Dr. Luna Nájera

Dr. Nájera earned a Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies at Cornell University, with specializations in Early Modern Spanish and Colonial Latin American literature, history, and culture, with particular focus on early modern theories of war, state violence, gender, and surveillance. She has published articles on these subjects in Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Hispanic Review, The Sixteenth Century Journal, and Bulletin of Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies. Her research on the panel topic includes instructional design, remote learning, and multiliteracies approaches. In her current research on foreign language pedagogy, she draws on assemblage theory and new materialism to reconceptualize foreign language learning.

Pandemic & Post-pandemic Language Teaching: Assemblages, Multiliteracies, and Power

Drawing on my experience in the teaching of intermediate Spanish following the shelter in place measures in March, in this presentation I shall begin with a brief discussion of how traditional approaches to language teaching (including communicative approaches) in the remote teaching format lessen the sustainability of language and culture programs in the present and in the future. I shall share the insights that I derived from the literature on instructional design in the creation of course designs that supported multimodal and multiliteracies approaches that better engaged 21st-century learners. I conclude with some observations about other “affordances” that remote teaching can offer the practice of teaching language and culture during the pandemic and beyond (e.g. rethinking power relations, reconceptualizing assessment, questioning linear approaches to the teaching of language, etc.).

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