Transformative Pedagogy for Spanish and Portuguese in 2021 (and in the Years to Come)

In this current issue of Hispania (March 2021; 104.1), we are publishing the first installment of a series of special features that highlight how educators and scholars have been responding to this tumultuous past year. The initiative, titled Transformative Pedagogy in K–20 Portuguese and Spanish Classrooms, permits dialog about the current state and the future of the teaching and learning of Spanish and Portuguese. We plan on publishing the second part of the special feature in the September 2021 (104.3) of Hispania.

Inspired by Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Fraser’s creation of the short-form article section in Hispania in March 2019, the current special feature seeks to create a space to explore the following questions:

How has the disruption of the pandemic affected teaching and learning of Spanish and Portuguese? And, how is our instruction responding to global protests and calling for reform and equity and social justice? How does the digital and in-person classroom meet these aims?

We were very pleased that AATSP Board of Director members, Rachel Mamiya Hernández (University of Hawai’i Mānoa), Comfort Pratt (Texas Tech University), and Martha Vásquez, (San Antonio Independent School District) accepted our invitation to serve as guest editors of the feature. I relied on their insight and impressive breadth of experience in a variety of fields across K–20 and Spanish and Portuguese to help shape this special feature. I sincerely thank our guest editors very much for taking on this continuing project with me.

By September 15, 2020, we had received 26 submissions for the first round of submissions. I managed the submission process and provided the anonymous essays to our guest editors for evaluation. We compiled our reviews in a shared sheet on Google and then met (on Zoom) in late October 2020 to discuss the submissions, all of which offered compelling contributions to the topics of the feature. After careful—and in some cases, very difficult—decisions were made, five exceptional essays were selected, which is about a 19% acceptance rate. I invite you to read more about the five short-form articles in the guest editors’ introduction to the transformative special feature in the next section.

After acceptance, Assistant Managing Editor Conxita Domènech and I worked with the special feature authors, along with our team of production assistants, to prepare their short-form articles for publication. Please take time to read our thank-you acknowledgment to Hispania’s production assistants in the front matter of this issue. We are grateful for their expert copy editing and proofreading help in English, Portuguese, and Spanish; without them, we simply would not be able to publish quarterly. Like other academic research journals, we rely heavily on anonymous peer reviewers, a large group of scholars across the globe who are fundamental to academic publishing. We acknowledge their collaboration with Hispania in the front matter of this issue.

Readers will want to keep turning the pages of this current issue. You will find two short-form articles that discuss world language and culture learning at US military institutions. Our research articles include a study on mixed and matched student groups with different experiences (L2 and HLL) (Henshaw and Hetrovicz) and an analysis of Colombian teachers’ attitudes about the use of vos in education (Weyers). In addition, included here are a study on shamanism and perspectivism in a text by César Calvo (Torres), an analysis of how national memory is created through the news in a text by Lope de Vega (Oechler), and an article on the posthuman approach in a work by Helisberto Hernández (Romero Salado), as well as a robust book/media review section curated by editor Domnita Dumitrescu.

On a special note, all of the editors at Hispania, the guest editors of the special feature, and our partners at the National Office of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese (AATSP) thank you for your continued engagement with the journal and the AATSP. We know you all have had to deal extreme challenges, and, at times, I...