2025 SOAN Summer Enrichment Fund Recipient: Liam Murphy

Photo provided by Liam Murphy '26

With the help of the SOAN Summer Enrichment Award, I was able to extend my time abroad and conduct ethnographic research working at an English school in Cuenca in order to pursue my thesis topic of language education. I became interested in the practice of language education because I felt a wide gulf between the process of becoming conversational with people I met in Ecuador and the process of studying Spanish in the classroom, both at LC and the Spanish school in Cuenca. How do methods of teaching a language in the classroom reflect a certain linguistic ideology of correct and authorized speech? The question is important not just for thinking about teaching methods but for understanding the social implications of institutional language education, and how hierarchies of race, class, and culture are at work. I got a job as a speaking teacher at an English school after my program ended in order to expand my perspective.

At the school I worked with students of many different ages and levels of experience. My
job was not to teach them rules of grammar, but to get them practicing and talking together. I got to experiment with a lot of different methods and styles of teaching, coming up with
conversation topics, organizing games, doing exercises such as asking students to describe
paintings and make up stories about them, etc. I took notes about how the students responded and what they said, and recorded moments that yielded insight into classroom culture, such as adult students asking my permission to use the bathroom. I struggled with the process of recording and organizing notes when every class felt so rich in significant details and social nuances. It taught me to navigate the balance between recording impressions in a stream of consciousness and drawing out patterns and themes over time.

An unexpected result of my extra month in Cuenca was that I connected deeply with the
city’s landscape, the mingling of architectural and natural features. I developed a special interest in the graffiti painted all along the river path I walked to get to the language school, and began collecting photographs in an ongoing archive. Going forward, I am now interested in exploring the topic of language education and linguistic environments through the lens of space and place theory. Thanks to the unique opportunity provided to me by the Summer Enrichment Award, I developed new dimensions to my research, got to deepen my own immersion in a new place, and gained practical experience in my passions of anthropology and education.

Interested in applying for 2025’s SOAN Summer Enrichment Fund? Contact SOAN@lclark.edu or talk to your advisor for more information.