Thursday, May 8, 2025, from 5:00 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. at the Observatorio Cervantes at Harvard (2 Arrow St, 4th Floor, Cambridge, MA)
This event will be held in person and conducted in Spanish. Click here to RSVP.
Calls for approaches to language teaching and language teacher education motivated by social justice goals have steadily grown in the United States, particularly in the field of Spanish heritage language education. However, language teachers and teacher educators continue to lack access to the training needed to develop critical language awareness (CLA), implement critically-oriented pedagogies, and enact agency as critical language educators. This talk aims to contribute to filling this gap by modeling an integrated approach to the design, pedagogy, and assessment of Spanish courses guided by principles of Critical Language Pedagogy (CLP) and Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) that can be adapted across diverse contexts.
First, critical tasks are defined, localized, and aligned with the design of CLA learning objectives and outcomes within an advanced service-learning university course (Spanish in the Schools). This course was initially designed in response to locally-identified needs to foster bilingual students’ biliteracy development and analyze immersion stakeholder needs in Spanish-English dual language immersion schools in Northern Virginia. To strengthen community-based partnerships, this work will continue this summer through internal grant funding that supports a team of faculty researchers, undergraduate students, and a graduate research assistant who will carry out a critical task-based needs analysis in local bilingual schools. This project will be outlined in detail as a model of critical TBLT enacted in a localized setting with the goal of allowing students to explore relationships between language, power, and educational equity, and to critically reflect on the experiences and perspectives of U.S. dual language stakeholders working within the current sociopolitical climate.
The talk concludes with a discussion of challenges and future directions in critical TBLT with a focus on building avenues to collectively foster, broaden, and sustain critical communities of practice among language practitioners in the U.S. and beyond.
Ellen J. Serafini (Ph.D., Georgetown University) is Associate Professor of Hispanic Linguistics in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages at George Mason University, where she also directs the Master’s Program and the Graduate Certificate in Spanish as a Heritage Language Education (SHLE). Her research and teaching focus on exploring and fostering critical language awareness and sociolinguistic agency among students and educators of Spanish as both a heritage and additional language, particularly within diverse sociopolitical and sociocultural contexts. Her work has been published in a range of academic journals and edited volumes. She is also co-editor (with Cristina Sanz and Inma Taboada) of the forthcoming volume Manual para la formación de profesores de español (Wiley, 2025).