Teaching during COVID-19: Social justice and Spanish heritage language learners
Abstract
Latinx who do not feel confident speaking Spanish are usually questioned. To fight these ideologies, Pascual and Cabo and Prada (2018) suggest new pedagogical approaches to incorporate in the curriculum the experiences of the heritage language learner (HLL). Latinx in higher education expect a culturally relevant curriculum to critically listen and speak to challenge the hierarchies that marginalize them. Why is social justice education key? To meet the needs of our minority students and to fight social inequities that affect their lives (Freire, 2021). This article offers a proposal to teach social justice in the HLL classroom through classroom strategies such as digital stories, autoethnographies, creative writing, or oral history to provide these students with the tools they need to give voice to their communities and incorporate them in the curriculum of an inclusive Spanish classroom whose backbone is US Spanish to fight raciolinguistic ideologies that marginalize them.
Publication history
Table of contents
It is well known that Latinx who do not feel confident speaking Spanish are usually questioned. As Anzaldúa (2012) argues, Spanish has been used as a tool of exclusion, and when Spanish is used in the classroom, it may become inclusive and provide cultural validation (García-Louis, 2019). Additionally, their bicultural identities unfortunately make them experience othering both in the US and the heritage countries (Leeman & Driver, 2021). Spanish is still taught as a foreign language in many places despite its locality, and the fact that US Spanish is not as visible as it should be reinforces the English-only ideology (Leeman, 2014). To fight these ideologies, Pascual and Cabo and Prada (2018) suggest new pedagogical approaches to incorporate in the curriculum the experiences of the heritage language learner (HLL). The presence of HLLs’ communities should be across the Spanish curriculum, including basic Spanish courses as a second language (L2) (Torres et al., 2017).
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