During winter 2025, the Oregon Multicultural Archives (OMA) collaborated with OSU Professor Adam Schwartz to gather materials from his course SPAN 399 “Bilingüismo local y personal” as an addition to the Oregon Multicultural Communities Research Collection. The set of materials includes course materials, documents pertaining to a book launch, an OSU Today article, and a sample of student projects.
About SPAN 399 “Bilingüismo local y personal”
“This course explores Spanish language education as a deeply personal, local (as opposed to foreign), and lifelong practice. Distinct from a survey course that introduces that thesis through published and multimodal texts, this class challenges students to realize their own bilingualisms as lived, dynamic experiences, and in ways that do not organize neatly into academic categorizations. Students will individually and collectively write, share, reflect, interview, sit in conversation, and present Spanish-English bilingualisms as lifelong relationships with and through teaching and learning.
Our work will be guided by the contents of Aquí Se Habla: Centering the Local and Personal in Spanish Language Education, a co-edited volume to be published this term. One of the co-editors of this text is the course instructor, and the other three will visit our classroom to invite students in as additional contributors. Over the course of ten weeks, students will read the text and learn about its foundational theoretical framework: The tension point. Aquí Se Habla raises awareness about long-standing points of tension that organize as ideological binaries (e.g. “home” vs. “abroad”) which relegate local and personal Spanish to marginalized status in academic spaces. Students will make the case for a tension point of their choosing, one that concerns not just themselves, but their families, friends and bilingual communities. In so doing, their own voices and testimonios will warrant inclusion alongside Aquí Se Habla’s diverse set of contributors, whose perspectives help to deconstruct disciplinary boundaries and elevate the knowledge and lived experiences of U.S. Spanish speakers. Final work in this course will prepare students to showcase how their local and personal bilingualisms may double as calls to linguistic justice. As such, students are invited to co-present with Aquí Se Habla’s co-editors at the volume’s official book launch at OSU in May.”
~ SPAN 399 “Bilingüismo local y personal” Syllabus
About the OMA and SPAN 399 Collaboration
Professor Schwartz shared the tension point the class selected to explore was “self-identity / imposed identity” — a tension point that resonated greatly with archival materials. As part of the students’ first of three visits to the archives, we talked about how archives can be a place in which people choose how their stories are represented on their terms as a form of empowerment and how archives can also be a place in which materials about but not by a community or individual can sometimes cause a great deal of harm. During their second visit, the students engaged with a curated set of materials that showcased the variety of ways in which communities and individuals have represented their identities — examples included diaries, songbooks, collective works of art, scrapbooks, and zines. On the third visit, we discussed the students’ ideas and questions for them to determine if they planned to donate their final projects to the archives. We discussed the importance of choice, representation, and consent, not only from them but for those who they interviewed for their projects. Of about a dozen students, five decided to share their final projects. At the end of the term, the students gave presentations of their findings and reflections, and many again shared their work as part of the Aquí Se Habla book launch on May 21, 2025.
