Teaching English in León: unraveling place, language, and ideology

In this TESOL internship, students develop their experiential understanding of the technical, personal, and practical elements involved in emergent language teaching in a “foreign” context. We will pay special attention to the affordances of the local context, students’ linguistic and cultural knowledge, and other on-site resources. Some of the questions we will address include: what does English language teaching/learning look like in León? What ideologies and policies shape it? How does English learning interact with other languages in the local context? How can we, as teachers, create adequate conditions for students to learn English in critical and meaningful ways? What can place-based English teaching do to help us understand the complexities of our world? How do we meet students’ needs and still create opportunities to challenge English dominance through anticolonial English language pedagogies? 

An undergraduate course for incoming K-12 educators based on the premise that “the world is already in our classrooms.” The course frames English as a language in relation to multilingual environments, growing and shifting according to sociomaterial and ideological conditions rather than as a contained language belonging to specific nation-states.

The class helps students to understand how to study language from well-known linguistic branches (phonology, morphology, semantics, syntax) but also from more expansive lenses, such as embodiment and linguistic landscapes, that offer the theoretical space to develop language knowledge according to the experiences of those who tend to be left aside in the study of language.

Language in Social contexts: Raciolinguistics and Antiracism in Applied Linguistics

This course aims at 1) understanding and interrogating how racial and language identities are jointly constructed and shape each other; 2) Interrogating the mechanisms by which English language learning and teaching are not neutral, but intrinsically related to power, colonization and coloniality, racism, and other oppressions, 3) Developing antiracist views and practices with implication for pedagogies across various institutional settings.