In episode 154, Kate Paesani and Yoko Hama from the Center for Advanced Research in Language Acquisition (CARLA) interview Kristi Lentz about her experiences in a CARLA workshop and learning community on the topic of Asian representation in the language classroom. In this interview, Kristi shares what she has learned as a Spanish teacher by intentionally focusing on connecting her students to the world and to their own stories. This interview is part of a series of interviews from CARLA on social justice in language teaching.

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Show Notes

We welcome feedback, resources, and diverse perspectives on this topic! To contribute to the conversation started here, you can follow us on X(Twitter) @weteachlang or use this contact form to send us an email.

Resources mentioned in the episode:

Kristi Lentz has been teaching Spanish and English for over 20 years in a variety of K-12 settings in the Pacific Northwest, Northern California and Minnesota, and specializes in supporting neurodivergent and 2e students. She is finishing a Master’s degree focused on intercultural studies, and is committed to increasing representation of diverse voices in curriculum materials. She serves as a board member of the Language Learner Literature Advisory Board; has co-authored, with Adriana Ramírez and Cécile Lainé, the book Challenging the Colonialism in World Language-Learner Literature: Paths for Writing Toward Respectful Interculturality (2021); and serves on a variety of professional committees through ACTFL. When not teaching, you can find her researching family history, community organizing, and communing with trees, creatures and people in Northern Minnesota. If you want to get in touch, you can reach out to Kristi by email or on X(Twitter) @LentzKristi

Dr. Kate Paesani is Associate Professor of French and Director, Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition (CARLA). You can email her here.

Yoko Hama is Doctoral Candidate, Hispanic Linguistics, Department of Spanish & Portuguese Studies and Graduate Research Assistant, Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition (CARLA). You can email her here.                        

Learn more about Stacey, WTL host and producer here.

 

 

If you want to cite this episode, our suggested APA (7th) reference is:

Johnson, S.M. (Producer/Interviewer). (2024, April 8). Centering Asian Voices with Kristi Lentz (No. 154) [Audio podcast episode]. In We Teach Languages. https://weteachlang.com/2024/04/08/154/

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TRANSCRIPT for Episode 154

Stacey Johnson: This is We Teach Languages

Stacey Johnson: A podcast about language teaching from the diverse perspectives of teachers. I’m Stacey Johnson and I host and produce this podcast. But one of the great things about We Teach Languages is that language teachers everywhere can contribute episodes. In fact, we recently had the exciting opportunity to collaborate with our friends at the Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition to publish some interviews they’ve been working on dealing with social justice in the language classroom. Today on Episode 154. I am very pleased to share with you the first episode in this collaboration. I want you to keep a special ear out today. One of my favorite things is when current guests refer back to folks who’ve been previous guests on the podcast, and you’re going to hear a mention of Dr. Kaishan Kong, who appeared on the podcast way back in episode six and in real life also, Dr. Kong is amazing and I’ve had the privilege of working with her on quite a few projects. So without further ado, I will leave it to our esteemed interviewers, Kate Paesani and Yoko Hama, to introduce themselves and their guest. Kristi Lentz.

Kate Paesani: Hello. My name is Kate Paesani and I’m the director of the Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition, also known as CARLA at the University of Minnesota.

Yoko Hama: I’m Yoko Hama, a graduate research assistant at CARLA and doctoral candidate in Hispanic linguistics at the University of Minnesota.

Kate: In fall 2022, CARLA was awarded a Language Resource Center’s grant to help us realize our mission of improving language, teaching and learning in the United States. One of our initiatives is supporting teachers who focus on social justice in language education. And one of the activities within this initiative is a workshop series and professional learning community centered around different social justice topics each semester. Our second workshop in Spring 2023 focused on centering Asian voices in the language classroom and included a workshop led by Dr. Kaishan Kong from University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire. Following that workshop, I organized our professional learning community or PLC to allow language teachers to go deeper into the topic and discuss classroom applications. Today we are speaking with Kristi Lentz, who attended the workshop and participated in the subsequent professional learning community. Kristi has been teaching Spanish and English as a second language for many years in a variety of K-12 contexts. She is joining us to talk about what she learned through participating in the Asian Voices Workshop and PLC and how these experiences have impacted her as a language educator. Welcome, Kristi. Thank you for being here.

Kristi Lentz: Thank you so much. It’s an honor to join you all.

Yoko: To start off, please tell our listeners a little bit about your background and how you got interested in language teaching.

Kristi: Yeah, so I grew up in a very White suburban neighborhood in the north of Seattle, and my world was mostly English-speaking people, as well as quite a few Korean-speaking people. My high school was centered right in the epicenter of the Korean diaspora on the West Coast. So my experience growing up was very White and, I would say, [among Asian cultures it was] predominantly Korean as well as a number of other classmates from other areas of Asia. And I originally actually wanted to study German. That’s my own heritage. And I changed that when an older teenager who I looked up to started to talk about how learning Spanish was helping her to communicate in a lot of contexts in our Western Hemisphere. And I thought, “Wow, this is so useful, I really want to learn Spanish.” And so as I went through high school and even college, I thought, “You know, if I had a dream profession, it would be to be a Spanish teacher,” because teaching Spanish, or rather, taking Spanish was the absolute bright spot in my day as a student. You know, everything else could could fall to the side, but my Spanish class is what gave me so much life. And so I thought, “If I can bring that kind of life and joy to other students through being a Spanish teacher, that would just be amazing.” But at the time, I thought, you know, “I will never be proficient enough, I can’t even understand my teacher half the time.” And so as as life evolved and I had the opportunity to travel to be a private teacher and a nanny for a United States family living outside of the United States, in Venezuela and Panama, my desire to teach Spanish just began to overwhelm almost everything else. I would be teaching literacy and weaving Spanish in in every single possible way. So when my district said, “We don’t have any other Spanish teachers, could you please come teach Spanish?” I said, “Sure, that sounds great.” So that was in–that invitation came originally in–2001, again in 2003, and I’ve been teaching Spanish ever since, as well as ESL.

Kate: That’s a great story. Kristi. I hope our listeners can hear the enthusiasm that we can see in your face when you’re telling that story. And I hope language learners will listen to your story because maybe they’ll feel your enthusiasm and be inspired to be teachers themselves. Could you talk to us a little bit about what motivated your interest in the topic of centering Asian voices in the language classroom?

Kristi: Yeah, you know, it was a lot of it through realizing my own–you know, ignorance gets such a negative connotation as a word, but just–my own lack of knowledge about Asian communities. I know that for so many years I was really focused on everything having to do with Spanish-speaking communities, specifically in what’s traditionally been called Latin America, a lot of people are shifting now to call Abya Yala to represent a more Indigenous perspective on this land. But my focus has been so much on Latin America, Abya Yala, that I really made a conscious choice not to focus anywhere else in the world because, I thought, “My time is limited, so if I’m going to watch movies, they’re going to be movies that are, you know, global films but, say, set in Chile or set in Bolivia.” And I remember this must have been probably around the year 2010, again, making the conscious choice to say, “There’s so much to learn about in the world, but I really need to focus on what can specifically help me in my work as a Spanish teacher.” So, you know, I didn’t learn very much about really any other region of the world. And I’m now coming to see, I would say principally through two different sources. Number one is just through realizing the identities of my students. I have a lot of students who are Asian American. And I started to realize, “Wait a minute. Like, we need to be able to bring all of ourselves into our work. And if my students are not seeing themselves represented in our materials, that’s really, um, it’s a problem that needs to be addressed.” So that was one. The other is that I’ve been really engaged in the TPRS/CI community, which is Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling/Comprehensible Input, and now Acquisition Driven Instruction. I mean, it’s a soup of acronyms, but a very powerful approach to language learning. And within this community we have a conference called Comprehended, which Scott Benedict started up and it must have been about two years ago that Haiyan Lu gave a amazing webinar, that’s recorded, in which she talks about how much we need more representation of Asian voices in language learning. And that was really influential to me. So when I saw the announcement come through for CARLA– I’m a new resident to Minnesota, so I thought, “CARLA is only 4 hours away, I need to connect with what CARLA is doing.” So when I saw– and, of course, CARLA is nationwide as well, so I would encourage everybody to follow CARLA. But when I saw that CARLA had a workshop about Asian voices in the language classroom, it was just so much in line with those previous strands of my awareness of what I need to learn about, that I knew I needed to sign up for that, and I felt kind of like, “Well, I’m such a beginner at this.” Even joining the PLC, I thought, “How can I join the PLC? I’m such a beginner.” But I really think as many hands on deck as we can have to increase representation is really important.

Kate: Well and we’re all in different points in our journey, right? And so it’s okay to be at the beginning of your journey in this topic and it’s okay to be an expert in your journey. So I appreciate you sharing that.

Kristi: Yeah, you know, I really want to share one other thing as well. So I moved to Berkeley in 2016 and the East Bay of California. And it was such an amazing shift because having grown up in, like I was sharing, the very suburban White plus Asian community that I grew up in and that I began my teaching career in–and that’s not to say that there were not other groups of people there as well, but that was predominant in my growing up town–moving to Berkeley was an absolute eye-opener because suddenly none of my students shared the same demographic as me in all the different aspects of identity. Like, as I would think through my students, I’d be like, “Wow, like every single student that I have, we have a different major area of our life that is different.” Whereas previously I shared so many demographic markers with so many students. So it made me really start to tune into, “What are my students saying? How are they responding to classroom materials?” And so with that in mind, I want to share two student quotes, and out of concern for their confidentiality, I’m not going to give any identifying details. I’ll just say that both students are coming from an Asian-American family background. This is what they have each said about the materials that we have in Spanish classes. One student says, and I quote, “I would love to see Spanish books, but with Asian characters. I think multiple people would love this topic because it has a sense of diversity for both cultures. It is important for young children to read more about diversity because all cultures should be represented in books so they can learn more about this subject.” This student has even pitched an idea for a book that she would love to see and hopefully someone will take this idea and run with it. She says, “I would love to see a story about a Spanish-speaking family with a young daughter. They meet a Cantonese family who immigrated from Hong Kong and they connect over culture, diversity and immigration as they have both immigrated to the U.S.” 

Kate: That’s wonderful.

Kristi: Right? I hope someone writes a story like this, and I hope they write it at level one because there are so many materials for levels three, four and higher. But our level one students really need to have materials.

Yoko: So yeah, I attended a workshop like a webinar by Tracy Quan, I think, from the University of Colorado Boulder maybe, and she’s conducting a study about Asian Latinx instructors of Spanish, and she’s like working on like a paper about it. So hopefully we will get to read that soon.

Kristi: I can’t wait til that comes out. Yeah. Can I share the quote from the other student as well?

Yoko: Oh sure, go ahead.

Kristi: Oh yeah, okay, so another student says, “I would like to see Spanish books with more representation than just White or Latin American characters, because not only White or Latin American people speak Spanish. There could possibly be Cantonese, Thai, Korean, Japanese, Filipino, Malaysian, or Indian characters.”

Kate: It’s so powerful to hear student voices about this. I think we we don’t always take their opinion into consideration when we’re thinking about designing curriculum, so thank you for sharing that.

Kristi: Yeah. And I, I think both of these students will probably be listening, so a huge thank you to both of them for speaking up, and it’s an honor to amplify their voices.

Yoko: So would you like to talk to us about your experience in the workshop and PLC and what are your main takeaways from these experiences?

Kristi: Yoko, it’s just been so fun to get to work together in the PLC. You know, the five of us– Alejandro has also been a really big player and we’ve had an even bigger group as well. It’s been a treat to get to come together and to realize that the work that we do: we can actually make products, we can actually make a website, we can actually collaborate on longer-term projects. And I think that so often, as teachers, we get so busy that we think that the creators of materials are “out there” somewhere. You know, so we kind of sometimes find ourselves begging other people for materials. “Oh, could you please make this? Could you please do that?” Whatever. Yeah, just to realize we have the power to really hive-mind. You know, I think about Alejandro, and he and I were texting each other during the initial workshop. I was writing him, and then he was writing me, saying, “Oh, you need to know about this and this and this and this and this and this and this resource.” And I’m like, “Wow, this is absolutely incredible.” And so I started making this Padlet just as an internal way to just keep track of all of these amazing resources. And then, Yoko, I had passed the Padlet to you and then you’d said, “Oh, yeah, let’s make a website with this.” So it was really, really motivating to see that we have the power to come together from a variety of different perspectives and to make a resource that can really amplify the voices that we want to see amplified. 

Yoko: Yeah, it was really great to be able to work on like a small database, but yeah, you know, we can still like add more resources hopefully in the future.

Kate: So maybe instead of sharing your longer-term plan, you could tell the listeners a little bit about the resource that you did create. I think they might like to hear about that.

Kristi: Absolutely, yeah, so we made a website and, forgive my lapse in memory, Yoko, what are we calling our website?

Yoko: AsianVoicesSLA.wordpress.com. But the website is called Asian Voices in SLA: Asian Experiences and Identities, Resources for World Language Education. So, it’s still a small database that we put together with Alejandro.

Kristi: And I think, the way that we’ve made it, it has so much room for growth. I mean, we’ve– it’s as if we have the scaffolding and we have resources in it, but we’re hoping that teachers will access this and then, over time, be able to contribute quite a few more resources. So I mean that, I guess, has taken us back again to the future. But for right now, what we have at the moment, is really a fledgling website. And what we’re coming across as a big challenge is that there is such a dearth of resources for teaching, for example, Spanish, for teaching in Spanish about Asian cultures. And so that’s where a lot of the challenge that we’ve come up against is, is we know that we need to increase the representation of voices, but right now, finding the materials is really challenging. So, you know, there’s quite a few academic books that are available. There’s quite a few books that are, say, written in English to help, you know, people who are not familiar with Asian cultures to learn more. But there’s very, very little that we’ve found so far that is, for instance, in Spanish about Asian cultures or really in any language about Asian Latino, or Asian Latinx, cultures and peoples. So that has really stymied us in being able to create the resources that we want, because they’re just not yet there. And that, for me, is the major motivator to be here today–in addition to just being with you both, which is wonderful–but to really pitch to our audience the need for materials. And one of the major challenges that we keep coming across in world language education, and this is one of my pet topics, so pardon me while I get very excited for a minute, is that we have so many materials that are written by people who are not internal to the culture that they’re representing. So we have, for instance, a lot of a lot of books in Spanish education, for instance, about, you know, maybe somebody who goes to another culture. And the book is written about a culture in Latin America, Abya Yala, but from the perspective of someone who has lived their life in the States. The big push right now is really for the Own Voices movement in literature, and there’s a number of voices, Margarita Pérez García, Adriana Ramírez, Maureen Águilar, a lot of voices who are really promoting the need for Own Voices literature in Spanish [language education]. And we’re really needing this with Asian Latinx voices as well. And so this is really the pitch, is, “Could we be inviting our friends who are Asian Latinx to be writing stories for beginners, for intermediates from the experiences of their communities, of their grandparents, etc.?” Because those are the voices that we need. I mean, I could go write a story about Korea and it would be an absolute disaster. No matter how much research I did, I would get it wrong because it would be filtered through my perspective as someone who grew up in Edmonds, Washington. I can certainly write a story about my– maybe in collaboration with my friend who’s Korean, you know, and maybe we could write about, you know, “I go to Korea and her family welcomes me, and here’s our experience,” me writing from my lenses and she writing from her lenses, and we could be coauthors on a book. But if I was to go write a book about Korea myself to try to fill in this gap in representation, it wouldn’t be a quality product, I don’t think. That’s my bias and, you know, some people may disagree with that, but that’s my take on it. And so we really need to be pitching to people, who can be writing from their own family’s experience, the need for more representation in literature.

Kate: So I want to go back to your participation in the workshop in the PLC. So apart from creating the resource that you just described along with Yoko and Alejandro, how has this, how have these professional development opportunities changed the way that you think about Asian representation in language education? I guess we’re sort of curious to hear about the impact of the professional development that you participated in.

Kristi: Yes, so the impact of the professional development is really to show me that we can no longer see our languages as isolated units, but that we need to be constantly seeing how cultures, how languages intersect. So for instance, if I am teaching Spanish, to be willing to incorporate, for instance, a Japanese lens in teaching Spanish. Or if someone is teaching French, what would it mean to incorporate, say, a Pakistani lens into teaching French? Instead of saying, “Oh, well, we can only teach about the cultures where this language is predominant,” instead to see–because we’re such a globalized world–where are cultures and languages intersecting, and to represent that. And that has been the major shift for me. Whereas before, I thought, “Well, if you teach Spanish, you can only be teaching about Latin America.” Now, granted, Latin America has so many different cultures engaged that, you know, we just can’t have these simplistic, reductionist ideas anymore. In the webinar, there were a lot of wonderful topics, in particular an amazing, extensive bibliography to explore that was just, like, that is worth its weight in gold right there, the bibliography. For instance, there’s The Making of Asian America by Erika Lee, which is really highlighted in that bibliography, you know, so there’s the resources to dive into. But the biggest takeaway for me was just that understanding that we can’t have this silo approach anymore to teaching about languages and cultures, but to know that everything is intersected. Another thing that was really, I would say, a huge takeaway actually, was the Story Circles idea that Kaishan brought up. To know that there is so much power in gathering people together in circles to share their stories and that a lot of stories can be derived, really, from, like from the ground level up, you know, that’s coming together to say, here’s my story, here’s your story, and then from that, being able to build resources for teaching.

Kate: Yeah. I really appreciate what you said about intersectionality, too, because I think if we’re teaching through a social justice lens, then we can’t not think about intersectionality, that people bring all different types of perspectives and identities to the classroom experience, to their way of living in the world, and if we have a better understanding of those intersecting identities and perspectives, then we’re going to have a better understanding of social justice issues and the people who are living those social injustices or social injustices.

Kristi: Exactly.

Yoko: You mentioned the book by Erika Lee who, I think, was director of the Immigration Research Center at the U —

Kate: Yeah, at the U of M[innesota].

Yoko: But do you have any other books or articles or webinars or other resources that you have found, like, particularly useful when you were thinking about the pedagogy related to Asian voices? Do you have any recommendations?

Kristi: Yeah, I absolutely love the website Social Justice Books and they have curated a list of, really, children’s picture books on just about every possible identity possible. And that is one of my goals for the coming year, is to really dive into that list and to educate myself, especially with children’s picture books about, about Asian-American cultures and about Asian cultures in general. For me always the criteria when I look at those books is, you know, “Who’s the author and who’s the illustrator?” You know, “Is this from an outside perspective or an insider perspective?” And Social Justice Books as a website has done a really good job of curating really quality literature to help us to educate ourselves. Another: I was surfing one day on Kanopy to look at different films, and I felt like, you know, “I have never been anywhere in Asia and I just want to go and sit on a bench and be a bystander. I just want to do people-watching.” I do people-watching everywhere. So there’s a film, it’s a film in which a filmmaker goes to a park, I think it’s in Beijing [Ed. note: It is actually set in Chengdu, Sichuan Province], and for about an hour and 20 minutes, they sit on a bench and they watch people walk by, and then they take–it’s a wordless film–they take their camera and they walk through the park. They just slowly walk for an hour and 20 minutes, and it was such a marvelous experience to feel that I was there at that park on this sunny summer afternoon just watching people. And it was so powerful just to see the utter diversity of people within the park. And I came away realizing, “There is no ‘single image’ of who is someone from Beijing. It was very powerful.”

Kate: It’s very humanizing, too, that kind of approach to film, right? Here you see people in their sort of natural environment living their lives, and you see that we’re all connected by that.

Kristi: Yeah. Yeah, you know, seeing people dancing, seeing children playing games, seeing parents with their kids in hand and, you know, navigating having two toddlers, for instance. You know, all these things that really bind us together as humans, and experiences that we share. And I liked it because there was no agenda going into that film. It was just observation, which is a lot like story circles. It’s just observation: What are people’s experiences?

Kate: Yeah. And listening, right? Observing, listening, yeah.

Kristi: Yeah, very much.

Kate: So you’ve mentioned a bunch of resources that teachers might use if they’re thinking about prioritizing Asian voices in their classroom. Do you have any tips or recommendations that you would want to give to teachers who are listening, who might want to take up this work?

Kristi: You know, the biggest one that I would say is that–and this is, again, from my own positionality of someone born and raised as a White person in the United States–that I think that we sometimes get the idea that we don’t have culture and that everyone else does have culture. That there is nothing really, quote, “special” about our culture. And what I’ve found is that in order to enter into these spaces of interculturality, so much of it is being able to tap into my own ancestors, my own family’s stories, and realizing that I carry culture as well. Because, otherwise, I think we can easily start to put students on the spot, like, “Oh, you have a culture. Tell me about your culture,” you know, as if I didn’t have a culture. And something I would super strongly recommend to teachers is, really, to do our own work about our own ancestors. You know, so, for me, it’s looking at my grandma who was born in Appalachia to my great-grandma, who is Appalachian. She selected my great-grandpa because he could throw an anvil farther than the other guy. You know, so as I tap into my grandma and all of the stories that she shared with me, as well as just the sociology of immigration that my own ancestors went through, it gives a really powerful lens for this intercultural work. So that’s my recommendation to teachers is to really do our work. And even though sometimes we feel at a loss to talk about our culture now, because we just don’t really see the water that we swim in, if we can tap into the stories from a couple generations back and invite students to do that work as well, it’s really powerful. And I know, like, not everyone has access to their grandparents, you know, so that’s kind of a point of privilege to have that. But it is just one idea about how we can come into an intercultural space.

Kate: That’s great advice.

Yoko: So lastly, is there anything else you would like to share regarding your thoughts on your participation in the CARLA workshop and PLC?

Kristi: Just my huge thanks to CARLA for offering this opportunity to realize some of the gaps in our formation as language teachers and to begin to fill that in through really thoughtful presentations. What Kaishan presented, especially when she tapped into her own stories, was so moving. It’s just, it’s just the absolute honor of receiving people’s stories and letting their stories start to open up our minds to how we can teach in more intercultural ways, is an absolutely precious gift. And so, a huge thank you to CARLA for offering these kind of workshops and I can’t wait to sign up for more.

Kate: Well, thank you for thanking CARLA and for attending, and thank you so much for sharing your thoughts with us today and your experiences and your knowledge. I know we talked a little bit before we started about you being, or when you, actually during the interview, you said you’re a beginner, but you have knowledge to share and we really appreciate that you did that with us today. So thank you, Kristi.

Kristi: Thank you.

Kate: Our conversation with Kristi is the first in a series of podcast episodes that will feature practitioner voices around social justice, and we will publish them all on the We Teach Languages podcast. So please stay tuned for future episodes on topics such as centering disability in the language classroom, increasing LGBTQ+ representation, anti-racism and more. So thank you, Kristi, thank you, Yoko, and thank you, listeners.

Kristi: Thank you.

Stacey Johnson: If you have feedback, questions or comments about this or any of our episodes, we would love to hear from you. You can reach out to us via our website. weteachlang.com/contact and you can subscribe to our newsletter and updates on our website as well. Thank you so much for listening. Bye bye.

One thought on “We Teach Languages Episode 154: Strengthening Asian Representation in our Language Classrooms with Kristi Lentz”

  1. As the person interviewed, I’d like to thank We Teach Languages and to CARLA for the opportunity to be on the podcast to pitch the call for more Asian representation in literature for world language learners and to spotlight the work of Asian colleagues. I want to be transparent for our listeners that a misunderstanding occurred in the time leading up to the podcast. My intention was that my voice would be a more minor one that would accompany Asian colleagues who would have a more major role. I see now that I misunderstood the plan, a mistake for which I take responsibility. I hope that upcoming episodes will feature Asian and Asian Latinx colleagues at the center, as we need to walk the walk about increasing representation and shifting power. Thank you for listening!

    – Kristi Lentz

    p.s. Thank you to Stacey for the encouragement to post this feedback openly, as well as to CARLA for reviewing this post with me prior to posting it.

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