Abstract:

The Modern Language Association is now recommending a transcultural approach to foreign language teaching that supports the idea of multimodal tasks and multiple literacies. With this approach, students learn to identify and interpret various discourses and cultural representations, to critically and creatively analyze many different texts, and to express their own response to these texts from different stances and perspectives. In keeping with this recommendation, this paper presents a case study of a university seminar course on Latina Literature in which Gloria Anzaldúa’s text Borderlands was used with Vygotskian sociocultural theory and a feminist epistemology of difference to frame the generation of critical and creative interdisciplinary connections between Latina literary texts, the visual arts, and the performing arts.

Specifically, the paper discusses:
(1) key concepts used in the course and discussed in Anzaldúa’s text such as the cultural space of the borderland or in-between-ness, resistance to mainstream ideology, problems of cultural displacement and dislocation, the process of identity formation, and the need for reinvention and becoming an agent of one's circumstances
(2) students’ exposure to varied genres of Latina literary texts as well as Latina visual texts and performance-based texts aligned with these key concepts
(3) interactive tasks that the author designed to facilitate understanding of these concepts in light of course learning objectives such as written personal response tasks, creative performances using Latina poetry and drama as pre-texts on which performances were based, and final essay tasks that used technology to integrate Anzaldúa’s critical theory with different literary and cultural artifacts studied in the course
(4) varied samples of student response to these tasks.

As a result of this session, participants will learn ways to structure texts and tasks in ways that can be adapted to a variety of online, blended, or face-to-face learning environments that explore the development of language proficiency and intercultural understanding through Latina literature. The presenter will also discuss challenges involved in this type of instructional design, the transformative impact of this approach on student learning, as well as the usefulness of this approach in preparing advanced Spanish students for upcoming Spanish capstone experiences.