives of the subject: “We’ll talk about violence from the violence. Thus, we warn the spectators that the terminology to be used might offend some of those who are present here today, and for that we apologize but we are talking about violence” (Agarrate Catalina, La violencia—our translation).

In didactic terms, this is precisely the worthiest element of the resources: to introduce a violent discourse which builds up a representation of violence that also makes it its own topic. This lets us articulate it with one of the challenges we will present to our students: mapping discourses which are violent, and not about violence.

The work about pre-conceptions of violence and the way how it is materialized in the discourses will be the starting point to present the relationships and tensions between violence and resistance, wondering about their limits. The work about linguistic landscapes also articulates two different scenarios: while the mapping of the groups is focused in violent discourses, in the classroom we collaboratively address resistance discourses which shape a moving linguistic landscape, from a selection of photographs taken in the protest of 8th March (8M), Women’s Day and International Women’s Strike, in the city of Concepción del Uruguay.

All these activities are accompanied by bibliography which our students read outside the classroom and to which we resource back in our face-to-face classes or in the interactions in the Facebook Group of the subject (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2
figure 2

Moving linguistic landscape: photography of the 8M taken by Antonella Cergneux (2019)

Full size image

The analysis of photographs of the 8M points mainly at recognizing the polyphony or intertextualityFootnote 7 in the discourses, addressing the relationships of anchorage and relay established between a linguistic message and the images (Barthes 1964)Footnote 8—when they exist—and analyzing the construction of enunciators, addressees and referents,Footnote 9 as instances of the process of enunciation. This process lets us address the relationships between the use of the language and the world:

On the one hand, this process allows speakers to represent facts in their utterances; on the other, an utterance is also a fact, an event, which takes place in time and space. So, enunciative categories call into question the very frontier between language and the world. (Angermüller et al. 2014, p. 136)

Meanwhile, in class we also defined the criteria that each group would take in the mapping, in an activity which places them in the need of focusing, from previous experiences of observation of their environment. In this way, the landscapes to be mapped can be an outdoor (streets, parks) or an indoor (the faculty, for example) landscape, static or in movement (a graffiti versus a banner in a demonstration or stickers in a car), and the choice of discourses can respond to a thematic criteria (politics, sexist discourses, etc.), a localization criteria (a certain area of the city, a square, etc.), linked to the type of format (walls, T-shirts, etc.), etc. Through the study we aimed at externalizing the proposal of the experience, making our choices, analysis and, as we will see later, also assessment criteria public.

The mapping is performed in groups, mostly using cell-phones to capture the images. In general, we suggest that the photographs taken let us observe contextual aspects, aspect of localization of the discourses mapped. The graphic record work is accompanied by a subject document named “Guide for the mapping of the linguistic landscape”, which presents a series of methodological guidance for this work and requires students to fill in a record sheet where they include the following dimensions (Table 1):

Table 1 Dimensions for the record sheet
Full size table

Even though the linguistic landscapes could be addressed analogously, the proposal is enriched by the use of different technologies which allow us not only to record and share elements of our surroundings but also to include them in a dialogue with pictures obtained from different geographical places and varied contexts. Besides, the use of ICT resources makes it possible that agents external from the subject, who cooperate with the mapping activities, participate in it: family, friends, etc. This forces us to think about the role played by our viewpoint and the resources used in the trimming performed on the linguistic landscape.

The students must later upload the mapped images to the platform Urban Voices, within the project Discursive Violence (Violencias DiscursivasFootnote 10). They must perform certain tasks there, in the search of the adequate contextualization of the material being shared:

  1. a.

    Describe the image briefly (What is it? Where was it taken and when? Are the author and the addressee known? Are there any other relevant aspects?).

  2. b.

    Choose one of the micro-aggressions among five options provided in the platform: social class differences, ethnic and/or religious group, LGBT, women or other minorities.

  3. c.

    Choose 5 tags for the image corresponding to the following categories: type of aggression/answer, language variety, format, field and heteroglossia.

  4. d.

    Localize the image taken geographically in a Google map integrated within the platform.

  5. e.

    Lastly, add an image or link to the graphic document.

As can be observed, the information required is directly related to the record sheet that our students had previously filled in.Footnote 11

The platform lets us gain access to the discourses uploaded visualizing their descriptions (messages) and localization in the map, by using keywords or from a photographic collage (images) (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3
figure 3

Options to access to the discourses in the platform Urban Voices

Full size image

However, we must mention that among the students there was certain resistance or difficulties to interact with Urban Voices, linked mainly to some own mistakes done during the first contact, mostly related to the uploading of images and their geographical localization. Due to this initial resistances in some groups only one person was in charge of the uploading of the mapped materials, even though we had suggested that this task was also performed as a group. Surely, more constant work with the platform will avoid some of the aforementioned difficulties, many of which were overcome with the later edition of the texts that had not been well-described, tagged or located.

The different materials which were mapped by the groups are brought back to the face-to-face meetings, where we accompany the first analysis stages and we dispel doubts and answer questions which resulted from the collaborative work they perform. From the group work, we aim at favoring “mutual learning cultures” (Bruner 1997, our translation) where ideas, knowledge and helping activities are shared.

We also planned in class a brief reportFootnote 12—addressing its structure, expected content of each section, formal requirements, style, frequent mistakes, etc.—as well as an oral presentation about the experience, with written support material, as a closure to this project. For the later, we shared with our students a “Guide for the assessment of the presentation” which aims at supporting the decisions taken for the oral communication of the experience from five dimensions: organization, content, clarity, time and support.

The oral presentations demand the involvement of all the working group and the interaction with other groups through questions and observations, as well as feedback provided by the subject teaching staff following the guide previously addressed in class.

Within the small scope of our subject, this proposal of looking at our linguistic landscapes must identify and accept its own limits: we describe here a narrow experience, many times marked by immediate needs, which takes advantage of our students’ enthusiasm but, we know, which does not take full advantage of the potential that our landscapes provide us with, as objects of analysis. However, we have tried to design a proposal which encourages the collaborative and critical work, which takes advantage of different spaces and time, which resources to ICT tools to try to go beyond the time borders that the face-to-face class impose on us and in which the teaching staff permanently accompanies the decision-taking process, both during the face-to-face meetings and while choosing the bibliography, didactic materials designed as framework for the process and the interactions on the Facebook group of the subject.

Beyond these limits, we like thinking that we propose an experience which works on the borders, the border between face-to-face and distance learning spaces, time within the classroom and time outside the classroom blend, and the commitment of our students with their own learning processes gains essential importance. We have also tried to avoid the existence of borders between virtual work and the one done in class which might threaten with turning the later into atomized practices and faintly linked to other actions.

5 About Voices and Experiences

Up to now, we have shown only one face of our proposal, linked to our didactic decisions, but we kept this section to call for the voices of students which allows us to get closer to their experiences. In order to recover these voices, we will make use of their reports—belonging to students of the school year 2018—and narratives which were required at the end of the year, with the aim of addressing their assessments of the proposal and their own learning processes.

These materials have allowed us to identify different challenges that our students have recalled many times in their narratives, among which we can mention the need to denaturalize the look, constantly questioning their own knowledge and the social prejudice; articulating theoretical paths and analytical practices, and collaborative writing.

In this way, in the students’ narratives and reports, the experience of mapping appears as challenging certainties, making the naturalization of certain discourses evident and encouraging a new and different look to the immediate environment:

From the beginning, the subject was presented as a constant challenge to the certainties. It suggested the observation and the deep analysis of the discourses that surround us, breaking up our pre-existing arguments. (Group 1, narrative of experience)Footnote 13

Through the graffiti, we could observe how a popular demonstration pass on expressions which are loaded with violent content that, on many occasions, go unseen to our eyes and our reflection. (Group 1, report conclusions)

Being used to find discursive violence in our everyday lives we believed that it was going to be easy but in practice, it was more difficult than expected. (Group 2, narrative of experience)

The mapping work we did (…) allowed us to pay attention to the texts and images loaded with violence that surrounds us. Daily, I had come across many of the graffiti that we photographed and analyzed with the group without noticing the violent messages they express, either due to being chauvinist, homophobic, racist, or loaded with ideological or religious aggressions. (Group 3, narrative of experience)

The mapping experience allows us to realize that we are surrounded by violent discourses that usually go unseen in our everyday life. (Group 4, report conclusions)

This brings about a foreign look, which invites us to rethink the violence, the everyday micro-aggressions which are materialized in different discourses of our linguistic landscapes. When facing those difficulties we have to see instances of naturalized aggressions, these experiences can be synthesized in the metaphor used by one of the groups in their narrative: “The mapping helped us open our eyes, put ourselves in the place of the analytical observer of the reality that surrounds us” (Group 3, narrative of experience).

On the other hand, when we are facing the mapped materials, the complexity of an analysis which requires that we move away from previous judgments in order to promote a deliberate articulation between the theoretical paths and the contextualized analytical practices is imposed. The practices of analysis suggested invert the traditional educational order: it is not a matter of “using” the theories learnt to analyze discourse but to start from the discourse to recover the theories which let us explain the observed phenomena. This makes us go back to our readings and look for new theoretical tools to address the challenges that the discursive material presents us with.

This complexity, as we have mentioned before, appears insistently in our students’ testimonies:

When we started working things were not as simple as we thought they would be. When choosing the material, we already came across difficulties. We realized that putting them together in a series was harder than expected. Although we could see that some of the ideologies were present on the surface, we lacked tools and scientific arguments to support our analysis. The task made us revise already learnt concepts, to delve into linguistic theories, functions of words, vocabulary, etc. (Group 1, narrative of their experience)

When we had to analyze each discourse we came across a big difficulty: the fact that we had to put theories into practice and revise linguistic categories that we had only seen as theory, or by reading discourse analysis which had been done by someone else. (Group 4, report conclusions)

The narrative brought about by our students shows this contrast between difficulties, problems and challenges, on the one hand, and positive assessment of the experience when finishing the experience, on the other. We can clearly see this in the following statement:

However, what we found problematic at the beginning ended up being enriching and gratifying. (Group 4, report conclusions)

When facing these complexities, they have especially valued the constant support received during the experience:

There were moments when we felt lost and got a bit discouraged when we weren’t able to find how to solve the activities in the right way. We felt that we lacked theoretical knowledge and that each analysis we performed, done with a lot of effort and based on previous readings, was incomplete. However, we were able to overcome those situations satisfactorily. We felt we were not alone. We listened to suggestions about the theory and practice which helped us reflect and calm down. (Group 1, experience narrative, 2018)

We were very comfortable when doing the mapping and the excitement we felt when the project started continued during the whole process. This was due to the support provided by the teachers and their good disposition. (Group 2, narrative of experience, 2018)

Moreover, it is interesting to observe that the activity itself provokes emotions which enrich the experiences of mapping and analysis:

At the moment of registering the first elements found in 8 de Junio Street, we experienced the first feelings; first, the fact that we were taking photos of the graffiti in public places at midday produced interest in neighbors and passers-by, who looked skeptical and asked themselves ‘what are these people doing?’ A man even approached me and asked me why we were taking pictures, and I explained to him that it was for a university project. (Group 4, narrative of experienceFootnote 14)

Beyond the ideological assumptions that guided the choice of topic, we discovered that the mapped discourses questioned ourselves directly as women. Thus, the experience was simultaneously affected by political, personal and academic issues. This combination of different aspects of our lives lets us get involved comprehensively in the experience of localizing, registering and analyzing violent discourses. (Group 2, narrative of experience, 2018)

If, as stated by Nelson (2007), “the experience is the basic unit of development since nothing related to the psychological area happens without it” (p. 8, our translation), we are certain that the project shared with our students has fostered necessary and meaningful learning experiences which are worth recovering from our own voices:

This has been an absolutely enriching experience for us, which made as constantly question our own knowledge and certainties, expose groundless preconceptions. Even though it produced uncertainty and doubts, it also lets us build a different way on how to look at the world, a more critic and sensitive way. (Group 1, narrative of experience)

We learnt to support our reading of reality from the field of Discourse Analysis. (Group 2, narrative of experience)

The experience was highly positive (…) and it provided a new perspective about the cartography of the city, a more critical and conscious one. (Group 4, narrative of experience)

A point to be highlighted is that there are no mentions, in the narrative analyzed, linked to face-to-face, distance and mediated by ICT activities, but for some references to the use of the platform Urban Voices as a resource to identify borders between the working modalities suggested, which could be read as a strength of the methodological design shared.

In that regard, one of the narrative highlights in the project planning the existence of a schedule of activities shared among teachers and students, as a didactic resource facilitator:

The work proposals were all organized from the beginning of the year (dates, activities, deadlines, etc.) This organization let us be better organized and methodical and we could plan the steps to be followed. (Group 1, narrative of experience, 2018)

This schedule, aimed at organizing the shared tasks and articulating spaces, time and activities, was not a static tool but a didactic planning resource shared, revised and adjusted according to the needs which arose during the implementation of the project. Together with the subject documents and the didactic guides, it was a resource at the service of a more autonomous work done by the students.

6 Some Final Comments

We have previously mentioned that the mapping experience for our subject is both a means and an end, and we have paid special attention to the latter to analyze the experience suggested to our students. About the former, we would like to mention here—very briefly—an activity which works as a link between the two projects that nurture the subject—the mapping experience described herein and the discourse analysis of the corpus—.

During other courses, before including the mapping experience into the seminar, we suggested our students draw a person doing research, as a strategy to externalize conceptions which allowed us to later outline the research as an axis for the didactic proposal of the subject. In the drawings the representations linked to the experimental science, recurring to special elements—laboratories—or specific objects—test tubs, magnifying glass, scrubs—were recurrent.

After the mapping experiences, we provided our students with the same instructions. Even though there still were some of the elements mentioned before in their drawings, we would like to mention here two productions: one, because it defies the limits of the instructions (image 4), and the other, because of how it articulates with the experience analyzed here (image 5).

In the first one, Eugenia chooses four images which move away from a static view of research to represent the processes and relationships: “three people are talking, there is an open book, a notebook and a screen”, she explains. In this way, as a response to an instruction which required the drawing of “a person” it appears the need to represent the collective to be able to account for research which is necessarily dialogic. The research here is not inherent to an individual subject but to a social practice which is supported by the face-to-face or mediated dialogue and as a response to a text, and which is necessarily polyphonic (Fig. 4).

Fig. 4
figure 4

Research as collective action (photography of Eugenia’s drawing)

Full size image

In the second image, Camila presents the mapping strategy as a research experience to show a researcher taking pictures. Considering the continuity of both activities,Footnote 15 the links are clear for the group and allow us to think of ourselves as researchers in the context of the practices promoted by the seminar (Fig. 5).

Fig. 5
figure 5

Mapping as research (photography of Camila’s drawing)

Full size image

Camila’s drawing makes it possible to articulate the discourses, interventions and perceptions about a doing which is not just looking but which is supported by the systematicity to foster interpretations which aim at a better and deeper understanding of the phenomena and also their transformation. It also lets us see the researcher of the Human and Social Sciences from a different perspective. The latter also appears in one of the stories obtained: “Another important issue was to understand the researcher of the social sciences from a different perspective” (Group 4, narrative of the experience).

The appearance of these drawing and these reflections in the context of our proposal is worth mentioning. In the same way, the fact that our students value in such a positive way the work done, a design which aims at widening the classroom limits, at going beyond temporal and spatial borders, and which wants to highlight the prominent role of each student, encourages us to revise it and strengthen it.

The use of ICT here makes the student-student and student-teacher dialogue possible, but also contributes to systematizing and sharing the mappings performed. Another technological tool allows us to record and keep the images of the linguistic landscape. However, we must go through the cities: mapping and analyzing the linguistic landscape requires movement, a special attitude, an effort to have a second look to what surrounds us with new eyes. Like a flâneur or flâneuse (Elkin 2017), we must walk through the city and observe it, in an active way, building the object of study.

What can technology do? What can’t it do? The ICTs are here to accompany the process, to facilitate the collaborative work, but they do not replace the itineraries where we place ourselves not only as walkers but also as researchers. As stated by the words of one of our students:

I started the search without previously fixed preconceptions, I just left my house with my camera in the search of places where I knew I could find graffiti. The first place I went to was the back of the city cemetery and the cemetery of the Israeli community next to it. I didn’t find anything here, but I unexpectedly found my first picture near there … (Group 4, narrative of experience)

Revising this proposal, we consider that we have included technological tools to our educational proposal from three complementary perspectives (Cabero Almenara 2014):

  • As ICT (information and communication technologies), as facilitators, passers of information and resources, by the active use of the Facebook group.

  • As TLK (technologies for learning and knowledge), learning facilitators, reality analysis and knowledge spreading, using technological resources at the service of knowledge appropriation by our students.

  • As TEP (technologies for empowerment and participation), tools for participation and collaboration, focusing on the social dimension of learnings, mainly through the collaborative use of the Urban Voices platform.

As stated by the quoted author, we believe that “the ICTs are just curricular elements, which work in interaction with others, and as a consequence, its meaning in the teaching-learning process will depend on the decisions taken with respect to the rest of the components.” (Cabero Almenara 2014, our translation). In this case, the use of the chosen technologies has tried to encourage a more ubiquitous learning in the subject, from its design which—as we have mentioned before—tries to delete the frontier between face-to-face and distance activities.

To conclude this process, I would like to bring back another voice, Camila’s, member of the teaching staff of the subject, and her assessment of the experience:

In particular, I enjoyed this stage… I was mapping the city at times. In fact, after doing this job, no poster or graffiti in public spaces went unseen to me and I believe that from this activity our critical look at everyday discourses changed. I am sure that students experience this too. (Carolina, narrative and assessment of the proposal)

This project aims at fostering this critical look, though there are still many challenges to face, not only with regard to the deepening and continuity of the mapping of the linguistic landscape of our city, but also, and above all, in the search of new strategies which lead the students through educational paths which are becoming more autonomous but also more scaffolding, more engaged, collaborative and critical.