Hola a tod@s,
Last summer I shared my experience and struggles with not being too familiar with U.S. Latino literature because it was never, or hardly ever, included and talked about during my K-16 education. It wasn’t until last year, as a second year PhD student that I decided to act on this and read as many Chicano and U.S. Latino books as I could in a summer. I asked other fellow teachers, friends and family for advice on what books to read and those books directed me to read others. That experience was fun and eye opening. I learned so much about my history as a U.S. born mexicana, but also about the experiences of Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Colombians, Cubans, Salvadorians etc. in the U.S. This experience has also taught me how important it is to create time and space for student agency when it comes to reading. We need to make this literature part of our Canon. Our students experiences and voices need to be included in the literature we select for our classrooms. All of our students should leave our classroom knowing there are U.S. Latino authors out there, I strongly believe that should be one of our priorities as heritage Spanish teachers. I have shared this personal reading list with my students, friends and family. This is a growing list, as I continue to read an explore my roots, I will add more books to this list. In the list, you can find the book title, link to amazon, and a brief description of the book from my point of view. I hope this list is helpful and if you have any other reading recommendations, please comment below. Link:https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DugwfHZ9RikAoZrDzAJ-j0ew7Bd2Hl7ahJ7M6Qlj6tU/edit?usp=sharing Gracias y hasta luego, Nancy
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It's been a long time since I wrote my last blog post, and I think one is overdue. As I reflect on this semester as a part-time teacher and full-time PhD student, I realized that I need to be better about sharing the research I am engaging in and how it connects to practice. That is one of the major reasons I decided to leave my full-time heritage Spanish teaching position and I don’t want to lose sight of that. This semester I have been engaging in research on Critical Language Awareness (CLA) and I will share my experience with CLA and how I have been engaging with this research.
My colleague Megan Marshall (also a PhD student at UIC) and I had the pleasure of presenting at La Cosecha in Albuquerque this year and our topic was Language Ideologies in the Classroom. Here’s a brief summary of our presentation: As a field we have transitioned from deficit-based approaches to teaching heritage Spanish (e.g. así no se dice, eso no es español) to asset-based approaches where the home language variety is perceived as valuable and often times used as leverage to acquire a standard variety of Spanish (e.g. otra manera más formal de decir “haiga” es “haya”). This transition is great, but I agree with scholars like Glenn Martinez, Jennifer Leeman and Claudia Holguin (and others that I can’t remember at the moment-I blame my kids for this) that we need to include CLA in our heritage Spanish curriculum. Some of the goals of CLA are to: (1)Empower students to see themselves not as deficient users of academic Spanish but as proficient language users with a broad (and growing!) linguistic repertoire and (2) CLA encourages the use of sociolinguistic tools to critically analyze the social values ascribed to different language varieties to empower students to make and defend their own linguistic choices. CLA promotes conversations with students for example about the fact that languages are standardized for social and not linguistic reasons and that “standard” forms represent the language norms of socially powerful speakers and groups. So how do I have these conversations with my students? In the next few weeks, I will share a few short activities that Megan and I created and/or found, that can help you include CLA in your heritage Spanish classroom. For this week, I will share how to talk about “haiga” and “haya” with our heritage Spanish students.. What most of us are doing now: “Haiga” es una forma más informal de decir “haya”. Cuando escribas, usa “haya” y en tu casa o en tu habla diaria puedes usar “haiga”. What CLA proposes: Si estudiantes, “haiga” and “haya” have socially ascribed values that deem one more valuable than the other, but linguistically, they both have the same value. I encourage you to use the variation that you feel more comfortable using in your speech, but know that there will be people out there that will judge your use of “haiga”.That is why I am going to share some history behind the use of “haiga” and “haya” and then you will have the agency to make your own linguistic choices and also DEFEND them: Brief history behind the use of “haya” and “haiga”: During the Renaissance & Golden Age (16th & 17th centuries) “haiga” and “haya” were used in free variation→ the desire to have a national language in Spain pushed for the codifying of the Spanish language= print→ this created a pressure to avoid language variation and therefore only one, either “haya” or “haiga” could survive. In this case the people in power chose “haya”. Some additional history of how this variation began:
References Claudia Holguín Mendoza (2018) Critical Language Awareness (CLA) for Spanish Heritage Language Programs: Implementing a Complete Curriculum, International Multilingual Research Journal, 12:2, 65-79. Penny, Ralph. Variation and Change in Spanish, Cambridge University Press, 2000. Leeman, J. (2018). Critical language awareness in SHL: Challenging the linguistic subordination of US Latinxs. In K. Potowski (Ed.) Handbook of Spanish as a Minority/Heritage Language, (pp. 345-358). New York: Routledge. Martínez, G. (2003). Classroom based dialect awareness in heritage language instruction: A critical applied linguistic approach. Heritage Language Journal, 7(1) 1-14. It has been a while since I posted something on my blog. Life has been busy with a new baby and a PhD in progress. However, this summer I was offered the opportunity to develop a heritage Spanish course that I will teach online (hopefully) soon! One of the things I want to include in my curriculum is an introduction letter for my heritage students, but I wanted to ensure the content focused on them and their previous and present language experiences. I finally sat down and had some time to write this letter and I just wanted to share it with you to either motivate you to write your own or use mine as a guide to discuss the linguistic oppression our heritage students have experienced. Let me know what you think and feel free to share your own below :)Dear Heritage Spanish Students,
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Educator. Spanish. Heritage Language. Spanglish.
June 2020
November 2019
August 2019
August 2018
June 2018
December 2017
August 2017
July 2017
May 2017
April 2017
March 2017