Building Comunidad, Confianza and Complexity through Translanguaging in Spanish Classrooms

In this presentation, Yamila shares her approach to building comunidad, confianza and complexity in an intermediate Spanish for Spanish Speakers course.  Throughout, she invites students to draw from their full linguistic repertoire as they read and analyze a diverse array of texts related to the experiences of Mexican-American people in the United States.  In addition to annotating texts, comparing and contrasting civil rights cases like Mendez v. Westminster and Brown v. Board of Education, and analyzing Chicana literature, students also demonstrate metalinguistic awareness through a series of authentic writing activities. The culminating assessment for Yamila's unit was a student-led poetry night (a Tertulia Literaria), where students shared their original writing with their families and community.  The slides below include examples of Yamila's lessons and anchor texts, as well as annotated samples of student work; additional student poems are included below.

Student Poetry Samples

Tertulia Literaria

In Spring 2022, Yamila and her Spanish for Native Speakers III students hosted a public Tertulia Literaria (Literary Gathering). During this event, students had the opportunity to read their poems out loud to their families and members of the community. The video below introduces Yamila and her pedagogical approaches to translanguaging and includes interviews with students about their creative writing process, linguistic choices, and feelings about presenting at the Tertulia Literaria.