Learning Around Iconic Buildings: Maps of Experience in the Making

Abstract

This chapter focuses on engagement with iconic buildings as a type of place-based learning. Engagement is here understood as multimodal interaction which involves seeing, talking, listening, walking or handling things in the material world. Two sites of engagement are under examination. First is a guided tour through the city of Frankfurt during which parents, teachers and researchers were led by a tour guide who highlighted the generally unrecognised contribution of Italians to the city’s development and wellbeing. Second is a bilingual project which involved primary school children drawing from their engagement with the world of commercially produced toys, as a background for creating their own interpretations of time, place, space and history in action. We see how the engagement of individuals with iconic buildings can disrupt dominant meanings, such as those circulated by tourist industries and toy manufacturers. While the city walk emphasised the possibilities of embedding alternative narratives into local spatial movement, the second activity showed the fragmented nature of trajectories of experience that draw on a variety of semiotic resources in line with the experience of many immigrant children whose family ties and identity orientations spread transnationally.