A liberatory design

Teaching is, to me, one of the most honorable and important professions in the world. It doesn't matter where you teach or at what level, you are making a great contribution to society and the world--to the present and for the future--because you teach. The problem is that, for some, the way we teach isn't as important as what we teach. I believe that all good teaching--that is, every place learning is taking place-- is intentional; the content is made accessible by design. It is the responsibility of the educator (and the system within which s/he or they may teach) to make the learning accessible. Teaching is an art, and like all other arts, it rarely happens by accident. Good teaching must be practiced. And before the teaching can take place, one has to plan for the learning and then, adapt the way we teach to match the learning. This requires a lot of planning. For so long, education-- where it takes place, if it takes place, and how it takes place--has been controlled by the people who are not in the classroom. And the decisions about what to teach, who should teach it, where it should be taught and if the content should be taught at all was decided by governments. Politicians and their representatives selected or rejected textbooks and their contents, decided were the schools should be located, who could attend those schools, and how many desks needed to be in them. They determined who should be allowed to teach and under what circumstances. And, whether we agreed with those decisions that they made or not, teachers were expected to ignore how they may have felt about the politicians and administrators that made those other decisions and just teach. This business of controlling the schools has not changed since the creation of public schools.

ALM-TPR-CL

Language teaching, in particular, has had many challenges. Over the years, there have been very public battles over which languages should be taught in public schools and the value of language learning was always a part of the debate. But, if you were in a language classroom in the US between the 1980s and 1990s, as a teacher or a student, you know that language teaching had a great transformation during that decade. When content-based language instruction entered the scene, the learning emphasis immediately went from memorization to communication. Before that, language teaching in the modern languages went from an emphasis on grammar mastery, vocabulary development, and pronunciation perfection to an emphasis of communication skills. I took my first Spanish class and began teaching my own Spanish classes during this period and was a witness to the revolution in language pedagogy. I was taught by the traditional Audio-Lingual Method (ALM) in high school. Each week, we would start a new chapter in the textbook and each chapter opened with a dialogue that many teachers made their students memorize. In theory, by memorizing those dialogues, a student would be able to pronounce the new vocabulary correctly and would learn grammatical structures intuitively. Immediately after memorizing the dialogue, the next couple of pages were filled with new vocabulary related to the theme of chapter. Each word in Spanish was paired with its English equivalent. Typically, a day or so after introducing the new chapter, our teacher, Señora W. would give us a spelling quiz. The quiz typically started with her reading a list of words to us that we had to write down on a sheet of paper to be turned in. Between Monday and Friday we did pages of grammar exercises. The only time we spoke in Spanish , in the first year, was when we were reading the sentences out loud after completing a grammar exercise, though I have few memories of that. Generally, we just wrote our answers on he board as directed. While we became very familiar with the vocabulary we used daily, we could not actually speak Spanish, because there was a huge gap between memorizing dialogues and lists of vocabulary and producing language. I don't actually remember being expected to speak Spanish until my third year in high school, but even then, expectations were low.

While I was in college in the 1990s, the content-based approach to language teaching was popularized, but my small liberal arts college education lacked any connection to the research produced about it--since we didn't have a language specialist among the specialists in Education. Although I was a Spanish major with emphases in Secondary Education and Portuguese, the program in Education did not include a course on teaching languages to English-speakers, nor a course on teaching languages at all. The Methodology course that I remember taking was about teaching in general, as if methodology was the same for all disciplines. In that class, I learned to create immaculate lesson plans. To this day, I use what I learned from that course so long ago. But I never learned what researchers were discovering about how human beings learned language in the first place. By the time I was on my way out of college, there were workshops on "innovative" ways of teaching language at the meetings of professional organizations. While I was completing my semester teaching, I attended with my cooperating teacher a workshop on the use of the Total Physical Response (TPR) in language classes. TPR, in a nutshell, "is a method of teaching language or vocabulary concepts by using physical movement to react to verbal input" (www.theteachertoolkit.com/index.php/tool/total-physical-response-tpr).

In the context of second language learning, the teacher that led the TPR workshop taught us to use it to assess aural comprehension, as well as vocabulary learning. In this particular situation, we would give students a set of short commands which required them to respond corporeally. In short time, there was no hesitation, the students just got up and responded with their bodies without having to translate. In that way, it was very effective. However, we did not have a textbook that would guide us to teaching language courses in this way all the time. Although my description of this methodology is quite reductive, it is fair to say that TPR took a lot of class time, and though it was fun for the students, not having a textbook sharing that pedagogical approach meant that it really could contribute very little to the courses that we taught. Of course, though TPR was very likely replaced by the Content-Based Language Instruction approach (CL, Communicative Language Learning) by the time I was first learning of TPR, it was my preferred teaching approach when I started teaching classes of my own. In fact, my teacher's toolbox included many teaching activities that I learned in workshops and adapted for my needs. I wanted my students to have the knowledge, ability, and the confidence to speak some Spanish even in the 1st-year class. I used activities like the signature survey--which required the students to find classmates to answer yes to a particular set of questions that that each student had on a document they were given, skits, and games like BUSCO, which was just bingo in Spanish, with numbers or pictures. I also employed teaching and learning contracts with my students, which was a novelty in the school district where I taught. I told my students, in disgust, that the textbook series that we were using was the exact same text that was being used in my high school at the time I graduated only a few years before. I had learned first-year Spanish with that text and now was being forced to teach from it, despite its antiquated pedagogy. If you cannot imagine textbooks that didn't have supplemental materials like transparencies or video components, then you may be able to empathize. Creating teaching materials is a necessity at all levels of language teaching, but I know that I was frustrated with the public school educational system that didn't even allow me to have a say in which textbooks we would use in the classroom. Textbooks were selected, at that time, on a state or district level, and who chose the textbooks every 5 years was a secret.  I was frustrated. A few years after earning my BA in Spanish, I began taking classes in the evenings and in the summers towards a Masters degree in Spanish with an emphasis in Secondary Education. I had not only hoped, but expected, that I would finally get instruction in teaching methodology. Unfortunately, I didn't. The Spanish professors didn't appear to find importance in teaching methodology. By this time, most of my courses in Spanish were literature courses. For one course to the next, I had been enrolled in the classes of almost all of the professors at that university, and each one taught his class differently. The only course related to teaching methodology that I took was about teaching culture. And, looking back, even that had serious design flaws. While all my professors (who were all male) were passionate about teaching their particular areas of literature, the scholarship of teaching was certainly not on their collective radar, and, at times, I could sense their frustration with us, surely because we were not responding appropriately to their questions. Even I had learned to just wait for the professors to tell us what they wanted us to know or think about a piece of literature, rather than using any of my own brain power. While they held lowered expectations of all of us, we obliged, fulfilling the prophecy of intellectual passivity, at best, or simple indifference, at its worst. So, why would teaching at the college/university level be any different?

Critical thinking, the mother of ambition

Although I had never read Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, I was already a critic of the educational system of which I was an integral part. I was so concerned about the deficits that I found in language teaching as a new graduate and a new teacher, even possessing a healthy amount of both self-confidence and hopefulness, that I had determined that I would eventually get my doctoral degree so that I could become the Foreign Language Curriculum Coordinator for the entire state in order to make the improvements in second language teaching and learning that I felt that were necessary. That was my plan until Ibecame disillusioned with Secondary Education in SC; I left high school teaching forever after only 6 years to return to graduate school full-time; I decided to become a professor. I enrolled in a Ph D program in literature at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. The abrupt change in disciplines in the first decade after completing my BA prolonged the time of my acclimation to the discipline of literary analysis and criticism. When I taught my first literature course at the college level, I didn't immediately realize that the expectations that I had for my students' learning were not in the least bit achievable. No one had ever taught me to teach literature and my methodology was not producing the kind of literature students that I had wanted or expected to have. Every semester, I worked to improve my teaching strategies of the Introduction to Hispanic Literature course that I taught regularly, but it took many years of trial and error for me to realize that I could teach my students in a way that would allow me the teaching success that I sought.

Literature as Critical Pedagogy

What I didn't like about the way I was teaching literature was that I expected the students to do the necessary pre-reading work to understand the context of the literature before they sat down to read the actual text and formulating their own opinions of the interpretation of the texts we read without my input, but the students were not aware of this expectation. The students would come to class after having read the assignment without necessarily understanding the basic facts--the who, what, when, and where. That was frustrating. But, after talking to other colleagues who also taught a section of the course, I learned that no one really had a pedagogy. One of my colleagues admitted to re-telling the plot of the work in English before analyzing the text for the students. Worse still, the analysis of the text was his own interpretation. He taught the students how they should interpret the text. And, later, when they took the test on the works that they had read in class, they repeated to him what he had said about the texts. Another colleague admitted to having done something very similar, except that he didn't provide a plot summary in English; but he did eventually explain the plot to the students. I must have seemed mean to my students, in comparison to what I am certain they had heard from other students in the sections taught by my colleagues. Everyone else was being told what to think, and the students need only take notes and repeat it on the test. In my sections, the students were responsible for choosing a lens for themselves through which they would read the text without having ever been introduced to the tools and skills they would need to do that.

Although the number of "A's" in my sections of this course were approximately the same as the number of "C's", but fewer than the number of "D's", which is rather normal, the majority of the students that complained about their grades argued that my expectations were too high, that I gave too much work, and that my classes were intentionally harder and more demanding than they needed to be. Each time that I taught a section of this course, I changed elements of the course objectives because I so desperately wanted to believe that the problem was that my course objectives were unattainable. My many years of participation in teacher workshops at the secondary level had taught me that the only time a teacher's expectations could not be met was if the teacher were not doing her job properly or that the students were incapable of learning. It wasn't until my 4th or 5th year teaching the course that I finally began to find the right mix of content and performance so that the majority of the students would say that they enjoyed the course. But, my goal wasn't to have great teaching evaluations--though it would have been nice to get some positive feedback on a course that I taught so frequently-- the objectives in that course had not changed and I wanted to feel good about not only what I taught, but how I taught it so that I could finally say that my expectations were realistic and that they had been met.

But there was another problem, just under the surface, that motivated me to keep trying to master the appropriate teaching methodology for the course: I wanted to change the course content so that there would be greater diversity in the reading material and greater relevancy for the contemporary sociopolitically-engaged university student. The textbook that we used at my university was the same textbook used at most of the colleges and universities in the country for that course. While those of us who taught this introductory course to reading Hispanic literature at my university all used the exact same textbook, we did not use the same syllabus or share the same materials or content. I was and still remain very concerned about the lack of diversity in the textbook. I wanted to use the literature to address a range of different topics concerning society while teaching these students to read texts in Spanish for the first time. The problem with the textbook, it seemed, was that the editors that put this anthology together were more concerned about canonicity than anything. Their textbook had then, and continues to have today, few women writers, only two writers who are not white (both are Afro Latin Americans), no literary representation at all from Central America or Equatorial Guinea, and absolutely no works on contemporary social issues pertaining to the lived experiences of the writers or the countries that they represent. I'll pause here a second because I feel I need to make clear that my problem wasn't solely with that textbook or its editors; this chosen ignorance and preference for works generally celebrated for literary innovations without overt discussions of serious social issues was infuriating.:::::: I despised the expectation that I should tell the students what to think about the works that we read and to demonstrate one interpretation, as if that were the only acceptable interpretation. Furthermore, I felt an intense need to create a pedagogy for teaching literature so that I could expect my students to be able to sharpen their own critical thinking skills while reading literature in Spanish. Even if the textbook may not provide me with the writers or the texts that I needed, a true pedagogy for teaching literature would make it possible to teach the students to read using a critical lens to discuss social issues. In this way, we are able to learn about the countries where the literature is being produced and learn some basic information about literature in general.

Literature to Facilitate Intercultural Learning and Anti-Discriminatory Teaching Practices

My work to learn to facilitate intercultural learning in my Spanish courses taught me to consider how teaching literature in a second language could be a component of a transformative education. Instead of the teacher doing the thinking for the students and imposing thoughts and interpretations upon the text, a curriculum with a liberatory design (as per the National Equity Project) could provide the necessary objectives to bring about the changes in student learning that I think we all desire. In a course like ours--Introduction to Reading Hispanic Literature, one of the most important objectives is that the students are able to identify the literary genre of the texts that they read. They should also be able to describe the innovations of the texts they read, the contributions of specific authors, as well as some major works. But this Introduction to Reading Hispanic Literature course is not a survey course. This is a course as much about literature as a form of communication as it is literary criticism. I want to improve this course by adding the imperatives of cultural competence through intellectual inquiry about culturally relevant issues to a diverse kind of authors and texts read.

Praxis of a Methodology of Curricular Design

So many educational institutions propose making education "transformative", though those changes are not named specifically. One can assume only that there is something about the present educational system that they feel requires criticism and improvement. Nonetheless, I contend that the lens through which we should be viewing our present and common system of language teaching is one that is critical of all of its deficits and inequities: a lack of ethnic/racial diversity of the authors included in textbooks; a lack of gender diversity; a lack of geographic and sociopolitical diversity; as well as a willful ignorance of perspective. And, as responsible educators and intellectuals, we have a duty to provide a plan to improve the system in all of its complexities. For that reason, I want to consider an intercultural and anti-racist approach that is intersectional. The concept of a Liberatory Design to teaching for equity in the classroom "is an approach to address equity challenges and changing efforts in complex systems" (nationalequityproject.org/frameworks/liberatory-design). To be able to accomplish transformative education, we must be intentional in our curricular design. It is for this reason that the creation of a pedagogy for teaching literature is necessary, but it is not the only element of a framework for liberatory design.

The Four characteristics of the liberatory educator

In order for literature and culture teachers, as the purveyors of the best practices of our discipline, to achieve the liberatory design, the educator must possess a multicultural mindset. That is to say, the teacher must model the behavior of an empathetic person who recognizes and has curiosity about all the complexities of the culture of others. The teacher will not permit, nor provide the students any facile answers, nor any easy explanations about the culture of the authors, but instead, encourage the students to question the why and the how a character is depicted the way it is in the text and to require the students to provide examples from the text that support such a perspective. Considering the lived experiences of our students who already exist in a system that does not always consider the inequities that challenge them, the educator must have intercultural training and must espouse an anti-racist teaching philosophy that is informed and intersectional. No, having native or native-like proficiency, and having spent several years living in another country interacting with only the people who speak this language as natives is not proof of an anti-racist teaching philosophy nor is it proof of intercultural competence. Intercultural competence is a set of behaviors, attitudes, and skills to bridge across difference, while an anti-discriminatory teaching philosophy requires action to work against the systems and practices that perpetuate inequities. The teachers who are prepared to enact a teaching methodology that results in equitable teaching practices in the literature classroom will purposefully select appropriate texts. Considering the race/ethnicity, gender, national origin, native language, and politics of the author is essential in the selection of the texts brought into the literature classroom when the students reading these texts do not share the same culture as the authors they read. And, finally, the educator must commit to having demonstrable course objectives. It is not enough to require the students "to have an understanding, a familiarity", "to explain", or even "to know" something. The course objectives have to require the students to demonstrate a higher level of thinking. By asking the students to produce something, and having prepared them throughout the semester to do it, is the only way the students will have achieved the necessary growth and the development of intercultural competence, and for the teacher to be able to proclaim having a teaching methodology by which to do this. A Liberatory Design is demonstrative of the "see, engage, act" motto of the National Equity Project; I propose, with the creation of a collective of like-minded educators, the "identify, collaborate, design" model. The first step was admitting that there is a problem and identifying it directly by name-- "the textbooks selected are inappropriate and inadequate for this course because they perpetuate.." --any of the following: white supremacist culture, sexist and misogynist culture, anti-feminist/anti-gay culture,  discriminatory ideologies, etc… The Collective itself would be  a collaboration of educators who want more inclusive language courses and textbooks that provide a diversity of texts and perspectives. The formation of this literary pedagogy is the result of an intellectual design, a specific methodology for teaching literature in the second language classroom that is culturally responsive, sensitive to issues of diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice, is relevant and engaging to the students we serve, objectively increases the likeliness of higher-level critical thinking skills, and promotes an inclusive community and intellectual growth, while reducing the instances of discriminatory offenses in and out of the classroom.

1. Teaching for Equity in the Second Language Classroom