The University of Arizona.
Teaching in a Materials’ World: A Qualitative Study of Graduate Teaching Assistants’ Use of Texts for Teaching Culture in The Spanish Classroom
Abstract
dc:description.abstractGraduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs) are central to lower-division foreign language instruction in U.S. universities, where teaching is structured around standardized syllabi, shared assessments, and textbook-driven curricula. In many programs, the syllabus itself is organized around the adopted textbook, which effectively functions as the de facto curriculum. Within these neoliberal institutional contexts, where efficiency, standardization, and assessment-driven outcomes shape instruction, culture is often compartmentalized, weakly assessed, and subordinated to linguistic goals. These conditions create persistent tensions for GTAs as they attempt to integrate meaningful cultural learning into classroom practice. Despite these challenges, limited research has examined how GTAs use and interpret texts for teaching culture in situated classroom contexts. This qualitative, classroom-based ethnographic study explores how four GTAs teaching second-semester Spanish at a large Hispanic-Serving Institution use texts to teach culture. It examines what texts they use, how they mobilize them in classroom interaction, and how they make sense of their practices. Data include video-recorded classroom observations, semi-structured and stimulated-recall interviews, field notes, and instructional artifacts. The analysis is informed by critical pedagogy, sociomaterial perspectives, poststructuralist approaches to language teacher identity, and multiliteracies frameworks. Findings indicate that text use constitutes a key site of teacher identity development. GTAs drew on a wide range of textual resources, including textbook materials, self-generated content, and multimodal digital texts; however, their practices were uneven and shaped by institutional constraints, time pressures, and assessment demands. Culture was frequently enacted through brief, teacher-mediated moments of exposure, with limited sustained engagement. Across cases, GTAs navigated tensions between textbook representations, lived experience, and pedagogical goals, positioning texts as resources to adapt, expand, question, or avoid. By centering GTAs’ classroom enactments and post-hoc sense-making, this study shows that culture teaching is a structurally mediated practice shaped by institutional priorities and the marginal status of culture in assessment-driven curricula. It also demonstrates that curriculum design, particularly in textbook-driven programs, is an ethical and political act, reflecting and reproducing power relations and neoliberal logics that determine what cultural knowledge is legitimized, marginalized, or left untaught. These findings underscore the need for sustained, context-responsive GTA preparation, collaborative materials development, and program-level changes that more fully integrate culture into curricular goals and assessment practices.
Degree
thesis:*- Name thesis:degree_name
- Ph.D.
- Level thesis:degree_level
- doctoral
- Discipline thesis:degree_discipline
- Graduate College
- Grantor dc:publisher
- The University of Arizona.
- Year dc:date.issued
- 2026
Author and committee
dc:creator, dc:contributor.*- Author dc:creator
-
- Negretto, Giulia
- Advisor dc:contributor.advisor
-
- Panferov Reese, Suzanne
- Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember
-
- Dupuy, Beatrice
- Ferdinandt, Nick
Subjects
dc:subject × 6Rights
dc:rights- Statement dc:rights
-
- Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction, presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author.
- Licence dc:rights.uri
- Language dc:language.iso
- en
Identifiers
dc:identifier.*- Handle dc:identifier.uri
- https://hdl.handle.net/10150/681062