 Thank you so much Flavia for the welcome. Today I wanted to talk about how we can use critical pedagogy to help us in our grammar teaching. I really didn't want to start this way when I thought about creating a presentation a few weeks ago but in light of recent events in the country I think that it's so important now more than ever to think about any kind of bias that we have towards our students of color within the curriculum and think about how we can start noticing those biases and correcting them so that we can teach all of our students better. So that's that's how I think I'll frame this today. The examples that I'll give you about using critical pedagogy are things that I use in a grammar class at St. Edwards. Most of the students in that class are heritage learners but I do have a few second language learners and every now and then even a few native speakers that are exchange students or who have recently arrived. So I think that these are strategies that work really well for a variety of different kinds of learners regardless of the kinds of experiences that they come from. So to go ahead and get started. If you haven't opened your chat yet please do. I would like for you to jot down just a few words about what comes to mind when you think about teaching grammar. These can be just little phrases or they can be longer beefs. If you will. Rules. Yes. Definitely right and wrong. That's great. And they really don't like the topic I do. Okay well I definitely think that rules and in structure yes logic patterns that are sometimes overwhelming all of those are things that happen when we teach grammar. I would also then like you to think about what your heritage learners would say about their own knowledge of grammar. I do think your students would say that they know about grammar. I like that they don't know not much. Definitely when I start a grammar class. I usually have students on the first day or sometimes even before the first day come up and say, Oh I don't think I can take this class because I don't know that kind of Spanish, right. I don't know grammar in reality that's that's not actually true our heritage learners know so much about grammar, but they might know it implicitly. A few examples, since I noticed that there were a couple of grad students in here would be. I noticed that heritage learners are really good at subject verb agreement, even when it's implicit knowledge. One example of grammar that they know really well is that they're super accurate on now an adjective agreement, much more than than second language learners, especially when it's not just an or an ending. And another thing that this is not research based but I noticed that heritage learners are really really good at interpreting a sentence when it departs from the typical subject verb object order. So if I give a sentence, it has happened recently something like la llamada la hizo Maria. Second language learners often go wait a minute so so somebody made a call to Maria, and they're not quite sure and then the heritage learners go no no no Maria hizo la llamada. And so they're really good about implicitly understanding in and out so grammar that second language learners don't yet know about. So when our students say that they don't know grammar. I think what they mean is that they don't have the meta linguistic knowledge to talk about all of the grammar that they already know. Yes, like complex subordination that our second language students get super overwhelmed with. I think there's this sort of ideological tension with teaching grammar, you guys definitely mentioned it in the chat of the kinds of competing desires that that we have when we teach grammar to heritage learners. So I put these two different ideas and tension in different colors. So on the one hand or the green side. We, we definitely want to teach students about structures in standard Spanish. If our goal is to help them communicate confidently and accurately in more and more domains in Spanish outside the home. Obviously we have to teach them about structures that they're not currently using in standard Spanish. So if we want our students to incorporate Spanish into their academic life, their professional life and maybe even their creative life. We need to teach them about the things that they're not yet doing. But at the same time, in the purple side or the on the other hand, we definitely don't want to privilege standard Spanish at the expense of our students home language practices. I think it's not only an example of linguistic violence, but I think it's also not great pedagogy to make our students think that everything that they already know and do in Spanish is not useful. So, today I have I brought some quotes from an article Flavia if you want to put this article in the chat this is the language Randolph article. You might not have access to it but you could at least read the abstract. But with this article is about high school heritage Spanish teachers. And we see that even when heritage teachers have learned about heritage students and worked with them for a while. When they report enjoying working with heritage students, they continue to teach from this perspective of bias against their home language practices. Thank you Flavia. So I'll read you some of the quotes here. If you have already closed the chat, I'd like you to open it again. And as I'm reading these quotes, I'll have to move the chat around so I can see everything I put as I'm reading these quotes, I would like you to jot down some of the words in them. So here's why these heritage Spanish teachers that appear problematic to you, either in a sense that this is an outright instance of linguistic violence, or maybe something that appears to be not a good pedagogical practice to you. So here's one of the teachers she said, Oh, there are many many Spanish speakers around the world that would agree with them that don't last this is probably perfectly fine. And at the same time, just pointing out that that really is substandard Spanish, and then she goes on to explain why she justifies harping on the two of last this four semesters at a time. Good, I agree. Substandard is, is a terrible way to talk about our students lived experiences. Another one, and you can do the same thing jot down some problematic ideas. There was another teacher she said, and you can write bad habits. I mean, if you point that out enough and you point out how many times do we spell that with an H things can be unlearned, but it does take a lot of repetition and almost, I made examples out of them and say, This is not going to be accepted. So yes, definitely bad habits. Yes, unaccepted, making samples of them. Perfect. You guys picked all the things that I said. So, I think before we talk about this idea of standard and non standards. I'd like to mention that in general we, we like to point out differences because we're language teachers and we're noticing details, but by and large, our students that are heritage generally tend to do things very similarly to the way they're done in other dialects of Spanish. If we think about a language as having multiple levels, like a phonological level and morphological lexical and syntactic level. And just of the levels, they're truly doing what monolingual Spanish speakers do, but sometimes slightly different. So, the idea of calling their language practices substandard as, as you pointed out, is saying that they're less than standard rather than different from standard. And it's also the idea of suggesting that their language practices are just bad habits that need to be unlearned. It is a really violent point of view. In my linguistics class recently we were talking about how from the period of infants and infancy all the way to adolescence, people increasingly start to assign linguistic characteristics to their identity, and they start having more and more linguistic like thoughts, right? At the beginning, our thoughts are more like feelings or reactions, and little by little they start to become more and more framed in linguistics and in language and telling somebody that the language in which they lived all of their experiences is just a bunch of bad habits that need to be reduced is not a great practice. So, I put our, I think our big question for today in this green box and that's how can we teach grammar in a way that validates our students' home language practices, so this is like that idea of tension, without ignoring standard Spanish, how do we do both at the same time? And I think critical pedagogy is a really helpful approach to addressing that question. So critical pedagogy is just the idea of doing a lot of things at once. It's teaching typical standard content and at the same time looking at how society's notions of privilege and discrimination have shaped our understanding of that content. I like to use the example of a history class when I explain what critical pedagogy is because I think that a lot of times we're used to thinking about history in that way. So critical pedagogy and history would be something like where we learn a couple of historical events and we read about them in the textbook, and then we think about how history was written in a certain way with certain definitions and certain inclusions in the text and how that benefits some people at the expense of other people. We can do the same kind of critical approach in grammar teaching. So I've listed four broad questions that I usually try to address with my students over the course of a whole semester. I decided to number them so that, again, in the chat, if one of these sticks out to you as something that either is impactful or something that you would like to share with your students, you could put that number in the chat and we could come back to that later. So here's some general questions. One would be how has the notion of standard Spanish been shaped by racism and classism. And then, number two is who gets to decide what's included in standard Spanish. And number three is what are the consequences of being excluded from participation and creating these norms. And finally, how have students been personally affected by these prejudices. So if one of those is particularly motivating or something you would like to share, you can include that number in the chat. All of them. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Yes. So there's yes a lot of these are a lot of these are things that we can we can share with our students. You have this recording so you can come back to these questions and also revisit them again. I think I don't need to talk about this slide and I will go straight to an actual pedagogical example of how I apply critical pedagogy when we teach grammar. And most importantly, I want to emphasize before I do this and before you see all the beast this and con lucy second and feel a little bit nervous about that. There's a misconception that critical pedagogy means that I don't have to teach focus on form. And in reality, we teach a lot of forms, applying critical pedagogy. Another misconception is that I will accept anything wild on an exam. And in fact, when we use critical pedagogy students have to really construct an argument to defend the way that they are speaking using metal linguistic and social linguistic knowledge. So, this is not a throwaway kind of, I don't really have to teach that much now. So, okay, these would be three different steps that I use when applying critical pedagogy. I'm going to use the example here of predatory because that is usually a topic addressed in most grammar classes and it's a great, a great field for for looking at different kinds of variation. And this is probably what you would do in any typical grammar lesson, we look at all of the forms. So if we're doing predatory, we will learn as they almost add on each day you must get on and maybe the most other forms and then we learn what the two stem changes are and then we learn all of the irregular verbs and we learn when I becomes accentuated when you becomes accentuated. As you can see the other day we did when you I becomes you why and so we learn all of the different forms first, and then we start to notice them in context. One great resource for doing this Flavia if you'd like to put this in the chat is looking at the spend tax or the Spanish and Texas videos for real examples, and then starting to have students notice all the forms. One of the things that I've given to you in these green boxes is actually just an interview taken from, thank you Flavia it's from, from a textbook. And I start to have students notice okay what are all of the preterite looking forms in here, and they will say okay we've got foiste and con lucy and estube. So we have to take out all of our focus on form knowledge and notice which ones are regular and, and which ones follow a non standard pattern and they start to notice Oh well, we'll see. We learned that all of the seed verbs have a J in the preterite so so this is different from what we've looked at. And then we have to say okay well hold that thought let's think about why that happens. And then when we look at Oh well beast this is is definitely a non standard form because then you stay you almost get on. We don't have anything with an S on the end so that's different. And once we started to notice all of the different forms that are unfaithful to speakers, then we have to learn. This is a really important part we have to learn why these different variations occur. So one thing that I always teach them in looking at preterite is the concept of regularization. Sometimes I teach them the difference between regularization and analysis if they seem that they really like these terms, but otherwise we just call it all regularization. Basically regularization is this tendency that all language brains have that to create fewer and fewer different patterns to express the same thing. You can see how if a brain is is bilingual, having two separate systems in their brain, of course they're going to want to regularize because they have to manage twice the cognitive load twice the information. So regularization is this sort of quick trick that that brains use and that society is used to reduce the amount of different forms that we have in a language. And I like to show them how the Spanish that we have today is a product of many different cases of regularization so I like to show them older examples of regularization that are already incorporated into the way. The Spanish does things and then show them a couple of modern examples of regularization that are processes underway right now. So one example I give them is the verb in Spanish. I don't know why this is this but raise a nobody is mad that when somebody says it's in the past tense but really this is a product of a process of regularization that when Spanish was was just becoming Spanish and was not quite Latin anymore but not totally Spanish yet. What they say was was really quite irregular and the infinitive and the present tense and the preterite they all looked so different that that over time people started regularizing it to the form that we have today. A modern example that I give them is the verb on that. Most of you, me to teach underway as the past tense, but we know that we are now witnessing a process of regularization with that verb. In fact, about two years ago, a student told me that she really liked this group it was kind of like indie pop from Mexico. I wish I remembered the name. It was kind of a celestial sounding name of the group. I don't remember it sorry. In the first verse, the guy says and they instead of a new way. And so I started listening to how younger people talk and asking my little speakers and it seems that all of us who teach and the way as the preterite tense. The speakers even a monolingual communities are more and more starting to prefer and they, they say that and Louis sounds a bit pedantic, or something that their grandparents would say that they, they don't want to sound that way anymore. I also show them examples of regularization in English, because English has the same processes operating in order to create this more regularized system. Here's another example, although I've got to hear. So we do have these conversations in Spanish, even though we're talking also about English and I think this helps our second language learners to make some connections to the curriculum if they're not as familiar exposed to non standard Spanish each time. So here's an example that I show them, you know what you guys are so mad about regularization with going to see, but look, even in English we have increasingly regularized our preterite forums over time. So I'll show them an example of however like burn has become more and more regular taking burned instead of burnt over time and how this is happening with many other verbs. I don't know if you can can actually access this link, but really it's just an article about scientists predicting which verbs are going to regularize in the future in English, and the one that they came up with that's going to be the new regular one is wedded instead of wed. So feel free to check that out. So, once I teach them all of this focus on form knowledge and meddling with technology so we can talk about it, and then we learn the social linguistic knowledge for why these things change, then it's time to have critical reflection. And this is definitely not just a throwaway or enrichment step. This is like if grammar grammar would be the means to this end. So in the step of the lesson, we discuss why certain changes have been accepted in standard Spanish, and others have not been incorporated into standard Spanish and how that affects the way grammar is taught and how that affects the way real people think about their own language practices. And I take all of this and try to have students do something productive with all of this new knowledge so a good thing to do at the end of the lesson is teach them how to respond to a discriminatory attitude or comment about their own speech community. If they're using one of these non standard forms. So, those are basically the steps we look at the knowledge we find different examples, then we learn how things change and why they change, and then we learn to respond to discriminatory attitudes against some of these changes. So I've listed a couple of examples of other areas that I generally tend to address in a grammar class. You're welcome to ask me about any of these during the Q&A time. But I think now Flavia would be a good time to or Sarah to create some breakout rooms, some small groups. Let's see I think first one thing that you could do in your small groups is think about how critical pedagogy of using an approach like this might motivate your students to learn more about Spanish. And maybe think about one of the grammar topics that that you teach, it could be one of these listed here or something else. And think about what your students already know about variation or what kind of variations they're already using, and how you could validate those in a class. So, let me share again. I am fantastic. Okay, well, so I hope that you were able to discuss a little bit about what you think might be applicable from this idea of critical pedagogy in in your groups hopefully you met somebody that has a similar experience or challenge or thought, or maybe they gave you a new idea. Let me go to questions. I wanted to kind of this is being recorded. So I wanted to just go through some comments on some slides about how you might assess this kind of lesson. And I won't really get into the things that are on here but if you would like to assess critical pedagogy, you could always watch the video and then just pause it and read through the questions on these slides. So, first I give some examples of like question starters that you can use to assess all the different components in a lesson. I think if you're going to teach it all, you've got to assess it all to in this way. And then I screenshotted a little tiny chunk from one of my exams. This one was about different types of past constructions and so there were questions about regularization. And you'll see that they're focused on form and social linguistic knowledge and critical reflection questions. And then I screenshot it and answer. And I was very intentional about screenshotting and not fantastic answer, because I didn't want to blow you away with an amazing student who might feel intimidated. So this is like a really average B response. It's not perfectly accurate in terms of metalinguistic knowledge, but the idea of what language variation does in bilingual communities is definitely on. And finally, thinking about now that everything is online and we have to assess online, I think it's a good time to try incorporating critical pedagogy because the answers that you are assessing are not so easily found in Google. I really don't think that a focus on form type test makes very much sense now that we're online. You can do those kinds of questions and then add to them and I have many ideas of how to do that if you would like. Finally, I wanted to end with some quotes from my students. A good way to see if you think this is working is for your last question on the exam to be something like, What did you learn that you would like to share. You can see how they framed their own learning and then again I tried to give not the most fantastic blow you away answers but really solid one was a B and one was an A answer. And you can see that the students really understand the idea of languages change and people get hurt in the process when stigmatization occurs. So that's my presentation. I would love to answer any questions that you might have. I don't know Flavia just want to to read out the questions. I'll open the chat again. Okay, just go ahead and write any questions or comment or something you would like to ask so we can continue the conversation. While they are doing that I've got the chat open now so that I can see. I know that one of the questions was about resources and so a couple of ideas. One is using your students own speech as a great resource students, I thought they would think that this was weird but they like to be featured in my lessons and they like to be quoted in my lessons. I also brought I was just in a breakout room talking about this one. This is one that I really, really recommend it is gonna make a funny or that variation social by Kim Potoski. You can see it's a really skinny book. But it is a book that I use a lot. Because now that I work more with critical pedagogy I think it's really important to privilege like depths over breath. Somebody gave me this. Yes, thank you for the machine, and she is here. Wonderful. So thank you Kim Potoski for writing a wonderful book that I use in class a lot. I think somebody gave me the phrase throwing spaghetti at the wall, and I think, you know just seeing what sticks and I think teaching too many grammar topics is kind of like that. I would rather teach fewer grammar topics and incorporate them from different angles so that the students can decide how they want to connect with that material and, you know, if they want to incorporate it into their daily practices or not. I hope that you continue to revise it. It's already great though. Thank you. Do you introduce the concept of appropriateness as a replacement for grammaticality. I introduced the concept of appropriateness as different from grammaticality. I would say that usually in my classes we talk about grammaticality as a predictable pattern that speakers in a native speech community. I don't know if it's up by level right but in a speech community that uses Spanish natively would use, and then I definitely look at appropriateness as the idea of, well, you can decide how much of this you want to incorporate in your own Spanish practices. I don't know if you are speaking with somebody in your professional life or maybe in your creative life or your academic life, but I think Carl, like, in the end, what's appropriate for one student might not be appropriate for another student because not everybody wants to incorporate Spanish into their professional life. I wish they did, but they might not want to and that is also their personal choice. What else? Other questions? Yes, professional or personal. They can add that. Let's see what is here. How do you organize the syllabus for the class? I've taught heritage learners for a while. I kind of predict the topics that have lots of variation that I think they're going to need to know, and we just do one after the other. I usually start with a general idea of thinking about critical language awareness and what the right is and what different academies of the language would say about different varieties. And then I usually pick a couple of topics that I think are going to be most useful to students and I definitely teach fewer topics now. I like this question. Could you give an example of something students could say to someone who critiques their language usage? Well, so yeah, this is like a big part of what I teach is how to respond to that when students hear a comment about, let's say, the he's this. Well, you can't say the he's this because the he's this is wrong. I teach them to first start with the existence of knowledge that variations exist. And then I teach them to incorporate so silhouistic information so that they might say, well, the he's this occurs because of a process called regularization. And that process has occurred in lots of Spanish instances in the past, for example, and then they might come up with something like a reír, say how it's been regularized or how and that is becoming more and more regular. And then they can say that their own speech community has its own practices and its own patterns. And if it is a pattern preferred by the speakers of that speech community, then it is a grammatical pattern for them. I usually teach them to sort of acknowledge that variation exists and then explain why and then defend their own practice if they choose to. And so I was wondering why people focus that much on grammar variation and less on on lexical variation, which impacts communication, much more. I think it's easier to teach grammatical variation so we do it more because we could take one whole box and say that all of these instances of patterns fit in that one box and so we tend to do it more. I would say that when trying to select topics that are worth presenting in depth. So I do think about if there is some kind of variation that's non standard that my students will probably use which ones have the most informational value. So the other day Flavia and I were talking about the subjunctive and teaching the subjunctive and Spanish teachers are just so in love with teaching the subjunctive and I think it's because we break it up into nominal clauses and adjective clauses and there's many different ways to teach subjunctive and we just keep teaching it. But in reality, the amount of informational value in coding a verb for subjunctive versus indicative is so small, because the first part of the sentence tells you whether it's subjunctive or not it tells you the mood that the speaker has towards its action. So that is something that we teach in a very advanced class, but we don't teach that much in a lower level class because coding for subjunctive is going to improve their effectiveness of their communication very little. What about the swen? Do you have an example of critical pedagogy being used to learn about lexical variation? I don't know would pronoun usage be lexical variation? Those are grammar words. We definitely talk a lot about it in the linguistics class. We don't do as much of it in the grammar class, but we definitely like to approach lexical variation in class as something that's exciting. Students love to talk about it and they love to learn about new varieties, but I don't teach it that much in a grammar class. I wonder if it's necessary for heritage learners to learn all the rules for the uses of subjunctive. If we have this much time and this much information. It's fun to teach about in an advanced class because I love teaching about how different languages code for mood differently and how it's a really salient feature in some languages and not in other languages. But that's like really nerdy talk and only the students that get to take linguistics classes really find that information useful. I try to think like what could they choose to incorporate in their own professional or academic or creative life and that's what I would choose to teach first. So subjunctive, sometimes yes and sometimes no. I saw someone asked earlier about ideas for teaching this with high school students doesn't even have ideas about that. I teach this to college freshmen and college freshmen are a lot like high school students. So, yeah, it's almost like the same thing. I do think that again you can teach fewer topics, and maybe you're in your focus on form, you don't give so many forms, but you start with forms, and then you can still teach variations on those forms and I think you can still listen to real people using those variations and talk about why they occur, especially if you make the connection to how those examples occur in English. And I also think that this book, it was written for for college, but I do think that you could pick out plenty of lessons for high school. Definitely in terms of subject for agreement, things like that. What else did you see the questions go so fast I try to get one and see if there's any more. I got to scroll back up I lost someone asked about how do you organize the syllabus for the class. Yeah, so I definitely start with the idea of language variation in general, and then I just pick instances of variation that I know are going to occur in my students speech communities at home. That's what we talk about I would say that I'm like hesitant to answer this question with specifics now that we're online because I'm just not sure how many topics we're going to teach, but I would say that we change grammar topics, once a week in a college classroom because we can do a lot more and I can assign a lot more out of class and I assign a lot of the focus on form outside of class, but maybe if you were in high school. You might teach the same grammar topic for like two weeks so that you can look at it from many different angles. If you are not only teaching grammar that could be half of your class period could be something like that and the other half of the class could be a different kind of reading a more creative style reading and writing. But we do incorporate a lot of reading and writing in into these topics. What else. I'll let you address them since it looks like someone Donna asked any thoughts on immersion students with fossilized grammar. Yes, I don't have that many because unfortunately. Well, and I noticed that Paltowski said that she was here. It was the kinds of programs that she's talking about that we need gosh we just don't have them in Texas. So I don't have a lot of those students. But again, I would go back to picking your battles and thinking about because of informational value. What can we teach them that they could choose to incorporate in their own communication style that would actually really improve the value of the message. And I do think that something like preterite really improves the value of the message, because these verbs are marked for very saliently we clearly hear the different endings so I would pick that. I would pick pronoun usage as something that could really improve the quality of somebody's message because recently I noticed that students were. This is like wild grammar talk but I noticed that students were confusing the gender of the indirect object with the gender of the direct object when they were creating sentences with double object pronouns. And that could be confusing to somebody there's a lot of informational value in that because if it's only coded once in a sentence and a pronoun, I would definitely teach them that. So yeah with students that have fossilized grammar. Their language is their language the way they speak is the way they speak and I would not try to tackle everything at once just as I wouldn't do that with a heritage speaker because, you know, that's like that I that metaphor of throwing spaghetti at trying to create correct everything at once. Thank you. I think we will also want to ask what classes you teach and where can they order the book also what other classes do you teach. But I think after this, since we only have one minute left we can probably. Thank you for for all the questions and I teach a lot of different classes I teach Spanish for heritage learners, and I teach a grammar class I teach a linguistics class translation, a class on language and gender that only the really like nerdy Spanish language to take because it's a very top level, but a lot of the strategies that I mentioned today are strategies that I use in classes with mostly freshman students. And where can you order the book. You can just Google it, and there's a great website. She has a website. Thank you so much for this great presentation I think that I mean there are so many questions that we can continue discussing so I hope the conversation keeps going. Everybody knows that we attacks really try to connect people from different spaces, different educational context, different stages of the profession. So anytime that you have questions or comments just contact us and hopefully we will see you around in our next event.