Nancy Gates Madsen

Outside the Zoom Room: Collaboration, Migration, and Telenovelas

by NANCY GATES MADSEN, Professor of Spanish

Nobody wants to read about the experience of the professor who was on sabbatical during 2020-21. “Tell me more about how you didn’t have to figure out how to teach in person, online, and hybrid all at once!” “However did you survive without zoom meetings? It must have been ghastly!” So if the very thought of reading an account that chronicles an academic journey outside the pandemic teaching trenches makes you feel physically ill (or potentially violent toward the author), read no further. I totally understand. Not surprisingly, what I accomplished during my sabbatical year did not fully reflect what I had originally proposed. Like many others, I too needed to pivot due to changing circumstances. Okay, maybe “pivot” is a bit of an overstatement. Instructors who compressed fourteen-week classes into seven, taught in two different classrooms at the same time, and marched along from January to May with nary a break, all while developing ever more creative ways to vavoom their zoom rooms were the ones who had to pivot. Me? I did more of a shimmy to one side, modifying some of my projects in order to be able to complete them. What follows is a short summary of two elements of my sabbatical year. One goal of my sabbatical was to pursue professional development in the areas of medical and legal Spanish, in order to better serve students in our Professional Spanish courses (Spanish 350 and Spanish 341). I had planned to pursue various in-person opportunities to increase my knowledge and hone my interpreting skills, ranging from volunteering at medical and legal clinics in Decorah to traveling to the US-Mexico border and working with the Florence Project, an Arizona-based organization dedicated to providing free legal services to refugees, immigrants, and asylum seekers. With the disappearance of most of these in-person opportunities, I sought other ways to fulfill these goals. In-person medical interpreting became online training and development, and the visit to the border to explore issues of immigration turned into a collaborative research project with a talented student and advisee, Mackenzie Zenk (’21). We spent the year analyzing the rhetoric of migration in a Mexican novel by Yuri Herrera, Signs Preceding the End of the World, and our weekly zoom conversations to discuss our research quickly became the highlight of my sabbatical year. During our collaboration, Mackenzie focused on researching media representations of border-crossing, while I dug into the literary analysis of the novel itself, to see how Herrera’s work dialogued with dominant narratives of migration. The paper, “Destabilizing the Binary Rhetoric of Migration in Yuri Herrera’s Señales que precederán el fin del mundo (Signs Preceding the End of the World)” explores how Herrera’s 2010 novel subverts the migration narratives typically seen in the news. Media portrayals often employ simplistic binaries to describe border-crossing: legal versus illegal, us versus them, North versus South. Herrera’s novel provides a more nuanced picture of migration that is often lacking in mainstream representations. First, the novel disrupts the common characterization of North and South as opposing poles of civilization versus barbarity by questioning the portrayal of the migrant journey as a perilous march toward a promised land. In fact, the “civilized” North proves more dangerous and lawless than the “violent” South, as the southern border zone in Signs embodies cooperation and improvised community between migrants, while the North remains the locus of fear and violence. Second, Herrera’s novel destabilizes the concepts of borders and the rhetoric of “us” versus “them” by emphasizing both the inadequate nature of the existing binaries and the transformative power of migration. In short, by questioning the binary narratives

Nancy Gates Madsen and Mackenzie Zenk ('21)

that emphasize difference (legal versus illegal, us versus them), Signs reveals the interconnected and interdependent relationships inherent in the dualities themselves, and the novel highlights how the migrant journey flattens distinctions between North and South, transforming both people and place. Mackenzie and I were fortunate to be able to present the paper at the annual conference of the North Central Council of Latin Americanists (NCCLA), which took place virtually in April 2021. In what was surely a bit of karmic payback for having avoided the trials of teaching via zoom, I kicked off our panel by demonstrating Complete Technical Ineptitude regarding screen sharing. Once the snafus were resolved, however, we were able to share our research with Latin Americanists from many colleges across the Midwest, and Mackenzie gave such a polished presentation that one of the audience members contacted us afterwards to pass along her congratulations. But the icing on the cake was learning that our paper was selected to receive the faculty-student collaborative research award from the NCCLA organization. Although the pandemic disrupted my original plans for in-person professional development, the opportunity to collaborate with Mackenzie was a bright spot in what could have been a rather gloomy year. A second central objective of my sabbatical was the creation of teaching materials to accompany telenovelas and TV series in the Spanish conversation classroom (Spanish 302). This too was a collaborative project, as I worked with Julee Tate, professor of Spanish at Berry College, a leading expert in telenovela research and a fellow superfan of Latin American serialized dramas. Given their enormous popularity and cultural significance in the Spanish-speaking world, telenovelas and TV series are ideal vehicles for exploring intercultural issues related to gender, politics, and socio-economic class; at the same time, they exhibit authentic language that helps students improve their listening comprehension, pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar. However, to date there exist relatively few teaching resources for college professors interested in using telenovelas in the conversation classroom. Our project aimed to fill that gap by creating teaching materials to accompany culturally relevant Spanishlanguage programs. While Julee and I were not alone in binge-watching series on Netflix and Amazon during the pandemic, we were fortunate to be able to call such activity “research,” and the hours spent searching for appropriate programs to incorporate into our classrooms were highly enjoyable. I was also able to pilot some of the materials with my daughter and nephew in the weekly family Spanish conversation class I taught while they were both experiencing remote schooling. As Julee and I were unsure about our comfort level teaching some of the mature content of a few of the programs (including steamy sex scenes and rampant drug use), I figured if I could successfully lead a discussion about teenage sex and drugs with my high school-aged daughter and nephew, Julee and I ought to be able to discuss these themes with our college students. Ultimately, we selected three Netflix shows for our pedagogical materials: Control Z, which chronicles a loner’s attempt to uncover the identity of a hacker who is exposing secrets in a Mexican high school (and contains the aforementioned scenes of drug use and sex), Altamar (High Seas), which follows the adventures of two sisters traveling from Spain to Brazil in the 1940s, and Madre solo hay dos (Daughter of Another Mother), a dramady that explores the consequences when two women from different social classes have their babies accidentally switched in the hospital. While telenovelas and TV series are excellent vehicles for practicing listening comprehension, building vocabulary, and deepening understanding of thorny grammar points, their role and importance in providing snapshots of political and social reality makes them well suited for developing intercultural understanding of key issues related to gender, class, and politics. Julee and I therefore developed materials that incorporate socio-cultural analyses of the series alongside exercises to build language proficiency, thereby bridging the gap between Spanish-language programming as objects of critical study and as vehicles for language learning. For Madre, this means digging deeper into questions of gender and class, as the program’s contrast between a wealthy mother who works as a business executive and a single mother who struggles to get by lends itself to conversations regarding cultural expectations of motherhood and the consequences of privilege. The highlight of this project was our presentation at the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese (AATSP) conference, held in person in Atlanta during the summer (July 2021). After over a year of social distancing and relative isolation, teachers from across the country were positively giddy to be able to gather in person and exchange ideas. Whether due to the great interest participants had in teaching with TV series (or the convenient time of our panel), Julee and I found ourselves in front of a large, boisterous, engaged group of educators eager to learn about our experience incorporating telenovelas into the language classroom and share ideas with us. We left the session invigorated and energized to test drive our teaching materials in our fall courses. At the time of writing (fall 2021), Julee is incorporating Altamar into her 300-level conversation class at Berry, and I am teaching Madre in Spanish 302 at Luther. Our collaboration continues, with plans to polish our pedagogical materials based on our students’ experience and submit an article regarding best practices to the AATSP journal Hispania. Although the sabbatical year I expected was somewhat different from the one I experienced, I appreciated having time to focus on professional development, especially during such a challenging academic year. I am ever mindful that the small side-steps I executed to achieve my project goals pale in comparison to the multiple pivots my colleagues made to respond to an ever-changing situation. As I return to the classroom, I hope to match the creativity, grit, and good humor demonstrated by those who kept the teaching and learning rolling at Luther during the memorable year of 2020-21.