In the textbook videos I remember, the recurring characters were mostly light-skinned Mexicans and a blonde, white American exchange student. They were college students. My students were high schoolers, and much of my teaching experience had been in majority-Black schools. The people on the screen were not reflecting much of the range of people in front of me.
From 2017 through 2023, I taught courses ranging from Spanish 1 through AP Spanish Language and Literature. I had a purchased textbook and workbook curriculum, with material I was expected to cover. So that was where I started: What are the pictures they’re seeing? What are the videos that we have to cover? What’s in their homework that I must assign?
The videos were very obviously scripted to practice the unit’s language. There was a place for that. But I did not want those to be the majority of my students’ touchpoints with Spanish. I wanted them to encounter people genuinely using the language to do things they cared about.
To me, my history, my identity, my language, my culture matter, and how other people learn about and engage with all those things matter.
I loved going to ACTFL, WIDA, and other language-focused conferences, especially the equity and inclusion sessions. As a white-passing, mixed-race Latina, I was trying to make sure that I was doing my own work. I sought out educators and presenters of color to broaden my lens and inform my practice.
As a teacher, I also wanted to make sure that what I was actually providing the students was what I thought I was providing the students.
I wanted content they could relate to, that centered their identities and realities, and that also showed them ways of being that were different from theirs. Rudine Sims Bishop’s mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors gave me language for thinking about those possibilities. I was extending questions from her work on children’s literature to the people, stories, images, and voices students encountered in my classroom.[1]
But finding a resource in Spanish doesn’t automatically answer all those questions.
In language teaching, authentic resource has a particular meaning. ACTFL’s guidance defines authentic texts as “written by members of a language and culture group for members of the same language and culture group.”[2] Think of a real restaurant menu written for its customers, a recipe video made for a Spanish-speaking audience, or a podcast about something the speakers and their listeners care about.
The point is, it’s not created artificially to teach language, and it’s genuinely using language in a natural way.
A grammar tutorial can help a student finally understand a concept. I used those too. But that is different from a person making a video about breakfast, reviewing a game, or talking about what happened at a party.
And authenticity does not settle representation. A resource can be made for a Spanish-speaking audience and still give students a very narrow picture of who speaks Spanish and what their lives look like.
My Latin American studies background was part of why I paid attention to that. I wanted to look beyond a predominantly white, Eurocentric representation of Latin America and make sure Black, Indigenous, mixed-race, and other voices were present across countries and communities.
That could be hard work. Sometimes putting the relevant terms into a search engine did not bring me anywhere close to what I needed. I had to follow people who followed people who followed people until I found creators whose work I could use.
Then I still had to consider the language, the subject, the length, the age of my students, and the school’s expectations. And finding one good creator did not mean I could ask that person to represent an entire country or community.
I cannot make an authentic first-person account of what it is like to be Black or Indigenous in another country, because those are not my truths or my experiences. I can research, teach, and help students ask questions. I still need to make room for people speaking from their own lives.
True inclusion isn’t just, let’s talk about this person and who they are and what makes them what they are. That is an important part of learning about humanity. But I also wanted people discussing their breakfast routine, how they work out, a game they play, or something they are making.
Who is making it? Who are they making it for? How do their experiences shape what they notice, explain, assume, or find funny?
One creator I returned to was Yuya. I used her videos across different themes, including food, holidays, and friendships. One breakfast video, as I remember it, addressed something very familiar to my students: not eating breakfast because there was no time, and finding quick things to make before school.[3]
She was not trying to teach the vocabulary or grammar from my chapter. I was the one building lessons around what she was already doing.
And I want to be clear about why I am using her as an example here. Her videos are authentic resources. But including another light-skinned, conventionally beautiful creator did not, by itself, move my collection beyond the Eurocentric beauty standards I was trying to look beyond. Her content could be useful and engaging while I still needed to ask whose faces and experiences were missing.
The video appeared early in the food unit. By the end, students would make their own recipe, tutorial, or food commentary video, connected to their country study. That was part of a culminating project bringing together the unit’s language, cultural comparison, and interpretive, interpersonal, and presentational communication.
So we did not watch Yuya once and move on.
The first time might be a vocabulary scavenger hunt. Students marked words on their lists as they heard them, then checked what they had caught and what they had missed.
Later, students researched whether people in their focus countries used different terms for the foods and ingredients. We watched again, pausing to share those differences and discussing variation within countries too. The word they heard from one speaker was not the only word they might encounter.
Other returns involved hearing verbs in context or rehearsing sections with a partner, using transcripts and slower playback for support. I wanted them hearing how people genuinely communicate: the pauses, the fragments, the trailing off, the phrases that do not arrive in beautifully structured textbook sentences.
I also asked questions that were much more ordinary. How many of these recipes would you actually try? If someone else made them for you and there were no barrier to getting them, would you want to eat them? Why or why not?
Their responses helped me know them better. They did not have to love every recipe for the activity to be useful.
That mattered beyond the food unit. I made collections of podcasts, music, videos, and other resources, both around our units and around interests students might pursue themselves. Some students wanted to study or work abroad. Some wanted to connect with relatives or with family histories they had not had much opportunity to explore. Others were taking Spanish because it was required.
If someone already loved fashion commentary or makeup tutorials, I wanted them to see the possibility of following someone who made that content in Spanish, including vocabulary they would not find in our textbook.
There was also a practical life-skills piece. These students were moving toward a time when they would have to take care of themselves, and some were still learning things like doing laundry, making a grocery list, planning a budget, or putting together a quick meal. Those are things I think everyone should know, and there are so many people making content about them.
Many of my students already spent a good amount of time on YouTube or scrolling social media. So how could I use these habits they already had and these interests they already had to teach them life skills they still needed, and also give them language content? Content that could expand their cultural understanding, their compassion, their empathy, their own identity and pride in who they are and where they come from, while they practiced listening and thinking about how they engaged with media?
But I also knew that wanting to learn did not magically create time or make a new routine comfortable. When students finally had a moment to watch their favorite videos, they might want to relax and understand everything. That made sense to me.
So I gave them choices and assignments that required them to try, with reflection on what they understood, where they got lost, and what helped. Their responses informed later selections. I was transparent about why: I wanted them to find ways into the language they might eventually choose for themselves, and to understand their own learning.
That connects to something I have been exploring in my own writing process: making the thinking available to examine.[4] Finishing an assignment was one thing. Being able to tell me how they had worked through it gave us more to discuss.
Another creator I shared was the man behind Bilingue Blogs, a Black American who talked about learning Spanish and developing his conversational language, regional expressions, and accents.[5] I kept his resources available on our class platform. He gave me a way to talk about who could become a Spanish speaker, especially with students who did not believe that conversational proficiency was something they could achieve themselves.
And he talked about the things they wanted to know. They wanted the slang, the curse words, the colloquial, cool ways to talk to each other, way more than they wanted the vocabulary and grammar necessary to even be engaging in those conversations in the first place. I used that as an in. There was interest there. We could work with that.
Students’ choices changed my collection too. By Spanish 3 and above, some had their own favorite artists and creators. They requested songs, suggested alternatives, and brought me things I had not found myself. I took those suggestions seriously, reviewed them, and looked for places to use them.
Sometimes a song worked beautifully for a lesson. Sometimes it worked during a movement activity. Sometimes it opened a conversation about an expression or a way of speaking that we had not discussed. And sometimes I could not use it.
Finding music with the sounds students enjoyed, the representation I was seeking, and content suitable for the classroom took considerable searching. The setting included a Catholic school with particular expectations about what I could show and play.
Students sometimes suggested using a clean version. But changing certain curse words does not make a song’s topic or theme appropriate. If my concern was the sexual content or objectification in the song, removing a few words did not resolve it.
We often disagreed about that, and sometimes that was where it had to stay.
Still, I did not want my own preferences to become the invisible definition of what was worth hearing. I knew more pop music because I loved it. That made it easier for me to think of a song and know how it might fit a lesson. Other genres required more deliberate searching.
I also knew that what worked for one group might not work for another. Songs that had been favorites for years could fall flat. Something another class barely noticed could become this group’s favorite. Over time, having alternatives let me teach the same concept through different songs and activities.
This was a constant iteration thing. It did not begin as a finished collection with every gap resolved.
And even a much broader collection still needed conversation around it.
At the beginning of the year, before moving into cultural study and comparison, I intentionally taught a lesson about how we would approach our own ethnocentrism, internalized racism and oppressive systems, and those we encountered in other perspectives, with respect and understanding. We watched Adichie’s The Danger of a Single Story, with reflection prompts and discussion.[6] That gave us questions to return to when one example was starting to become a conclusion about everyone.
The questions came up in very ordinary moments. Students might react with disgust to a food they had never tried. I wanted to make room for the reaction without allowing it to become permission to ridicule someone else.
You do not have to want to eat it. You do not have to pretend to like it. But there is a difference between saying something is unfamiliar or unappealing to you and treating the people who eat it as disgusting or inferior. When a reaction becomes mockery or a judgment about a whole group, we need to examine what we are doing.
That was part of the learning too. What did I assume? Where did I learn that? What do I actually know? How can I be curious without pretending I have no preferences or reactions?
The same questions applied to me. What are my biases, my preferences, my blind spots? Am I at least inspecting them, and ideally finding ways to compensate and fill them in for the students?
In Borderlands/La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldúa describes the new Mestiza: “She is willing to share, to make herself vulnerable to foreign ways of seeing and thinking.”[7] She is writing within her Chicana feminist framework. For me, the connection to teaching is in that willingness. I was inviting students to examine their assumptions; I needed to be willing to have mine questioned too.
And all of this took time.
And I want to say this clearly: this inclusion work is something that feeds my soul. I love it. I’m on fire for it. I’m so interested in it.
And it takes a lot of time and effort, and it’s really hard. It’s a lot of self-searching, a lot of soul-searching, a lot of intentional effort and checks and balances. Dialogue with experts and people of other identities. Books, examining, reflection, and work.
Almost all of that additional work was unpaid, and almost all of it happened in my extra spare time. Outside of the grading and the planning and the posting and the newsletter and the parent communication and the conferences and the training and the report cards and the attendance and the duties as assigned and everything else that already had to happen.
That was already too much work in too little time, for pay that I found ridiculous in relation to what the job required. And then, on top of that, the hours of searching for resources, reading, understanding, processing, and hard internal work.
Many mornings, I arrived about an hour before I needed to be there. Many afternoons, I stayed after the workday was supposed to be finished. I attended conferences, paid for learning and resources, searched, screened, adapted, and made activities.
And I did not do that learning alone. Other educators had spent years developing their own work. I worked through ideas with thought partners, trying to learn respectfully, without mining them for their identities. Their expertise, their perspectives, their time, and their work were part of what made mine possible.
It’s just so much work from so many different people.
I truly care. I want them to want to learn it. I want them to actually learn it. I want them to care about it. I want them to connect to it.
But caring did not make those hours stop being work.
I have written before about inclusion depending on more than the goodwill of individual teachers. This is what that looked like in my own practice: a purchased curriculum I was expected to follow, and substantial additional labor to address what I found missing while still meeting those expectations.
With experience, I had prepared activities, alternatives for different groups, and more room to examine who was still missing. That flexibility came from accumulated work. A new teacher could not reasonably reproduce it overnight.
So I do not want someone reading this to hear one more expectation to arrive earlier, stay later, spend more, and care harder. Schools need to make room for this work: paid time to review and develop curriculum, access to resources and professional learning, and ways for teachers to share and maintain what they have built, with appropriate permission and credit.
I keep returning to what my students were actually encountering, beyond whether a resource was in Spanish.
Who gets to be familiar? Who gets to be interesting? Who gets to appear as an ordinary person doing an ordinary thing, and who only appears when we are explicitly teaching about difference?
And what would it take for the work of asking those questions to become something our schools support, instead of something individual teachers must keep finding a way to carry?
Sources and connections
Bishop, Rudine Sims. (1990). Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors. Perspectives: Choosing and Using Books for the Classroom, 6(3), ix–xi.
ACTFL. Use Authentic Texts.
Yuya’s YouTube channel. The breakfast-video description and classroom uses are my recollections; I have not yet located the exact video.
Sanneman, Erika. Narrate First, Polish Later.
Bilingue Blogs. Black guy speaking Spanish really well | Americano hablando muy bien el espanol.
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. (2009). The Danger of a Single Story. TEDGlobal.
Anzaldúa, Gloria. (1987). Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Passage reproduced in Patti Blanco’s An Interview with Gloria Anzaldúa, University of Arizona Poetry Center. Interview originally published November 1991.
