Welcoming Students’ Linguistic and Cultural Repertoires into the Spanish Classroom
By Patricia Ferreyra
Spanish at The Downtown School is not just about teaching and learning a world language. As Lupe Fisch explained in her post, it also is about connecting with multiple cultures and their speakers through art, literature, music, current events, and social studies. In this post, I will concentrate on the teacher’s perspective and how we bring novel pedagogies into the classroom. Once one becomes a teacher, one continues to learn, to go deeper into the content area and its methodology. And we grow.
I joined the DTS community as a part-time Spanish teacher in August. Since then, I have taught two groups of 9-12 graders who love to learn. As a teacher, I am constantly reflecting on my practice. How can I ensure that my teaching approach stays fresh? How can I know I'm offering my students what they need? Students bring their full selves into the classroom and make meaning using all their linguistic resources. Therefore, it is my duty and responsibility to create a learning experience that reaches as many as them as possible.
First of all (surprise, surprise), creating a safe learning environment where students gain confidence in their own abilities and feel ok making mistakes is key for learning. Second, there is no one single method that can address all of our students' needs and learning styles, so one must be willing to stay flexible (and eclectic). Third, while the emphasis remains on exposure to and production of the target language, the learning space should not completely exclude the students' first language or their funds of knowledge.
Wait, what?
Yes. English is not banned from the Spanish classroom. Teachers who believe in strict language separation might think of this as a bold move, and in some ways, it is. For some educators, grammar and vocabulary come first, and should be taught only in the target language. But time is of the essence and we cannot wait until students have mastered a number of patterns and lexical families to transition into more complex content. It is important to teach students meaningful content and to help them express their complex ideas from the start, simply because they come into the classroom with knowledge of the world and a wealth of cultural and linguistic assets that cannot stay outside. Plus, the bilingual brain does not separate languages, so it is simply not possible to shut down one's home language when one is learning a new one! The following myths about bilingualism might shed some more light into the reasons underlying my teaching practice.
Moving on, as a teacher, I need to strategically consider how my students' home language can inform language and content learning as we maintain academic rigor. Some students learn better through contrastive analysis, so understanding similarities and differences across languages is necessary for them. Others learn better when language is embedded in a story. Or when they see it contextualized in history, culture, geography, music or current events.
My students use their first language as a bridge to access knowledge and make connections across languages and content as they learn how to express themselves in Spanish. It is not the same as translating from one language into the other. It's a delicate dance that connects prior knowledge to new information, and that welcomes their linguistic resources to process it all. This year my students have investigated, written and engaged in conversation about themselves, public figures, sports, festivals, cities in the Spanish-speaking world, bilingualism and biculturalism. Ask Lupe about hers, and she will give you a multitude of examples!
At The Downtown School, as we introduce topics in Spanish class, we give students options and support them to find out how far they want to go with their learning. They know that they can bring their worlds into the classroom and that the expectation is to demonstrate their learning through a final product in Spanish. As choice leads them to learn responsibly, our students take more ownership over their own learning in many ways. In the process, they also learn more about the world and their developing selves.