Chapter 30: Teaching LGBTQIA+ Rights in a Spanish Class

Many American college students have heard about LGBTQIA+ issues in English but are unaware of challenges affecting LGBTQIA+ communities in other countries and may not have had exposure to related terms in their second language. This chapter outlines a unit on LGBTQIA+ rights in the Americas designed for a third-semester intermediate Spanish university course in which students compare and contrast LGBTQIA+ rights in the U.S. and in Spanish-speaking countries. This unit departs from textbooks that typically do not include discussions of LGBTQIA+ issues in the target language and culture and validates LGBTQIA+ students whose identities are often ignored in second language education. LGBTQIA+ rights is an optimal choice for critical language pedagogy because being a proficient second-language speaker includes being able to talk about pressing social issues in modern society, such as gender- and sexuality-based inequalities. For this particular unit, students review present tense and past tense in Spanish, with the intent of using this grammar to discuss LGBTQIA+ rights.