‘The Translator’: A public intercultural pedagogy of solidarity?: Lou Harvey, University of Leeds
This talk will report on a project to adapt research into language and intercultural learning for theatrical performance. In collaboration with theatre company Cap-a-Pie, my research was adapted into a work-in-progress performance staged on two evenings in Leeds in June 2017. I will briefly present the research, how the adaptation project came about and how the performance was developed, and show some short filmed extracts from rehearsals. Drawing on concepts of dialogue (Bakhtin, 1981), hospitality (Derrida, 2000), and sentimentality (Zembylas, 2016), I will introduce my thinking around the relationships between public engagement and public education, between empathy and solidarity, and the affordances of these ideas for a public intercultural pedagogy.
Crafting rhymes and throwing up messages in a rhyme workshop: experiences of living the language in the classroom: Cristina Aliagas, Universitat Pompeu Fabra
The objective of this presentation is twofold. On the one hand, I will show the analysis of the written responses (rap lyrics) of 75 high school students who participated in a rhyming workshop taught by Pau Llonch, vocalist of the Catalan rap group At Versaris, at a multicultural and multilingual high school in Manresa. On the other hand, I will show some of the pedagogical strategies deployed by the rap artist to motivate the lyrical expression of young people and promote it, starting out from the messages they wanted to transmit and their aesthetic sensibilities. In the analysis of the educational experience, I connect three analytical constructs: (a) rap music as a complex vernacular literary practice for its textual and linguistic creativity (Newman, 2005), (b) rap music understood in terms of “funds of knowledge” (Moll & González, 2011) that are valid in the classrooms and (c) rap music as a sociodiscursive “third space” (Moje et al., 2004; Gutiérrez, 2008) where it is possible to encourage creativity in classrooms, and that can also contribute to language learning and to the development of academic writing. The analysis of this educational experience shows the potential of rap music as a ‘bridge’ to connect, through pedagogical and linguistic creativity, a musical practice that is increasingly popular among young people, with the linguistic and textual values ​​fostered by academic culture.
El hip hop latino en Barcelona: una narrativa de las desigualdades lingüísticas y sociales en la escuela: Víctor Corona, Universitat de Lleida
La inmigración latinoamericana es la más importante en Barcelona. A partir del año dos mil podemos ver como “lo latino” ha venido ocupando un lugar en el espacio social, no solo de Barcelona, sino de las principales ciudades en España. Durante los últimos 12 años he dedicado gran parte de mi trabajo como investigador a la tarea de describir y entender como se construye “lo latino” en un contexto como el de Barcelona. Gran parte de mi trabajo, esencialmente etnográfico, lo he realizado en el entorno escolar con chicos que habían abandonado, o estaban a punto de abandonar los estudios. El corpus que he reunido durante estos años lo conforman registros en video de entrevistas, grupos de discusión y charlas informales con estos jóvenes.
En la tarea de entender “lo latino” en Barcelona me he percatado de la importancia que tienen discursos como el del hip-hop. A partir 2014 he ido incorporando a mi corpus de datos canciones, videoclips y algunas entrevistas con raperos de origen latino residentes en Barcelona. Mi objetivo es integrar al hip hop, en la diversidad de sus géneros, como un discurso más para entender el rol que tiene la escuela, y las desigualdades sociales que en ella se reproducen, en este proceso de construcción identitaria.
Resemiotisation from page to stage: The trajectory of a musilingual youth’s poem: Emilee Moore, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
In my recent research with youth spoken word poets, I have been particularly interested in the fluid practices that span spoken, written, gestural, digital, musical and spatial modes, and across times and places, in the trajectories (Kell, 2009) of poems written and performed by youth. Poetry is a particularly interesting practice for studying semiosis; as van Leeuwen (1999: 5) writes: “[...] things work differently. No hard and fast rules exist. Any bit of language you might lay your hands on could come in handy for the semiotic job at hand, whether it is grammatical or not, whether it represents a standard variety of English or not.” Among other aspects, I have explored how musical notation sheds light on the complexities of the transformations that the poems undergo in these trajectories, following insights from Erickson (1982), van Leeuwen (1999), Falthin (2013), and others. The presentation focuses on part of the trajectory of one poem, titled ‘To Him’ by a 17-year old French-English bilingual and musilingual (Fernández-Toro, 2016) poet and singer.