Acceso usuarios
Paola Guerrero Rodríguez
Siftr (https://siftr.org) is a geolocation platform developed by the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery’s Field Day Lab. Among its affordances, this application allows users to post images, geolocate them, and comment and share posts with a public or a private group. Considering the versatility of this platform, it has been utilised in different fields such as education (e.g. Bell et al., 2019), folklore (e.g. DuBois et al., 2018), or social sciences and humanities (e.g. Guerrero-Rodriguez et al., 2022). However, despite the high potential this platform offers for language education, its implementation in heritage language courses remains unexplored. To address this gap in the literature, following an adapted version of the LESCANT model (Victor, 1992), the present study seeks to observe the effects of using Siftr in two intermediate courses for Spanish heritage speakers at a public university in Florida. During a 16-week semester, participants used this geolocation application to record their experiences using Spanish and/or observing the presence of their Hispanic heritage in their day-to-day lives. Based on the qualitative data collected, results show that this project encouraged learners to actively notice their and their peers’ surroundings while reflecting on how the landscape identity helped them construct their collective and individual identities (Ramos et al., 2016) as Hispanic American individuals.
