Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Welcome to Insightful Questions, the podcast where we dive deep into the big ideas shaping Eastside Prep's community and beyond. I'm your host, Sam Uswick. Each episode I'll be sitting down with different members of our EPS community.
Join us as we ask the insightful questions that help us lead with compassion and listen with intention. Let's get started.
Joining us is Josefa Ruiz Mercader, who has been a cornerstone of the EPS Spanish program since 2014.
She has actively participated in redesigning the EPS Spanish curriculum undertaken during the last 10 years in both the upper and middle schools. Inclusive instruction, designing activities to reach all learning profiles has always been her core principle.
She has been able to do that in an immersion environment where Spanish is the primary language heard and spoken.
Beyond the classroom, Josefa has chaperoned EBC week trips to Arkila, Spain and Argentina, bringing the language and culture to life for her students.
We're also joined by Malcolm Yates, who has been a vibrant part of the eps community since 2018 and currently serves as the Spanish discipline lead. Over the years, he's taught an impressive 86 Spanish classes across middle and upper school, facilitated engaging seminars on Mexican cinema and Gen Z on tv, and chaperoned EBC trips for both divisions. Beyond the classroom, Malcolm has coached track and field and ultimate, bringing his energy and dedication to every aspect of the EPS experience.
Bienvenidos az unestro Podcast Josef E. Malcom Buenos tardes. Buenas tardes. All right, so let's get started.
First, from your perspective as a Spanish teacher, how does empathetic dialogue help students connect not only to the language, but also to the cultures it represents?
[00:02:23] Speaker B: Sure. You know, for me, I am almost always starting from the perspective of a non native speaking Spanish teacher when I think about empathetic dialogue in the classroom.
And so in whatever class I'm teaching, on one of the first days of class, we talk about the fact that my relationship to this language is one of somebody who has fallen in love with the world of Spanish speakers and cultures in which Spanish is spoken, who has a real love of language as a cultural marker and as sort of a human trait, but who can't represent personally the cultures represented by Spanish and whose story is not based in Spanish. And so to give a really specific example, we at EPS talk a lot about inclusive language in English in our classrooms. And when we talk about inclusive language specifically for people with complex gender identities, for instance, that is a challenging conversation in English. And it comes up in the case of personal pronouns in a number of ways in Spanish. It comes up all the time.
It comes up almost every time a person uses an adjective to describe themselves. In English, you can say I'm tired. And in Spanish, you have to say, I'm tired. And also I'm a man or I'm tired and I'm a woman. And if you want to say I'm tired and not declare a gender, there is no traditional adjective for that. There's no.
Until somebody invented it quite recently.
And what this means is that there's complex, politically and socially controversial language that is necessary to be inclusive in Spanish. And it's not my language that I'm asking students to alter, to play with, to be flexible with. And so the complexity of having to be empathetic in using this is that I have to communicate to students both. Here at eps, we use inclusive language, and we must make space for inclusivity in the way that we talk about people using gender as one particular example. And yet I also have to say, if you go out into the world and expect this language to exist and be used, know that the cultures that speak this way, that speak in, that speak Spanish, don't necessarily adopt this language, won't necessarily recognize it. And there's a tension there. And I think the best thing I can do is just model that that tension exists and that we are both committed to inclusivity here, and we recognize that changing an entire many people's language is a big ask, and it's not quite my ask to make.
[00:05:05] Speaker A: How about you, Josefa?
[00:05:06] Speaker C: Malcolm said that he's talking from the point of view of a person who is not a native speaker of Spanish. So I can talk actually as an immigrant because I come from a very different culture. For me, it's a challenge to be integrated in this culture. So for me, Malcon is not only to talk to the students about the culture in Spain, which is the country where I come from, and also the culture that I know from other Hispanic countries, but also I need to be able to read what is the culture here in order to.
To be able to have empathetic dialogue and to be empathetic with people. And I think that at eps, there is one more layer with the fact that there are many students that they are in very similar situation to my situation.
Maybe the students have been born here, many of them, but the parents have not. And, Malcolm, you used the example of inclusive language. Another example that I can use, which is very different, is the comparison between how in Hispanic culture we talk. If I compare with the culture here in this area at Least in the area of Seattle, which is the area that I know in the US So for us, we talk much more directly.
For me, this is a big challenge because when I have, for instance, to provide constructive feedback to the students in daily basis, I try to be empathetic. And when I try to be empathetic, I have to think about what that means for me coming from a different place, but also what that means for the student who I have in front of me.
[00:07:07] Speaker B: Yeah. And it sounds to me like one of the things you're saying is that because we have so many students who they themselves or whose families come directly from another culture, the fact that you're experiencing that challenge of navigating the cultural differences, it actually connects you in some ways to a lot of our families, which is amazing. I have to say. I noticed how direct you were when I first got here, and I thought you were mad at me a lot of the time.
And it took me a little while to get to know you and to know that you really weren't. And that's just the way you talk.
[00:07:38] Speaker C: No, actually one of the things that when you travel more internationally and when you talk to people who visited Spain, one of the things that we tell students when you go to a restaurant, for instance, don't think that everyone is fighting with each other.
It's just how we express ourselves. We use a lot our hands, we interact each other, and it is just because we want to. We are more passionate and we really.
So, like, one thing that really impressed me when I came here, one of my first cultural shocks is when I went to the supermarket and the person told me, how are you? And I thought, like, wow, they are interested in me.
But it took me time to realize that it's the same thing that's saying hi.
So in our classes, one of the things that we explain to the student is like, well, empathetic dialogue.
In our cultures, you ask someone, how are you? You're asking someone, how are you?
And for us, the content of times, which is very different in both areas in both countries, is very different. And if you are telling me, how are you? I think that you have an interest on knowing how I am. And I think that you have the time for listening to me. And I'm going to tell you if I am good, I'm going to tell you. And I felt sad. I'm going to tell you too. And once again, I expect empathy from you. Like, I expect that you've put yourself in my situation and you react in an empathetic Way.
[00:09:24] Speaker A: Yeah, I've had the casual greeting of how are you answered with do you really want to know?
Right. Because the way you expressed it, Josefa, in terms of is. It's a way of saying hi. I have to say that all those examples you just shared to me illustrate why when we talk about empathetic dialogue and civil discourse, it is a very complex set of skills that we are teaching students all at once.
That's why it's a skill. It's a necessity for a complicated classroom, a complicated world, and it's an essential thing that we're teaching our kids. Those examples you just described, for our young people to navigate the complexities and the multiple layers, you got to take your time to unpack all of that. So thank you for those illustrations of why we're spending so much time on this. Excellent. So here's the next one.
What specific strategies do you use to model empathy in interactions with students, particularly when discussing sensitive cultural topics or providing difficult critical feedback?
[00:10:41] Speaker C: One thing that is very important for me at EPS is the different learning profiles.
This is very important for all of us in all the disciplines, of course, and in the Spanish discipline, we add one more layer. So we have the neurodiversity, and then we have the fact that students have many previous experience and many different number of years that they have been studying the language.
So it is very important to.
To make sure that all the students feel that they belong in the classroom. So when you have students that even in their first language is challenging for them, when you have students that they have never taken Spanish before, when you have a student that have these two characteristics together with a student that they are able to communicate without any English, to be able to.
For them to feel safe in that environment, for them to feel comfortable, for them to feel that this is not scary for me, we have to work on making them that they belong to that group, regardless of the knowledge, regardless of the challenges, and they belong to our group because they can learn every day from where they are.
If you are advanced students, you have the obligation to keep growing.
If you are different level, if you have different levels, still your obligation is that if you don't know anything, if it is challenging for that, no worry, I'm here to support you to grow from there. So, regarding which are the strategies, the way we work is how can we make every child to feel that they belong, that they can succeed?
[00:13:05] Speaker B: Yeah, I know so much what you mean, and I try to really remind myself of that when I'm responding to something a student said. And something that I have had to spend a few years learning to do is to really first react to what a student said, rather than immediately moving to correct and to analyze the way they said it. Because I think as language teachers, especially in the lower levels, when a lot of the focus is learning particular skills, how to conjugate in the present tense, how to make adjectives and nouns that they're attached to, you know, agree for number and gender. You've got these ideas in mind, and you hear a misstep. There's. And it's. At least for me, my initial reaction is to go, no, no, no, no. You said Casa rojo. You meant casa roja. And to listen to them and instead say, like, no way. Your house is red. That's cool. My house is blue. Or, you know, whatever. And then to try to swing back around to how to make that more precise and what the specific thing we're learning is. But so that a student gets the sense that I'm really listening to what they're saying and not just listening for errors, and I don't know that I do that 100% of the time. I think it's a hard thing. We only have a little bit of time in a class with 18 students in 70 minutes. Not everyone says something to the room every day. And so to walk that line between making sure that I'm working with them on the mechanics of their language and actually attentively listening to the thing they're saying and relating to them as people and not just as speakers of Spanish is. Is the line I try to walk.
[00:14:47] Speaker C: I think that in a class, language class like ours, empathy, dialogue needs to come from us adults, but needs to come from kids also, because these are very communicative classrooms where we spend a lot of time talking, kids spend a lot of time talking, and we cannot be listening to all the kids.
So it's very important for them to understand that all of us are there to help each other. And they play a very important role as a community to help each other.
And the way of helping, once again, has to be in a very empathetic way. So something that I appreciate and I feel like, wow, is when I see this kind of empathetic behavior between them in the sixth grade, this is very obvious because there are kids returning, fifth graders with kids that they have never taken as Spanish.
So they always embrace me. The way they care about each other and how kind they are and how they embrace each other and how patient they are with each other.
So to belong, to be Able to feel that I belong, to be able to feel confident, to be able to feel not scared, to be able to not be anxious.
The other students are the one who help more than us because they are the one who embrace them.
[00:16:39] Speaker A: And that speaks to how important it is that we're learning together, that it's a community experience. Because that support from your friend, I mean, of course you're all providing amazing support. And they can tell when the adult is not, and they can tell when they're friends or not. It makes me think of the power we have as the teachers, as the adult in the room to impact how much they like our subject or not. I'll give you an example.
I once had this epiphany about wrong answers with kiddos, because, like you mentioned, Malcolm, a kid is sharing what they think about something.
And to them, it is what is the truth. It's what they know in the moment. What's the capital of Oregon bent? And do I stop them immediately and go, I'm sorry, it's Salem?
Or do I have the empathy to understand that that's where they are in their learning at this point? Because they're probably not going to give an incorrect response on purpose unless they're having some fun. It's what they know in the moment. And I have to honor what they know in the moment because they're on this path. And if I just go, nope, wrong, wrong capital, next person, I'm getting in the way of them figuring the things out. This idea that you are where you are as a student and making that. But at the same time, we can't let kids, you know, if someone says, you know, the capital of Oregon is San Francisco, and another kid hears that and think that's accurate, am I living up to my responsibility as the teacher in the room to provide correct information? And I think that is a massive tension that we're weighing every single minute in the classroom. It's why teaching is so exhausting, is because you're literally making hundreds of decisions no one sees for every class. Do I correct them? Do I not? Do I say, hey, hold on. When do I pause and reframe and give them the accurate information? I think that's one of the most amazing and challenging parts of what you do as teachers.
[00:18:53] Speaker B: I think that really comes into play with empathetic dialogue in particular, also in all these moments where we are present and we are responsible for what's being said in the room, but we are not standing and delivering and running a lesson, and we hear conversations between Students and there are moments where you have to decide how much you're going to micromanage the things they say to each other. If you hear something that pings as a little mean spirited or a little edgy and you have to decide, is it my responsibility to jump in right now and break this down or should I try to sort of give kids a chance to work this out on their own? I have no obvious, specific way of managing that. You know, I think we all handle it case to case. But I think for me, I look at that and I think what students need to know is that I am listening to that, that, that if I hear something that they're not on their own kind of. That if I gave them space to work through something with another student, if they were having kind of a hard conversation with another student and I didn't intervene, I want to make it clear to them that they weren't alone, even if they were given the space to work it out themselves.
[00:20:12] Speaker A: And I think that speaks to the complexities of teaching empathetic dialogue and civil discourse. Is all those many, many, many judgment calls in the moment about when do I need to step in and instruct directly? When is the lesson more powerful? When the students recognize something, support one another, work through it. Because if we're always rescuing, if we're always in there for them, they don't develop that capacity. But then at a certain point, there's a line where it's like, whoa, hold on, we're just going to stop a second, right? But again, the complexities.
All right, we have a couple more.
So how do you foster a sense of belonging for students who might feel intimidated by the challenges of learning a new language? You've touched on this already, but I think that you have a lot of most of our students, when they arrive here, they've been introduced to the disciplines. They've been introduced to literature and math.
Not all science necessarily, depending where they're coming from.
But for many of them, this is their very first time engaging with Spanish, which I think is an amazing opportunity because you're basically saying, look how cool this is. So how do you approach that?
[00:21:40] Speaker C: So something that I've been teaching, fifth grade, sixth grade, Spanish one, Spanish three, something following with the idea of making everyone to belong. Something that I do is this, that the first three weeks of the school year, I focus, I teach things that no one knows.
So that does give the opportunity to everyone to feel like, okay, I can do this, we are all growing together and I belong here and we can do that I can do that. And then slowly is when I start to introduce concept that some of them know, some of them they don't know. And always the idea is that everyone has to grow from where they are. For that you have to provide the activities and the material that serve where they are.
This is clearly reflected in the most clearly reflected in the sixth grade, where there are two parallel curriculums.
But it is equally reflected in all our classes.
And that is something that I do in order for not to be intimidated. There are many other things like for us is very important to have a very fun. For instance, like which are our values? What are our principles? Movement, fun.
What else? Mark?
[00:23:32] Speaker B: Music.
[00:23:32] Speaker C: Music, games.
So all this make people to relax. So having fun in any class make people to relax and make people to learn faster.
So this is something. Of course there are other strategies that we do and for us are very important for our discipline, which is for instance, accommodations. Respect the accommodation of the students. Make sure that they take the accommodations and make sure that they feel comfortable doing that. Make sure that everyone in the class feels comfortable doing that.
[00:24:11] Speaker B: Yeah.
One of the things that I do to help with that feeling of intimidation is to establish some really concrete routines.
And so students in my, especially in my seventh grade course, they are asked every single day we have a song. And after it always opens with a song. And, you know, students are encouraged to dance and to sing along. They're not required to, but they're encouraged to. And some do and some don't. And that's relatively light as well as I hope, you know, a real window into other cultures and some exposure to a way of speaking that's different from mine. But following that, there's a warm up, which is usually either a visual interpretation of a song lyric or a translation of a song lyric from the song. And then every day we write the date, we write it out in letters. So we write out even the numbers in letters. And then we write out the full time. You know, it is six in the. Or not six, it's never six, it's 2:03 in the afternoon.
And then we have a question of the day, which is always based in the kind of language we're talking about. So if we're learning about daily routines, the question of the day might be when did you wake up this morning? But those, those time and date questions, they're unbelievably simple linguistically and they're incredibly formulaic. And some students find them very boring. And I've had students complain to me every day with the date and the time. And I have also had students say, I love the date and the time. I always know how to say the date and the time. And if you want me to raise my hand twice in class, I'll raise it for the date, and I will raise it for the time. And it does. It gives students an opportunity to say, I can say something. I can participate in this, and I try.
Well, it's frustrating having any of these conversations with Pepa, with Josefa, because you always find out that she's doing brilliant things that you have not thought of. It had never occurred to me to throw everybody, day one, into something that they don't know. I think that's kind of genius.
Something that I do that is kind of similar is occasionally I will play a YouTube video for students of just some, like, Internet influencer who speaks so much faster than they could, who I'm having a hard time understanding because of how fast he talks. And there is not a student in the room who understand every word, who understood every word that this person said.
And then I say, okay, but what did you understand? Talk to me about a few words that you caught. What was the whole set? Oh, we were talking about the World Cup. Oh, we were talking about Brazil. We were talking about how Japan has a good shot this year. And all of a sudden we realized that there is. You can always go higher and higher and higher. There's sort of a stratospheric level of ability you can have and that you don't have to be in the stratosphere to be understanding and engaging.
And so that thing of showing that you can get something out of an exercise that was incredibly difficult that nobody mastered is a strategy I use.
[00:27:22] Speaker C: Gracias.
[00:27:23] Speaker B: Gracias.
[00:27:24] Speaker A: Thank you.
For more insights, be sure to check out the EPS weekly news every Friday.
RA.
