Sensescapes and What it Means for Language Education

This chapter lays out the groundwork for the notion of sensescapes as grounded in my own ethnographic work, and in dialogue with current developments in the field of linguistic landscapes (LL) as well as with proposals from other areas in the humanities, the social and cognitive sciences. The perspective presented herein centers on how multilingualism in the study of the LL may benefit from a wider lens that integrates sense-making, both, in the sensorial way and in the cognitive way, bridging them through trans-ing processes. The second part of the chapter focuses on language education, and describes the possibilities of sensescapes in this context. Two examples of pedagogical applications (framed as proyectos) are presented; both articulate a sensescapes approach as operationalized at the undergraduate level with multilingual students in a Spanish for heritage/native speakers program, and at the graduate level with pre- and in-service language teachers in an MA program. Both pedagogical assignments promote an ecological understanding of personhood in space, the translanguaging processes that mediate meaning- and sense- making, and the ways in which contextual factors are processed through embodied cognition.