Breaking New Ground in Language Education

Exploring Communities Through Cross-Global Collaborations

Abstract

Through an action research collaboration across classroom contexts in Colombia and the U.S., language learning students in high school classrooms engaged in a cross-linguistic and cross-geographic digital platform to critically examine and share aspects of their communities. This project involved a high school classroom of English language learners in a low-income public school in the Caribbean region of Colombia and a high school classroom of Spanish language learners in a magnet public school in the U.S. Southeast. Using Spanish and English from their linguistic repertoire, students from both classroom settings created artifacts and communications with one another to enhance their linguistic and cultural competencies. Specifically, they created and shared social cartographies of their communities, portraits of their personal lives, and other reflective artifacts that represented a range of experiences and knowledge. In this article, we provide a brief overview of the collaboration, along with specific examples of student work that reveal how they expressed culture, language, and their lived experiences. In doing so, this article expands the notion of linguistic landscapes in the Global South by providing how bilingual education settings can “break new ground” for language learning to dismantle hierarchical beliefs in language, to push beyond arbitrary bounds of classroom learning, and reposition students’ standpoints at the center of their language learning.