INTRODUCTION
TANIA AVILÉS VERGARA
Teaching and Learning Spanish at CUNY: Public Language Education Through Archival Resources is a peer-mentoring project addressed to Spanish adjuncts that promotes curricular changes in the Spanish classroom through the use of CUNY Latino archives. [1]
The pedagogical goal is to ground language learning within the social, cultural, and linguistic experiences of CUNY students and adjuncts who, as part of a Hispanic serving institution in New York, are surrounded by large Spanish-speaking and Latinx communities in their everyday lives.[2]
In the midst of radically changing times imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic and ongoing social justice movements, this project centers Latinx communities and life experiences in teaching and learning Spanish within a critical and additive framework. Ultimately, our goal is to perform socially responsive pedagogies that speak to our shifting social realities and, most importantly, call out racism within the curriculum (Alim & Paris, 2017, p. 9).
Building on bell hooks’s engaged pedagogies and Paulo Freire’s critical consciousness, the project is inspired by “what it means to make teaching and learning relevant to the languages, literacies and cultural practices of students in our communities” and “[what it means] to include the linguistic, literate, and other cultural practices of our communities meaningfully as assets in educational spaces” (Alim & Paris, 2017, p. 5).
In this OER compilation, the reader will find a set of lesson plans and projects based on archives that seek to address our guiding questions with concrete teaching strategies. These materials are the outcome of a year of theoretical reflection and practice, and we share them hoping that they may be implemented by Spanish adjuncts at CUNY and beyond.
In our exploration, we align our efforts and partner with CUNY Latino institutions including The Dominican Studies Institute, The Center for Puerto Rican Studies and The Mexican Studies Institute. These institutions are key agents in fueling a living/activist memory about the Dominican, Puerto Rican and Mexican communities in New York, and their work speaks to our students’ own experiences in the city. This project is indebted to their efforts. We are grateful for the support and funding offered by The Center for the Humanities, The Graduate Center, CUNY, and the Gittell Collective. The CUNY Adjunct Incubator grant has been an important opportunity for us, as Spanish adjuncts, to grow professionally but especially important for the CUNY students from whom we learned while enacting this project.
In this introduction, we address the people and institutions that made this project successful. We hope our enterprise can be replicated in the future.
When speaking about these CUNY institutes and archives we use the term Latino, since these institutions do not use the term Latinx to identify themselves. ↑
When speaking broadly about the identity category, we use Latinx for inclusivity purposes and to index our own position within the debate or gender-inclusive language. We respect each author´s choice regarding the use of gender-inclusive language. ↑