The Intersection of Muralist Movements and Two L2 Classes

Abstract

The Intersection of Muralist Movements and Two L2 Classes Mariadelaluz Matus-Mendoza The Philadelphia Mural Movement is internationally known; admittedly, it is one of its most sought attractions when visiting the city. Using this form of art as the backdrop, a telecollaborative task-based project between two universities located in two different countries, in two different continents, was designed in fall 2015. Universidad Católica (UC) in Santiago, Chile, and Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, share a similar art form on their city’s walls: murals. Both movements relate to cultural, social, and political trends in their respective city and country. Selecting this as the overarching theme, this telecollaboration, part of two traditional intermediate world language classes’ curricula, was created with two goals: 1) to develop the intercultural communicative competence of students of a second language (L2), and 2) to prepare Chilean students who will study abroad in Philadelphia the following academic term. This current essay includes three sections. The first sets up for the project represented here, briefly describing the mural movements, on the one hand, and placing this project within telecollaborative projects, on the other. The second concisely presents its design, and its evolution. Finally, the essay turns to outcomes drawing on a qualitative analysis of an individual written survey and group debriefing sessions. The muralist movements in these two cities started twenty-five years apart with similar beginnings in working class neighborhoods, the participation of graffiti artists, and their desire to portray their citizens’ socio-political concerns. In Philadelphia, the artist Jane Golden invited graffiti artists to create public art on working class neighborhoods in 1984 which was the birth of Mural Arts Philadelphia. In the Southern Cone, in San Miguel, a neighborhood in Santiago, Chile, two local residents David Villarroel and Roberto Hernández convened not only graffiti artists, as Golden did, but muralists to paint on their neighborhood walls in 2009 which gave origin to Museo a Cielo Abierto. Both movements collaborate with their communities to create art that empowers them portraying issues dealing with social justice, racism, poverty, workers’ rights, migration, etc. Community members participate on the projects giving suggestions on mural themes, being models for them, or painting under the artist’s guidance. These artistic manifestations have also economically revitalized these neighborhoods and become tourist attractions for locals and non-locals. For this telecollaboration, a well-known muralist in Philadelphia, Cesar Viveros, recorded a lecture on the mural movement in the city and his art as an introduction to the project’s theme. It was uploaded to Drexel’s learning management system (LMS) to be watched by participant students. This telecollaborative project was created under the umbrella of Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) that consists of “online and hybrid courses . . . where faculty from two or more cultures work together to develop a shared syllabus for the purpose of implementing an internationalized classroom emphasizing experiential and collaborative student learning.” (Rubin 2016: 263) At Drexel University, this collaboration is denominated as a “global classroom.” As noted previously, the global classroom consists of two traditional intermediate world language classes, one at Drexel and one at UC, where students of Spanish in Philadelphia and students of English in Santiago work using Asynchronous (ACMC) and Synchronous Computer Mediated [End Page 15] Communication (SCMC) technologies to facilitate developing their intercultural communicative competence and to prepare Chileans for their study abroad experience in the United States. Before describing the global classroom, it is necessary to define intercultural communicative competence as the speaker’s ability to operate in cultural contexts that allows one to appreciate and adapt to the cultural differences of the other. The aim is that students of a world language see the other’s culture as a variation of their own, not as a divider. It is also worth noting that the intercultural communicative competence involves the acquisition of linguistic as well as cultural competences. The duration of the global classroom was modified to accommodate UC’s need to evaluate their students and determine who would study abroad in Philadelphia the following term; it lasted six weeks in 2015, five weeks in 2016, and finally was set to run for four weeks in 2017. Weekly topics are...