español Archives

^{Photo credit: Sonia Balasch}

From the Editor: This is a guest post about a new set of openly licensed activities “The Spanish Language and its Cultures in Perspective”, by Sonia Balasch (Eastern Mennonite University), Alexia D. Vikis, Lisa M. Rabin, and Colleen A. Sweet (George Mason University).

This virtual space offers free access to nine original lessons that are oriented towards the teaching and enrichment of intermediate-level students of Spanish. Each lesson consists of readings that are written in Spanish and short, communicative activities. In its totality, these materials or open-access educational resources call upon critical thinking through eight themes closely tied to the Spanish-speaking world.

Coordinate with license agreements for open-source educational resources (identified in English as OER, or open educational resources), teachers and students are welcome to make use of these materials. Even more important, we hope that the adoption of these shared lessons can serve as a point of departure for enriched classroom discussions on Spanish-language culture, especially in the United States where Spanish has a long historical presence and exists in myriad, dynamic sociolinguistic contexts.

Spanish co-exists with other native languages in three continents (America, Africa and Europe). Whether officially accounted for or not, the many different voices and sociolinguistic histories of Spanish reverberate and move audaciously across the vast geography of the Americas. In The Spanish Language and its Cultures in Perspective we cover such diverse themes as:

The history, varieties and current profile of Spanish in the United States
The Spanish-language press in the United States
Youth’s courageous resistance to entrenched dictatorial regimes in 20th-century Latin America
The encounter of Catholicism and other religious traditions in Latin America
The overwhelming force of globalization in the Latin American regions
The mass media as vehicles of power and resistance
The long history of Latinx in the United States
The contrapuntal relationship of country and city in the modern context

All of the lessons of The Spanish Language and its Cultures in Perspective have been successfully tested in two courses of intermediate Spanish (Spanish in Context I and Spanish in Context II) that are taught at George Mason University’s main campus in Fairfax, Virginia. Lessons for these courses were grouped in two sections, as the following diagram shows.

The lessons of group 1 formed the backbone of the course Spanish in Context I, while those of group 2 sustained the course Spanish in Context II. However, because each lesson was created independently, they may be put to use in the ways in which teachers themselves find them beneficial to their classes. In the end, the key goal of these lessons is to engage with themes that are rarely covered in intermediate courses of Spanish that we teach in the United States. In the best of all cases, students and teachers will build fruitfully on the critical perspectives that they are exposed to in The Spanish Language and its Cultures in Perspective.

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^{“El aquelarre” by Francisco de Goya is in the Public Domain}

When he began compiling his textbook anthology Leyendas y arquetipos del Romanticismo español, Robert Sanders knew that his students weren’t taking upper-level Spanish to become professors of Spanish literature. They were mostly minoring in Spanish with other career goals in mind. This sort of insight into students’ needs is what makes open resources authored by language instructors so valuable for modern education.

Leyendas y arquetipos is an openly-licensed introduction to nineteenth-century Spanish literature for intermediate university students of Spanish. Dr. Sanders chose the works of poetry, drama in verse, and short stories for their literary interest and the social importance of their themes. After piloting the book with students, he compiled vocabulary, historical, and cultural annotations to facilitate comprehension.

Dr. Sanders made many choices in compiling and writing the anthology to allow students the flexibility to pursue their own interests. He did not prioritize any one interpretation of the texts in the anthology. The discussion questions mention scholarly works as a jumping off point for analysis rather than a definitive interpretation. The author biographies in the anthology are short in order to encourage further investigation and richer discussion by students, and the book lists sources for further research, such as Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, the Centro Virtual Cervantes of the Cervantes Institute, or the Biblioteca Digital Hispánica of the Spanish National Library. In his course, students have even created their own multimedia take on a chosen work by creating fan fiction, graphic novels, film storyboards, and musical compositions.

The multimedia potential of the book is also reflected in the paintings, photographs from films, and other art that are as valuable as the texts in their potential to teach about literary and social movements of the time. The art provides a whole other avenue of exploration and analysis to students.

Dr. Sanders compiled the book himself with support from the Portland State University Library, which has supported the prolific creation of open textbooks (several of them for languages) in order to save students money and provide a customized learning experience. The book has a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, which means that anyone can copy it, share it, and make modifications, as long as they give attribution to the author, maintain the same license, and do not make a profit off of it. With this in mind, what could you do with this book? Has it given you ideas about reading with your students? Tell us in the comments.

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