Hybrid | February 16th, 2023 (5pm - 6:30pm)
RSVP: https://bit.ly/RSVP-Observatorio or info-observatory@fas.harvard.edu
This event, organized in collaboration with the Embassy of Spain Education Office, will center on Spanish speaking students in the US classroom. Often defined with a deficit narrative by their mainly English monolingual teachers and school systems, these students use their native Spanish to acquire English, make sense of the written and spoken word, and learn new content areas. This presentation aims to dismantle this negative perspective with examples of the explicit use of the Spanish language in the English as a Second Language/Multilingual (ESL/ML) classroom.
Marta García, M. Ed. is an elementary school ESL/ML teacher in Salem, MA. She came to the US as part of the Visiting Teachers from Spain Program in 2006, and she has worked in Salem for the last 15 years as a teacher and advocate for the immigrant and multilingual community; before that, she taught in California and Spain. In 2022 she was recognized as the Massachusetts Teacher of the Year, an award she has used as a platform to amplify students' voices, as well as the voices of immigrant/bilingual families, who care deeply about the education of their children.
Language: English