Cultural Activities

• NEW: Talleres del español. This is a joint collaboration by the Department of Romance Language and Literatures at Harvard University, the Observatorio del Instituto Cervantes, and a group of dedicated educators. This site is the product of a series of workshops where educators prepared culturally and pedagogically sensitive learning materials for Latinx students enrolled in language courses in high school and university.
• Activities for Hispanic Heritage Month Every year, Professor Gabriela Zapata (Texas A&M) creates a new website that provides information on the celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month, along with topical cultural resources such as photos, biographical information, and videos. Each website also has classroom activities (in Spanish and English).
  • NEW: Activism From and In Texas [CC]
  • The Wonderful World of Lotería [©️]
  • Hispanic Activism in Texas [CC]
  • Tejanas: an interactive journey of discovery [CC]
• Empowering Learners of Spanish , is a collection of activities developed by Claudia Holguín Mendoza, Robert L. Davis, Julie Weise (University of Oregon) and Munia Cabal Jiménez (Western Illinois University). These activities, based on Critical Pedagogies, serve to introduce students to a range of concepts in sociolinguistics and critical inquiry into language ideologies. The activities are written in both English and Spanish, and resources are also in both languages.
• Survey for Heritage Learner Attitudes and Political Climate : As an extension to the original Survey for Heritage Spanish speakers on language attitudes, we created this new survey to analyze heritage students’ attitudes regarding language maintenance and the use of their heritage language as an act of resistance under a difficult political climate. If you have any questions about the survey please email Jocelly Meiners or Delia Montesinos.
  • Create a Google account or log in to Google Drive with your existing account.
  • Copy the survey to your Google drive.
  • (Optional) Use the form as is or edit the form before sending it to participants.
  • Use the “Send” button at the top of the Google form to send the survey to your participants.
  • View responses and scores in the “Responses” tab on your form (You can select to “Get email notifications for new responses.”)
• Mexican Muralist Movement Learning Expedition : a lesson by Yvonne Fariño from the CASLS InterCom newsletter
• “Saber es poder”: Activities for Heritage Language Learners of Spanish [CC] by Vianey Cabrera (University of Southern California). The activities explore students’ perceptions of their heritage and linguistic strengths while raising consciousness about the presence of social varieties used throughout the Spanish-speaking world. Additionally, these materials seek to raise awareness of the social, cultural, and political dynamics of language use. Designed to address the experiences of heritage language learners of Spanish in the United States, they can be used as a project for heritage speakers in a mixed classroom or in a Spanish for heritage speakers course, either as an introductory unit to layout basic concepts or integrated throughout the duration of such courses.
• Teacher-authored materials from the COERLL Collaborators program –These lessons are a product of a school year’s worth of work. Teachers attended COERLL’s summer 2017 Spanish heritage language workshop, submitted lesson proposals, wrote their lessons, and edited and finalized their work based on feedback from the heritage Spanish project team.
  • El graffiti y el arte urbano hispanoamericano [CC] by Carmen Ensenat (Baltimore County Public Schools)
• Video-based discussion activities for beginning Spanish Heritage Language courses , developed by COERLL Heritage Spanish Project Directors Yanina Hernández and Dr. Jose E. Hernández (University of Texas Rio Grande Valley) and a group of graduate students from the UTRGV M.A. Spanish program. These activities target learning comprehension in the beginning heritage Spanish courses by using speech data of interviews collected among Spanish-speakers from across the state of Texas. Heritage learners will relate to the linguistic forms and registers used by these speakers and to the topics and cultural practices discussed. We hope that these activities will have a positive impact on their motivation to learn the language, while strengthening their connections to their community.
• Spanish for Heritage Language Learners  This is a collection of instructional materials  developed by Gabriela Zapata (Texas A&M) for the teaching of Spanish as a heritage language at the intermediate level, grounded in the tenets of the multiliteracies framework Learning by Design. The lessons are based on authentic materials produced by Latino writers and artists, and are organized in four instructional modules with a focus on topics relevant to heritage language learners: immigration, labor, family, and bicultural/bilingual identity.
• Immigrant stories is an archive of contemporary migration stories through digital storytelling.
• SpinTX is a corpus of video-recorded sociolinguistic interviews and transcripts from the Spanish in Texas Corpus, built and maintained by researchers from The University of Texas at Austin.
• CoBiVa (Corpus Bilingüe del Valle) is a corpus of audio-recorded sociolinguistic interviews and transcripts gathered by researchers at The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.
  • The principal investigators have also produced a handbook: the CESA and CoBiVa Training Handbook (Ryan M. Bessett, Ana M. Carvalho, and Katherine Christofferson). This guide describes how to form a bilingual corpus based on the methods used in developing CoBiVa and its sister corpus, Corpus del Español en el Sur de Arizona. It features information on technologically-aided transcription. Supplementary materials can be found here.

If you’d like to share a resource with the Heritage Spanish community, please contact Marco Pevia at techs.edu.team@gmail.com.