Sometimes we DO have to judge the book by its cover: Lessons on visual representation of Latin America in Spanish learning novels
Presentation by: Magdalena Vergara
Session F | 12:10 – 12:30 | Room 207
Abstract:
This presentation is part of a broader project whose general goal is the development of a critical literacy model aimed at decolonizing hegemonic representations of Latin America produced in the Global North. One component of this project was the ethnographic exploration of the work of a group of Spanish teachers organized under the general umbrella of social justice. Through this, I got interested in the methodological approach that they are using in their classrooms, Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling (TPRS) (Ray, 2012), and particularly in the corpus that is produced within this pedagogical structure.
In this presentation, I will analyze, the visual composition of the covers of three Spanish learner’s novels that are used by this group: Esperanza (Gaab, 2011), La Llorona de Mazatlán (Baker, 2013), and La Guerra Sucia (Kirby, 2011). Doing this, I will especially focus on the interplay between the political project of this collective and its methodological choice.
The relevance of this study is that a considerable audience in the Spanish classroom reads these texts and, therefore, constitute a public, which is receiving a specific representation of Latin America. In spite of this, these textualities are usually ignored by the specialized critique. This presentation is a call to move studies from the archive of high culture to the actual practices of reading communities in the educational system.
The main conclusion of this exploration is that political agendas may be neutralize by the pedagogical and methodological approaches in which teachers have to deploy their practices, more specifically, in this case, social justices’ approaches tend to be as reproductive as the hegemonic gaze when literacy is understood from an exclusively linguistic point of view. As we will see, the representations that these novels offer may reinforce colonial relationships between North and South by using gender stereotypes and the dichotomy modernity/pre-modernity and thus maintain the primacy of the world of hegemonic readers.
In order to prevent this, I propose to develop a frame to de-automatize these reading practices through an approach built upon critical literacy (Freire, 1970; Luke, 2000, and Janks 2010).
