I have defined my academic career by practicing an informed and thoughtful language pedagogy that foregrounds direct engagement with rich and diverse cultural content, and establishes the students’ agency in the learning process. To facilitate language acquisition, I guide students’ interactions with these realia in order that they make connections with what they already know. Through this work, students identify linguistic as well as sociocultural patterns, and develop multicultural competency as speakers of Spanish. When they serve our learning objectives, I deploy digital technologies to support this purposeful, content-based instruction as well as to introduce new contexts for using Spanish that bridge the gap between the classroom and the real world.
An inclusive, supportive community of language learners constitutes a central pillar of my approach to teaching Spanish. Since I began teaching Spanish in 2009, I have taught and worked closely with the diverse student bodies of many institutions. My students consistently describe me as “energetic,” “engaging,” and “enthusiastic” – one even said my attitude “was totally contagious.” I underscore to students the importance of the affective dimensions that impact learning because I want students to think critically and participate fully in the social, discursive processes that contribute to language acquisition. To this end, I begin each semester with a student-centered norm-setting exercise. As students express their expectations for their peers, they hear that many students share the same or similar expectations and begin identifying communal aspirations. By giving my students a voice in this process and clearly setting class rules and goals with rather than for my students, they take responsibility for their learning and its success. Together we establish a classroom dynamic wherein students know to communicate with one another and not just with me, creating multiple axes of interaction and feedback.
Regarding specific teaching practices, I guide students’ motivation and engagement through peer work, reflection, and collaborative projects designed around the cultural content of the class. At the elementary level, I do this with great success by asking groups of students to perform poems such as Nicolás Guillén’s “Canto negro” and Luis Palés Matos’s “Danza negra.” Together they practice carefully pronouncing each onomatopoetic verse and determine how to vocalize the syncopated rhythms these poets create. They help one another, inventing strategies and correcting pronunciation. Activities like this establish the playful environment students consistently highlight in their end-of-term evaluations and demonstrate to them that poetry in Spanish can be enjoyable.
At an intermediate level, I have introduced students to art and sculpture to inspire critical thinking. In one class, we observed a diorama of a Mayan ball game. I had students read a brief paragraph the night before to contextualize the sport in the model. My goal in my language classes has been to encourage my students to make connections and situate the course material within a global context—to experience, three-dimensionally, the Spanish language and the cultures that it both reflects and constructs. I was proud to hear them ask many questions and reflect on how differing cultural contexts have inflected the written histories describing this game. They recognized that the text described a dominant narrative that affirmed violence and bloodshed, but students identified another narrative in the ludic, familial images they saw, which clashed with the text. Through this process of real-life close observation, students became critical readers of the text and the diorama.
As students advance, I use literature to demonstrate how meaning is embedded in grammatical structures and support their reading comprehension through digital technologies, extending the reach of my classroom. Since native English speakers have difficulty distinguishing the indicative and subjunctive moods, text offers illustrative examples of how each is subject to more than just mechanical differentiation. I want students to see how the grammar fundamentally reflects the speaker’s subjective positioning in the world and to discern how they too can harness the richness of the subjunctive’s expressivity of doubt, desire, and possibility.
In my pedagogy, digital technology is a purposeful and effective tool. When my students read short stories, I use the web-based application VoiceThread to transform the individual task of reading into a project-based homework assignment. Students listen and reflect on their classmates’ video-recorded questions and organically re-read passages to support their peers, beginning a discussion that will continue into the classroom. In their feedback, students report that they experience increased levels of engagement with and understanding of the text and enjoyed hearing the thoughts of their peers. Additionally, the length of student interventions online nearly doubled in the course of a year. Looking toward eventual dissemination, I would like to implement this project in a broader research initiative and rigorously investigate this activity’s effects on students’ learning and retention of detail.
I integrate my current research, how identities are constructed in contemporary Latin American novels, with my instructional practice. I want my students to be reflective about how their acquisition of Spanish influences their identity and how it affects their engagement with the Spanish-speaking world. I underscore for my students that the literary and artistic details we examine are clues to deciphering a cultural code: by thinking reflectively about Spanish language cultures, they can destabilize their assumptions. Close examination of realia helps my students develop interculturality and pursue a greater openness to new experiences, honing a critical eye for foreign as well as domestic culture in order to become active and respectful participants in the Spanish-speaking world. This is the ambition behind my teaching: I want to inspire my students to rethink their own culturally situated experience and their modes of relating to others and also to transform how they describe, experience, interpret, and participate in the world by learning Spanish.