Critical Pedagogy beyond the Classroom Walls: Community Service-learning and Spanish Heritage Language Education

Abstract

This article describes a critical service-learning initiative in which college students of Spanish taught in an after-school Spanish class for young heritage language (HL) speakers at a local elementary school. We contextualize the program within broad curricular revisions made to the undergraduate Spanish program in recent years, explaining how critical pedagogy and our students’ experiences motivated the design of the program. After describing the program, we analyze reflections from participants that show how the experience helped them take their critical language agency beyond the classroom walls and integrate university, school and community knowledges, as both the college students and the children they taught came to view their cultural and linguistic heritages to be of educational and public importance.

The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Education

“…Pedagogic approaches and methods for heritage language education cannot be divorced from the broader historical and sociopolitical contexts of schooling, which are shaped by ethnoracial and monoglossic ideologies as well as the use of schooling as a technology of colonialism and nation building (Wolfe 2006;Bale 2014). Key pedagogical turns in heritage language education include fostering critical pedagogies such as critical language awareness (Pennycook 2001), critical pedagogies rooted in critical social consciousness (Parra 2016), identity work (Leeman 2015), translingual practices that include translanguaging and collaborative translation (Pennycook 2006), and community-based learning (Leeman et al 2011a(Leeman et al , 2011b.…”

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“…Guadalupe Valdés and colleagues bring to light the ways in which linguistic ideologies can permeate even in contexts in which non-hegemonic practices are discouraged, such as departments of Spanish in higher education (Valdés, González, García, & Márquez, 2003), highlighting the importance of making these ideologies explicit in the classroom. In a recent piece, Martínez (forthcoming) stresses the importance of addressing the cultural and social issues that go beyond individual learners and individual proficiencies if Heritage Language instruction wishes to inspire social change beyond the classroom (for more work on critical pedagogy in the Spanish heritage language context see Colombi, 2015;Leeman, Rabin & Román-Mendoza, 2011;Villa, 1996.…”

Critical Chinese as an Additional Language education in Australia: A journey to voices, courage and hope

“…Establishing genuine dialogues was part of a broader educational process that went beyond the classroom (Leeman et al ., 2011). In the four focus groups, the students critically reflected on past learning activities and talked freely about strategies to further improve pronunciation learning:

Maybe we get a workbook for Chinese and we put the pronunciation in English, put the symbols, and then we put the English words (next to the Chinese words).

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