Learning around Iconic Buildings. Maps of experience in the making.

In this chapter I look at learning and how it unfolds around the engagement with iconic buildings. My observations involve children and adults who I met through a six-year long ethnographic research in a bilingual German-Italian primary school program in Frankfurt/Germany. My initial focus during data collection (between 2003 – 2008) was primarily on bi-literacy teaching and learning and rather classic literacy practices involving reading and writing in more than one language. It gradually shifted towards learning, space and a more geo-semiotic perspective (Kress & van Leeuwen 1996, Scollon & Scollon 2003, Nichols 2011, Lou 2014) as I examined how classroom based learning connected with the wider physical and geographical space that made up the social and emotional world of the children and their families. I went back to my data and noticed a variety of activities – a selection of them will be described in more detail below – in which children and adults interacted with buildings and the built environment of the city. At closer examination of this data it became apparent that important social meanings emerged from these encounters.