Keywords

1 Introducing This Volume: Time Again to Think About Space

The origins of this volume can be traced back to initial conversations at the 7th Linguistic Landscape Workshop (LL7) in Berkeley, California, followed by further discussions at LL8 in Liverpool before plans crystalized in Orlando, Florida at the annual meeting of the American Association of Applied Linguistics in 2016. Since that time, work on language and literacy teaching in the linguistic landscape has expanded considerably (Bever & Richardson, 2020; Bradley, et al., 2018; Krompák et al., 2021; Li & Marshall, 2020; Malinowski, 2018; Malinowski et al., 2020; Maxim, 2020; Niedt & Seals, 2020; Roos & Nicholas, 2020; Shang & Xie, 2020; Wiśniewska, 2019; Zheng, et al., 2018). At the same time, the prospect of expanding our teaching and learning into new spaces is now faced with a pandemic-induced world order that is challenging us to rethink how to make pedagogical use of spaces that have become even more dynamic and ephemeral. If our sites of engagement become too remote, locked down, or inaccessible, how are we as educators able to facilitate students’ participation in exploring the ways in which language, people, and place co-construct each other? Indeed, the mobility that we foregrounded in our earlier work (Malinowski et al., 2020) is now tested like no one could have imagined just a few years ago. From the more immediate challenges to classroom learning posed by masks, physical distancing, and the continued threat of infection, to larger considerations such as the inaccessibility of—or much restrained access to—study abroad and the feasibility of community-based learning projects, language and literacy teaching in the linguistic landscape finds itself having to reconsider the places where it can operate. For example, does the virtual access that Zoom and other new means of communication have afforded us provide alternative possibilities for understanding material, social, geographic, and historical contexts?

Indeed, it is hard to imagine that the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic will not have long-lasting effects on our movements, communications, and interactions. In that sense, the global pandemic has presented itself as a hinge event, that is to say, as an occurrence that will radically reshape the world we live in. One of the primary ways in which the pandemic has done this is in how it has forced us to re-envision notions of space and place both in the built environment and in the social environment (Lou et al., 2022). Seemingly familiar contexts have taken on new functions and configurations - the living room becomes a classroom, the meeting backdrop becomes a palm tree-lined tropical beach, the deserted city street becomes a pop-up bike lane. Words such as “confinement,” “social distancing,” and “quarantine” have all taken on new meanings in this new context and they all point to how we inhabit our social and physical worlds. Previously unseen additional signage has appeared, from one-way aisles at the supermarket to multimodal posters indicating whether and how to wear face coverings, a practice that was sometimes controversial in intercultural settings and has now become controversial in intra-cultural settings (e.g., pro- vs. anti-maskers). This situation has also made us more aware of the environment in which we live, as well as the language and the people in it, if for no other reason that we spent more time inside since travel was curtailed, and work and schooling often happened from home or in a much smaller geographical perimeter. In this context, we have been called to notice how the use of language and other semiotic resources in the public space shapes the space as much as it is shaped by it.

The extent and import of these changes are captured effectively in Adami et al.’s (2020) analysis of communication and interaction during the pandemic, where they identify a “changing semiotic regime” in which “the dimensions of social interaction have changed their combinatory possibilities, as the times and paces, the spaces and places of our activities and roles have had to change” (p. 5). Specifically, they point to how the restrictions and dangers of the pandemic have resulted in many of our naturalized and habituated practices’ becoming no longer viable, causing us to reflect about these past practices while also looking to establish possible new ones. They term this period of reflection and creation a “re-disciplining process” that requires people to “reconsider, replan and recreate ways in which they conduct activities, interact with others and manage space” (Adami, 2020). In discussing the pandemic’s effect on notions of space, Adami et al. (2020) highlight the blurring of traditional boundaries between public and private, and real and virtual spaces, which have resulted from this process of resituating ourselves in a pandemic-inflected world order.

In this way, the altered social, semiotic, and educational landscapes of the Covid era form a lens for this volume that is both inescapable and appropriate. While the nine chapters that comprise the volume reflect teaching and research endeavors from years leading up to the pandemic, we cannot but read them now in light of the collective experiences of 2020 and beyond. Chapters that extol the benefits of language learning activities in physical classrooms, on shared school grounds, in neighborhoods and cities that surround students’ usual places of learning, and in study abroad settings across national borders and accessible only by plane, train, or boat, must now first confront the reader’s skeptical question that has become all but second nature: “Yes, but can we still do such things today?” While the present volume, in origin, spirit, and substance, builds from the same set of pedagogical challenges and conceptual energies as did our earlier volume, Language teaching in the linguistic landscape: Mobilizing pedagogy in public space (Malinowski et al., 2020), we acknowledge that it cannot be read without considering the very loss of mobility experienced by language students, teachers, and researchers around the world since the onset of the pandemic.

At the same time, we see the recent profound curtailment of mobilities as yet another example of the ever changing conditions under which language teaching and learning have always taken place. Precisely for that reason, we center this volume around the concept of spatialization. Spatialization, as we elaborate below (see Sect. 3), highlights the interactions of learners and teachers and their textual, material, and environmental affordances over various scales of time as generative of space, as much as they may be constrained by it. Language learners and teachers must both adapt to (in the intransitive sense) their changing circumstances, while symbolically and/or materially adapting (in the transitive) circumstances to suit their needs. In terms of second language development, Lantolf, Poehner and Swain (2018) remind us that “…cognitive processing does not depend on mechanisms inside of learners’ heads which are assumed to ensure that acquisition is the same no matter where it occurs (e.g., in everyday or classroom settings), but on the affordances encountered in different environments and on the nature of learners’ relations to these” (p. 8). Whether one endeavors to learn or teach language within the confines of a traditional classroom, or immersed in the sights and sounds of outdoor spaces replete with the L2, or quarantined at home with only online or print materials to support one’s practice, learners’ encounters with the affordances of their environments may be best seen as “relations” when the human and symbolic dimensions of the encounters are the pedagogical focus (as in Lantolf, Poehner, and Swain’s (2018) accounting). These relations may be further seen as “spatializations” when their materiality is also taken into account.

As the assemblage of visible, audible, and otherwise textualized languages of public space, the linguistic landscape forms a rich context for understanding how material and environmental affordances play an active role in language learning—and how language teachers can bring their L2 curricula to life (e.g., Bever & Richardson, 2020; Chern & Dooley, 2014; Chesnut et al., 2013; Malinowski, 2016; Maxim, 2020; Rowland, 2013; Sayer, 2010). This volume continues with the outward-oriented sense of purpose we articulated previously to “contribute to productive transformations in pedagogical practice and social action in language and culture classrooms” (Malinowski et al., 2020, p. 10), while returning with a renewed sense of urgency to the spatial practices of language teachers and learners, wherever and however they may find themselves in the world.

2 A Short History of Space in L2 Teaching and Learning

As evidenced in Niedt and Seals’ (2020) volume, detailing how people’s “naturalistic, everyday encounters [...] themselves can be a form of education, often in nontraditional educational settings” (p. 2) and Krompák, Fernández-Mallat, and Meyer’s (2021) volume revealing the ideological struggles and learning opportunities in the “educationscapes’‘of schools and communities, space and place are at the forefront of current inquiry into the dynamics of second language acquisition and learning (cf. Benson, 2021). However, beyond even the frame of linguistic and semiotic landscapes, the emergence in the past two decades of notions such as human-environmental ecologies of learning (e.g., Kramsch, 2002; van Lier, 2004) and the ‘wilding’ of language teaching in naturalistic activities (Dubreil & Thorne, 2017) was not without precedent. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see a direct lineage for spatial concerns in second language and literacy research at least as far back as the ascendance of Communicative Language Teaching in the 1970s and 1980s from the Grammar Translation and Audiolingual methods before it. In particular, the emphasis placed on the ‘authenticity’ of linguistic input for learners to negotiate created a need for authentic texts, real-world tasks, and so-called native speakers of the target language, even as these were often represented in idealized form through the “textual traces’‘of language textbooks and curricula (cf. Widdowson, 1998; Chapelle, 2020). The foregrounding of sociolinguistic, pragmatic and cultural elements in (communicative) competence, the growing use of corpora in materials development and teaching, and pedagogical approaches incorporating cultural exchange, global simulation, and even study abroad may all be seen as outcomes of the still relatively recent insistence upon ‘real world authenticity’ in L2 education.

One of the early works to raise awareness about the changing contexts for language use was the New London Group’s (1996) heavily cited manifesto, “Pedagogy of Multiliteracies,” and its subsequent revisions (e.g., Cope & Kalantzis, 2015). Pointing to the expansion, if not explosion, of new forms of communication that arose from increasing globalization, mobility, and internet-driven connectedness, the New London Group (1996) called into question the efficacy of traditional approaches to literacy and literacy pedagogy and proposed instead the term “multiliteracies” to capture the dramatic growth of new contexts, new textual genres, and new modalities for communication. Indeed, the notion that literacies are plural and that they simultaneously involve radically different ways of knowing (each mode with its characteristic logics) echoes a key insight of spatial theorists of the time that “space” is not singular but “the sphere of possibility of the existence of multiplicity in the sense of contemporaneous plurality” (Massey, 2005, p. 9). The New London Group’s mobilization of visual, audio, gestural, and spatial modes in tandem with the linguistic mode as part of a composite literacies paradigm that would address “the realities of increasing local diversity and local connectedness” (New London Group, 1996, p. 64) has continued to offer important guidance for teachers in expanding language learners’ meaning-making options (e.g., Kern, 2000; Paesani et al., 2016; Swaffar & Arens, 2005).

At roughly the same time that the New London Group (1996) was highlighting new modes and contexts for communication, the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) was completing its National Standards project (1996) that looked to expand the U.S. language teaching profession’s conceptualization of language study to include interaction and even collaboration with communities where the target language was spoken. While the National Standards (1996) did not feature the new genres and modalities emphasized by the New London Group (1996), ACTFL’s inclusion of community as a locus of language use reflects the growing understanding in the profession of the need to consider a much wider range of contexts for language use. It is important to note here that “community,” as a term, can be problematic. While it can seem to refer to a static, well-defined or a priori delimited group of people, including in ACTFL’s documentation, this approach would be reductionist. Community may very well designate a social aggregate but it should be envisioned as a dynamic construct, in other words, as the very process of this aggregation and in the actions that individuals take to develop, sustain, and nurture forms of sociality and solidarity that are recognizable and, to a large degree, shared (see, for example, Latour, 2005; Thorne, 2011). It is this view of community as both social process and outcome that we adopt here.

Further developments in theorizing the spatialization of language use followed, marked perhaps most notably by two seminal publications in 2003: Scollon and Scollon’s Discourses in Place and Block’s The Social Turn in Second Language Acquisition. As reflected in the title, Scollon and Scollon (2003) presented a systematic approach for analyzing how language derives meaning from its placement in the material world. Calling this approach “geosemiotics,” Scollon and Scollon (2003) highlight the inseparability of social meaning from the material locatedness of language and discourse. For language practitioners, then, geosemiotics represented another reminder that context, that is, the social and material situation in which language is used, is a fundamental component of the meaning-making process. The situatedness of meaning also lies at the heart of Block’s (2003) critical re-evaluation of Second Language Acquisition (SLA), in which he interrogates the absence of socially informed approaches to language use in standard input-interaction-output models of SLA. While Block (2003) considers a range of social variables that play a role in mediating language use, central to his analysis is the need to move away from viewing language use as an isolated, individual process and to recognize language use as contextually situated.

More recent developments in language studies that have extended the profession’s attention to the centrality of context, environment, and the material world for meaning-making have focused on the ecology and socio-materialism of language use. A fundamental premise of ecological approaches to language learning and use (e.g., van Lier, 2004; Levine, 2020) is the close inter-relationships between language users and the environments around them. Van Lier (2000) himself refers to these environments as affording a “semiotic budget, which provides opportunities for meaningful actions in different situations” (p. 252). In their transdisciplinary framework, the Douglas Fir Group (2016) reaffirms the need to view language use from an ecological perspective that takes into account micro-level social activities, meso-level sociocultural institutions, and macro-level society-wide ideological structures. Sociomaterialism continues this emphasis on the centrality of social and physical environments for understanding human interaction and communication by illuminating the entangled relationships, the semiotic assemblages of humans, artifacts, and environments, and the emergent, process-based nature of the social realm that characterizes human action (Thorne et al., 2021).

Notions of space and the spatialization of human interaction and communication have unsurprisingly also been a major focus of Linguistic Landscape (LL) Studies. From its very early iterations (e.g., Landry & Bourhis, 1997), LL research has looked to analyze and understand language use in public space. Geosemiotics (Scollon & Scollon, 2003) and its emphasis on the inextricable relationship between the emplacement of public texts and their meaning continues to undergird LL methodology. More recent developments have also examined the perspectives of those public texts’ authors as well as of the citizens who interact with them as sources of meaning (Garvin, 2010; Huebner & Phoocharoensil, 2017; Lamarre, 2014). This emphasis on understanding the “human-sign interface” shifts the focus to exploring the different and very complex ways in which individuals perceive and engage with public signage in their everyday lives (Zabrodskaja & Milani, 2014, p. 2). Further facilitating the field’s understanding and analysis of space have been applications of Lefebvre’s conceptualization of space as consisting of conceived, perceived, and lived spaces (Gorter, 2018; Trumper-Hecht, 2010).

3 Spacing, Placing and Dislocating: Three Layers of Spatialized Teaching and Curricular Design

The chapters of this volume, in concert with the literature reviewed thus far in the introduction, reveal a number of significant ways in which spatialization is a productive lens through which language teachers can reimagine and reevaluate their courses, curricula, and lesson designs. As we suggested above, “spatialization” refers in a general sense to language educators’ actions and initiatives that make reasoned use of the ways in which language, people, and place co-construct each other through discursive practice. The notion of spatialization draws upon Leander and Sheehy’s (2004) insight that “space is not static—as in metaphorical images of borders, centers, and margins—it is dynamically relational” (p. 1). In this case, the dynamic relations of interest are those between language learners and other participants in local meaning-making processes, whether they be human or non-human, material or virtual. Spatialization, as in Canagarajah’s (2018) model of a spatial (rather than a cognitivist) orientation to competence, prioritizes how languaging activities “are aligned with other semiotic resources, social networks, and material features that account for the success of communicative activities” (p. 38). Language teachers seeking to capitalize on this pedagogical approach focus not on perfunctory communication per se but how to facilitate students’ participation in communicative activities as they are situated in (and co-constructive of) material, social, geographic, and historical contexts.

In order to make this general orientation toward spatialization more concretely actionable, we propose the following three-layered framework for teachers and curriculum designers to consider:

  • Spacing is the configuring of learners, instructors, extra-institutional participants (e.g., community members), physical and virtual environments, technologies, and interactional purposes into various alignments with expected affordances and constraints for language learning and use. At a fundamental level, Spacing suggests a teacher’s involvement in understanding and manipulating the respective merits and limitations of “in-class” or “out-of-class,” and “virtual,” “in-person,” or hybrid settings for learning activities. We may also use Spacing as a way to draw together notions such as “community-based language learning,” “telecollaboration,” and “language learning in the wild,” for instance—terms that have distinct histories and practices associated with them, but which are alike in that they serve as overarching categories suggesting generally where and how learning activities take place, and make assumptions about participant roles and purposes that are distinct from traditional classroom-based language learning. We wish to emphasize, too, that a teacher’s endeavors in this regard are not limited to the time before a school term or class session begins; Spacing is an iterative, even constant, aspect of teaching practice, in which regular adjustments and improvements are made to material, technological, and social conditions for learning.

  • Placing is the gerund form of the transitive verb “to place.” As such, it highlights the agentive role that language instructors play in making intentional pedagogical use of the particular geographic, historic, cultural, political and material/virtual places in which language learning takes place. However, more than simply representing places as background illustrations to adorn the pages of a language textbook, or touristic playgrounds for a study abroad experience, Placing recognizes the ways in which intersecting senses of community, memory, and imagination inhere in locales that may be as vast as a region’s territory, or as focused as a street corner. In this sense, Placing engages the human and cultural geographic notion of “place” as a site for the accrual of meaning: in the words of Tuan (1977, p. 6), “if we think of space as that which allows movement, then place is pause; each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place.” A study abroad program that not only teaches its students about the host country and town but involves them meaningfully in activities with members of the local population, while asking them to interpret and reflect on the particularity of their experiences is one example of Placing in teaching practice.

  • Dislocating is our term for the third layer in a spatialized language pedagogy. While it may carry unpleasant connotations for those who have experienced physical dislocations (of joints, or of oneself), in a metaphorical sense “dislocation” points to a profound aspect of second language and culture learning, in which encounters with the unfamiliar give rise to the potential for novel meanings and new identities. As Kramsch writes, “in the early stages of second language acquisition, especially as it occurs in classrooms or in settings far removed from communities of native speakers, signs are dislocated from their natural context of occurrence. The referential relation between signs and their objects is not (yet) perceived as natural and necessary, and the symbolic possibilities of the sign are much more evident than at later stages” (Kramsch, 2009, p. 13). In the linguistic landscape, of course, it is not just signs that are dislocated from their ‘natural context of occurrence,’ but language learners themselves. Whether immersed in the sights and sounds of a far-away town or a long-familiar neighborhood, students may be tasked “to become aware of linguistic forms and begin to think deeply about what cultural meanings and social identities are being enacted through these forms” (Sayer, 2020, p. 332). Among other functions it performs, this task of understanding sociocultural meanings in the unique places, times, and contexts of the linguistic landscape—and through a language with which one is less familiar—can productively dislocate students, bringing moments of insight and self-awareness through unfamiliar encounters and different frames of reference. To be sure, Dislocating will not happen of its own accord; teachers can create conditions for students’ dislocation and relocation, both metaphorically and physically, leading them to possibly profound moments of intersubjective and transcultural learning, and supporting them as they negotiate new meanings and identities.

While the naming of these three ‘layers’ involves a degree of arbitrariness, and the lines between them are not meant to be absolute, we feel that a tripartite framework such as this allows for some critical distinctions to be made. For instance, teachers may have their students participate in an international telecollaboration/virtual exchange, thereby proactively integrating (Spacing) two distinct settings for learning—that is, the physical classroom and an online telecollaboration—but the issue of how to substantively incorporate into the exchange facets of the geographic and historically situated sites where the partner students are located (Placing) is a separate question altogether. Similarly, a teacher leading a study abroad or community-based language learning program may place their students’ learning activities by means of student-led interviews, site visits, and/or homestays with local residents, but without a way to capture the historically-laden discursive practices students observe and co-construct with their participants, they might miss the opportunity to facilitate students’ encounter with, and analysis of, cross-cultural stereotypes (Dislocating and relocating). With multiple tools in their toolkit for spatializing language pedagogy, then, teachers can not only plan where, how, and with whom learning activities might best take place, but also maintain an openness to allowing people and places to act transformatively upon those teaching and learning processes themselves, with a commitment to reflect and grow from the experience (Byrd Clark & Dervin, 2014; Toohey et al., 2020).

4 Organization of This Volume and Chapter Summaries

The three ‘layers’ of Spacing, Placing, and Dislocating that we have introduced above offer, in turn, one possible way to read, read across, and read between the contributions to this volume. Each chapter offers valuable insights into ways in which the Spacing of language learning activities, the Placing of pedagogical encounters in real-world contexts and communities, and Dislocating as the design of opportunities for defamiliarization and refamiliarization all work together to enrich learning. We have grouped three chapters under each of these three notions, not to imply that they only attend to the one notion but rather to suggest points of departure from which to consider the many pedagogical, conceptual, and methodological innovations that each chapter offers. Further, in an effort to bridge the rich ideas of the chapters with the practical concerns of syllabus design, project development, lesson planning, and other hands-on practices of language teaching, we open each of the three sections with a list of guiding questions that further develop these different facets of spatializing language pedagogy.

  1. I.

    Reimagining learning spaces through the linguistic landscape

The first three chapters of the volume challenge us both to think of new language teaching and learning spaces for our students, and to imagine new purposes, configurations, and techniques for teaching in already-familiar contexts. The opening chapter by Ritchey steps into the latter role, as it proposes a set of pragmatics-focused classroom activities designed for university-level intermediate learners of French as a foreign language. Asserting that “the discourses that appear in the linguistic landscape open a window onto sociocultural norms and practices” (p. 22), the chapter focuses specifically on the area of politeness as it is revealed and enacted in the linguistic landscape, drawing from the insight that the LL “freezes an act of (im)politeness for examination and analysis, which gives learners the time and space to explore it” (p. 24). Drawing upon a five dimensional model of sociopragmatic politeness, Ritchey develops an activity design framework that focuses students’ attention on the role of linguistic form in communicating politeness, raises their awareness about differences in the affordances and constraints of speech and writing, and leads students toward politeness strategies that take into account diverse author and audience positionalities. Through its conceptual work, examples, and discussion on applications and future directions, Ritchey amply illustrates how classroom work on pragmatics in the LL helps teachers to overcome some of the typical limitations of classroom instructional materials and pushes L2 students to “reexamine their assumptions about cultural and social difference” (p. 39).

The chapter by Yu, Moeller, and Lu, “Exploring language and culture in the novice Chinese classroom through linguistic landscape,” is one of a number of studies in this volume that demonstrate how teachers and students can take advantage of rich learning opportunities in the neighborhoods and towns surrounding their schools. Through a social constructivist lens, the authors propose that culture and cultural learning in the LL are at the heart of a “dynamic and dialectic” (p. 47) learning opportunity: students create “webs of significance” (p. 45) around textual artifacts, and both observe and co-construct culture through the documentation of languaging practices in local linguistic landscapes. The chapter follows the students of a short-term immersion Mandarin Chinese program on a field trip to a local grocery store and shopping plaza in a midwestern U.S. city, where they carried out and documented a series of guided observational and interactional tasks. Through analysis of students’ journal reflections and multimedia presentations, the authors suggest avenues for language teachers to “create a learning space for our students to move from the noticing of cultural products to the understanding of cultural practices and perspectives” (p. 57).

In the third chapter, Vinagre and Llopis-García explore the potential of using LL studies in the “space” of a telecollaboration (Dooly, 2017; O’Dowd, 2016, 2021) between the Universidad Autonóma de Madrid and Columbia University in New York City. In particular, this project aims to harness the multimodal nature of both the learning environment and the linguistic landscape to develop students’ multiliteracies. Anchored in the idea that places can shape the meaning potential of a text, the course seeks to engage meaningfully with the physical environment itself as a generative construct for textual meaning-making. In an asynchronous two and a half month exchange, students worked in pairs to engage with their own and each other’s cultures. The course culminated in an activity whereby students took photos of shops, billboards, posters, announcements and walls in their respective cities that showed how English was used in Madrid and how Spanish was used in New York. During the subsequent compare-and-contrast analysis, students critically examined issues of authorship, audience, and geo-semiotics (why the signs were there and their meaning). They concluded, for example, that English signs in Madrid were mostly geared toward a certain commodification of the language and targeted a consumer audience, giving the English language a value-added. By contrast, the Spanish signs in New York aimed at better including the Spanish-speaking community more, by providing informational content, while simultaneously positing Spanish as an inferior language to English. In so doing, students noticed the differing and complex faces of globalization through the contingencies and ideologies conveyed through language use.

  1. II.

    Places made and remade through learning in the linguistic landscape

In Part II of the volume, all three chapters explore how learning activities situated in the linguistic landscape can unveil place-based meaning-making practices and thereby rich learning opportunities for language users. In his examination of the K-12 schoolscapes in one school district in rural Oregon in the western United States, Troyer undertakes a nexus analysis (Scollon & Scollon, 2004) in order to uncover the factors that affect and ultimately control the publicly displayed discourse of those schools. Of particular interest is the degree of agency that teachers and students have in including bi- and multilingual signage within schools, particularly within a school district in which administrators have had a history of excluding languages other than English from the schoolscape. The nexus analysis proves to be a particularly efficacious methodology for investigating more deeply the factors at play in the construction of meaning in public space. In particular, exploring the historical body of the actors involved in schools reveals discourses that continue to have an influence on school behavior. The project highlights how instructors respond to the unique assemblages of people, histories, and environments in their schools by shaping the schoolscape through their agentive choices to include multilingual signage in their classrooms and hallways. Thus, while the teachers do not necessarily engage their students in explicit learning activities with the schoolscape, they are placing meaningful multi-lingual artifacts in spaces that foster a shared sense of community.

Jiménez-Caicedo integrates the linguistic landscape of Spanish Harlem in New York City into a multiliteracies-oriented advanced Spanish course to develop not only Spanish learners’ registerial repertoire but also their understanding of the social and political complexities of immigrant communities. Through ethnographically based research projects that frame the linguistic landscape as a conceived, perceived, and lived space (Malinowski, 2015), learners take on an agentive role in advancing their multiliteracies development by serving as chief investigators of the socio-cultural and political complexity of Spanish Harlem, a community that is in close geographical proximity to their institutional home of Columbia University. As such, they find themselves having to consider multiple layers of spatial production and their own reflexive awareness of participation in said practice. Central to the reflective practice of this ethnographic research project is the recognition of and respect for the local community and the establishment of a balanced symmetrical relationship (Norton, 2000) between student researchers and community members.

Ruvalcaba and Aguilera, in their chapter, explore the linguistic capital of Tucson, Arizona, in an effort to render visible the multilingual makeup of their city and de facto making it easily accessible to new arrived members of the community (e.g., international students, migrants, refugees) by mapping out Tucson’s multilingualism and transforming it into an asset for these communities. Driven by social justice pursuits, the authors envision the LCP as a way to spatialize language practices in Tucson by engaging the notion of inhabiting in combining the visible linguistic landscape and the multilingual practices of the people in the geographical space. In so doing, they allow their students to examine how members of marginalized and excluded language communities gain a sense of place by creating their own (linguistic) representation of the space they inhabit and sustaining their own cultural practices. In including an asset-mapping component to their pedagogical repertoire, Ruvacalba and Aguilera also endeavored to spatialize instruction by connecting English learners to the Tucson communities in meaningful and mutually emancipatory ways that highlighted cultural resources that “persist despite being historically ignored, erased, and/or appropriated” (p. 156).

  1. III.

    Dislocating selves and locating worlds in the linguistic landscape

The following three contributions foreground dialogic encounters with less familiar discursive worlds as a window into LL-based pedagogies. Drawing on practices in literacy studies and community-based learning, the first contribution, by Bever and Azaz, highlights how language learning in the linguistic landscape can extend beyond formal schooling to include community members who, recognizing the multilingualism in their midst, make use of shop signs to advance their own language learning. Situated in multilingual spaces in Tucson, Arizona in the southwestern United States, their project features the agentive role that community members can play in leveraging both their multilingual surroundings as well as readily available online learning resources to advance their own language acquisition. As such, this project emphasizes the role of the signmaker as both author and learner and thereby highlights the meaning-making that takes place not only in the emplacement of the sign but also in its production. Significant for the production process is the signmakers’ anticipation of their readership, that is, their customers, and the resulting efforts to establish discursive spaces for dialogue and community-building.

Through the lens of a second-year course at CUNY designed to engage students with topics that affect the city of New York, Sekerina and Brooks, in their chapter, heed the call by the American Psychological Association to internationalize the psychology curriculum and design foundational courses that target five specific learning goals: knowledge base, scientific inquiry and critical thinking, ethical and social responsibility, communication, and professional development. After receiving training in LL Studies methodology, students conducted their own interdisciplinary research project on urban linguistic diversity. The objective was for students to gain some understanding of the procedures associated with collecting, analyzing, and writing about real data in the context of multilingual NYC. Consequently, the spaces associated with this project comprised neighborhoods where Chinese, Greek, Hebrew, Russian and Spanish were spoken. In terms of spatialization, students were encouraged to collect data from the physical environment (e.g., bilingual signage) as well as to interact directly with residents of the neighborhoods (e.g., through interviews and surveys). As a result, the project yielded insights into and ushered discussions on immigration patterns within NYC and strategies immigrants utilize to foster and curate a sense of place by preserving their cultural and social identities through language usage. The authors conclude that students were able to incorporate “appropriate levels of complexity (e.g., individual, group, societal/cultural) in interpreting local residents’ attitudes about multilingualism within their communities” (p. 214).

The chapter by Zimmerman, Noodin, Mayes, and Perley, “Indigenous conceptual cartographies and landscape pedagogy: Vibrant modalities across semiotic domains,” reveals how language teaching and learning can be nothing less than world-creation. Pointing to “relationships between language, landscape, and cosmology” (p. 226), the authors analyze a narrated walking tour at an indigenous community school, part of an Ojibwe language and cultural revitalization campaign on lands co-located with the northern U.S. state of Wisconsin. Through a carefully documented community walk from four different narrative/subject positions, the chapter expands upon the LL walking tour methodology (Garvin, 2010) to analyze the organic, symbiotic relations that characterize “indigenous conceptual cartographies” (p. 244)—that is, native ways of knowing, being, moving, and languaging local landscapes that cannot come to be but within those landscapes themselves. “Vibrancy,” then, is an emergent concept from this chapter that points to ways for language learners and teachers in dialogue “to access the vitality of language, landscape, and cosmological relationships in the service of language, cultural, and spiritual learning” (p. 224), and thus significantly expanding realms of possibility in L2 teaching and learning.

5 Our Hopes for This Volume

This volume recognizes challenges to our mobility and thus places its emphasis on thinking creatively about the genesis and adaptation of rich environments for learning, regardless of how mobile one has to be to access it. Whether it is within the four walls of a school (Troyer), in virtual telecollaborative spaces (Vinagre & Llopis-García), in a nearby multilingual neighborhood (Jiménez-Caicedo), or in any other location for language learning, this volume looks to highlight possible configurations of space, the intentional use of space for learning, and the dynamic relations in space that allow for a thorough examination of place-based meaning-making processes that are central to spatialized language and literacy pedagogy. Because of the different spatial configurations featured in the volume, it is hoped that even though the volume largely finds its origin and development in the United States, the nine projects can serve as models for interrogations of space that can happen in any location. Moreover, the scope of projects mapped out by this volume’s nine chapters suggest many other possible teaching and learning configurations, as well. To suggest but a few: augmented and virtual reality are recognized areas of experimentation and innovation in L2 instruction (Kessler, 2018; Sydorenko, et al., 2019), and offer the ability to bring language learners into more intimate contact with multilingualism in public places around the world; a growing commitment in the field to heritage language education (Brinton et al., 2017) and community-based and service language learning (Palpacuer Lee et al., 2018) opens avenues for language teachers and learners to recognize as learning assets the diverse home and community languages in their immediate vicinity—indeed, in their own rooms.

Because of the expanding, dynamic, and (in many cases) ideologically charged character of the teaching and learning environments we collectively inhabit, the editors are especially pleased that this volume is being published in open access format. We hope that this will greatly increase the volume’s availability for teachers, researchers, and students in public, private, and non-profit institutional contexts alike. The researchers and practitioners of LL-related work have benefited immensely over the years from the healthy dialogue and interaction, exemplified perhaps most notably at the annual LL workshops, and it is our desire to offer another venue for such conversations.