Podcast episode released! Social justice issues in heritage teaching

Hello all! I hope this post finds you well! I’ve had a little bit of rough start of the year, honestly, and I still feel like I’m drowning 🙂 Never hurts to be honest, right? This post will be short and sweet, friends, but I wanted to make sure that I pass on some cool news!

Recently, a friend of ours, Jahdai Jeffords, invited Mary Beth and I be guests on his new podcast, What in the world? Language podcast. He has been doing an amazing series called “Deconstructing the white lens,” a topic he is super passionate about, and he knows that Mary Beth and I have been working on being advocates for social justice in a lot of areas of our lives, including professionally. He invited us to talk about the social justice side of being Spanish heritage teachers. 

Friends, this was such a humbling experience to share our journey of where we were and where we are now and what we’re still working on. I just wanted to make sure you knew that the episode was just published, and you can listen to it here! Here are the topics we discussed:

• What it feels like and looks like (for us) to teach a heritage class when you’re white and non-native speaker
• How we can, without thinking, teach reading and writing in ways that reinforce the status quo, and how we think about changing that
• The idea of promoting an academic dialect
• Helping teachers navigate the status quo to get heritage classes
• Thinking about the best way to treat classes that have heritage learners mixed in

We hope you enjoy it! And we’d LOVE to hear your feedback! Also a huge thank you to Jahdai for all his hard work and time in getting this podcast, and in particular this series, off the ground. I’d highly recommend following his podcast!!

Here are some additional resources that are mentioned in the podcast:

• Elisabet Velasquez https://www.elisabetvelasquez.com/
• Yesika Salgado https://www.yesikasalgado.com/
• Rachel Cargle https://www.rachelcargle.com/
• John Warner, Why They Can’t Write Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities 
• #disruptwriting discussion in Twitter 
• About the #disrupttexts movement and its founders 

Also, in case you missed it, Mary Beth wrote an amazing post the day we recorded the podcast, on the topic of being a white non-native speaker, because she was so inspired! If you haven’t read it, you should definitely check it out!

Happy teaching, friends. Keep on keeping on 🙂 

Adrienne