Department of Spanish

In consonance with Haverford College’s mission, the Department of Spanish is committed to promoting diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice in our curriculum, in our teaching approaches, and our community engagement courses.

Our courses, at all levels of the curriculum, address the study of the Spanish language, literature, culture, and linguistics as a product of its historical, political and social contexts. We want our students to appreciate the aesthetics of cultural products and practices, but we also want them to develop a critical and ethical understanding of the legacies of racial, economic, gender and sexual oppressions in the cultural production of Latin American, Iberian and Latinx communities . Our courses outline the history of these interlocking systems of inequity and oppression, as they developed throughout the medieval, colonial, modern transatlantic, and contemporary world, showing how these systems overlap in transhistorical and non-linear ways . Moreover, our courses highlight recurrent and diverse agencies, literary, cultural production and practices that resist colonialism, racism, gender, LGBTQ+ and political violence, in communities in Spain, Latin America and Latinx U.S, and strive to create alternative possible worlds.

After the student’s strike in the Fall of 2020, our commitment to our students has been to actively revise our curriculum, at all levels, by including readings and the study of Black and Indigenous communities, as historical, epistemic, cultural, and political agents. Moreover, our commitment to promote DEI, ethics, and social justice starts in the classroom by providing a safe space to our students and offering accommodations for diverse ways of learning.

In the same token, we believe that learning experiences go beyond the classroom. We have been developing Community Engaged Learning (CEL) courses at all levels of the curriculum, with the exception of the beginner level). These courses offer students the opportunity to work in collaboration with Philadelphia-based organizations serving Spanish-speaking migrant communities to create projects and commit to building relationships of trust and mutuality.