Celebrating Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month

This project is a part of the Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month celebration because it supports a Latino teacher or a school where the majority of students are Latino.

I teach 10th and 11th grade English at a large, comprehensive high school in California. The 10th grade curriculum focuses on ethnicity and race in literature, while the 11th grade course analyzes American literature. The students that I teach are extremely diverse; their interests, heritages, personalities and preferences vary uniquely one to another.

I employ various types of popular culture (advertisement, film, image, text) in the classroom on a regular basis to enliven the English classroom. To create classroom community, I frequently discuss up-to-the-minute pieces of popular culture that every one of my students can relate to and consider critically. I strive to convey to students that the study of English doesn't only consist of reading the classics, but instead addresses the art of clear communication. Last year, when my 11th graders and I studied rhetoric and the art of persuasion, we looked at some very famous television commercials together, online. Specifically, we analyzed advertisement’s use of appeals to sway audiences. We heard the footfalls of the Nike athletes, felt our heartstrings tugged by eBay, and laughed alongside Ms. Butterworth and Geico. The students and I easily located almost all of these online resources through YouTube. Unfortunately, all 26 of us were all huddled around my 16-inch MacBook. In an effort to make popular culture truly academic, the students and I will need the appropriate technology to project these images so that we can analyze them together, as a group.

The ability to display an image via projector to a screen (or a wall, for that matter) would make it so easy for all of us to see clearly the clips and/or images that we’ll discuss as a class. In an instant, I can connect my computer to the projector and… demonstrate to students how to appropriately conduct an Internet search… view and discuss the appeals used by President Obama in a speech he gave the night before… surface a “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” clip to inform students on the definition of “satire”… or locate an image of an Asher Durand painting to illustrate the meaning of Transcendentalism. With a projector, the Internet is our oyster, and the places the classroom can go are truly endless. Furthermore, a projector would maximize classroom time, as I could show students slides I had previously prepared. Students would be able to read clearly the slides’ contents, and could easily take notes on the material themselves. Sticking to a slide show would also help the classroom teacher (me) stay on-track and on-time, so that the students can begin to reflect and converse with one another about the presented content.

Your generous donation could help my students and I bridge the gap between “school” and the “real world”. By encouraging students to view everything around them as a statement (including the movies and TV shows they watch, the video games they play, and the advertisements that pervade it all), I can convey to them that the purpose of an education in English is more than just reading books and writing papers. It is the skill to communicate, to analyze, to debate, to understand. And, as you and I both know, it is oh-so-much more.