At the beginning of each school year, Spanish teacher Aurora Hermo displays pictures of a diverse group of people and asks her students to identify which of them are Latino. They confidently eliminate those wearing business attire. Then they narrow the group down further by eliminating those with the lightest and darkest complexions.
In reality, all of the images are of Latino men and women.
Hermo, who teaches at Summit Senior High School in Summit, N.J., says the results of this exercise are the same even among students who speak Spanish as a part of their heritage. In fact, she finds that her students’ perceptions instead reflect the narrow portrayal of Latinos in popular culture.
The National Association of Hispanic Journalists tracks the presence of Latinos in the news. It reports that news stories in which Latinos are the subject most often concern immigration, poverty and crime.
And Hollywood does no better in reflecting the broad reality of Latino life. Latino characters are often portrayed as poor and uneducated. In his book Hollywood Hispano: The Latins in Motion Pictures, George Hadley-Garcia writes, “Hollywood has not explored the world of Hispanics who are rich, educated, middle-class, who are gay or bisexual”—in other words, the depth and breadth of any culture. What students see often reinforces stereotypes and creates a skewed vision of the actual communities in which they live.
The good news is that Spanish-language teachers are perfectly positioned to tackle anti-bias issues within their curriculum. But it doesn’t happen automatically. Educators must be purposeful in integrating language and culture, with a goal of eliminating biases as their students accumulate language skills.
Embracing Standards-Based Instruction
Pablo Muirhead now teaches Spanish at Milwaukee Area Technical College. But it was teaching a middle school class that helped him reimagine the goals of foreign-language instruction. He created a unit about an indigenous Peruvian family that moves to the city. His eighth-graders learned what the class needed to cover—such as vocabulary—from the text. But they also were able to explore the themes of cultural merging, discrimination and linguistic difference.
Muirhead’s approach reflects the national standards for foreign-language learning issued by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL). The standards identify five interlinked goal areas: communication, cultures, connections, comparisons and communities. And they provide a framework for teachers to implement curriculum that explores both dominant and marginalized cultural perspectives while helping students acquire language skills. But Muirhead laments the “real, or perceived, pressure” teachers feel to get through certain chapters in a textbook, which often results in cultural themes being relegated to an afterthought, at best.
In contrast, Muirhead found that creating a more realistic unit that encompassed all of the standards engaged his students on an emotional level, making anti-bias goals easier to achieve.
Creating Curriculum That Reflects Diversity
Hermo knows that students tend to accept the perspective of the dominant culture as reality, so she feels it’s important that they develop critical cultural competence. She challenges her students in lively debates, and recalls one in which her advanced-Spanish students tackled the role of women in society. They were surprised to learn that women now serve, or have recently served, as the presidents of nations such as Chile, Argentina, Brazil and Costa Rica.
“Many kids are used to seeing themselves ‘on top,’” Hermo says, but she constantly urges them to explore their own assumptions and to be more aware of the reality of the world.
Speaking as a teacher myself, that means replacing dominant perspectives about culture with more complex views. For example, I once challenged my students to create a skit about a family. Two boys snickered and asked, “Can we be a gay couple?”
As a relatively new teacher, I balked, imagining the stereotype-filled rendition we’d see if I 