This assignment was designed by Prof. Wendy Call during her time as site director of the Wang Center for Global and Community Engaged Education Oaxaca Program, Fall 2018.
It invites students to craft a public conversation centered on the critical choices they made as they translated two poems by Mexican indigenous poets. During the approximately 5 minutes that students had for the project, they highlight the hard critical work of translation and make it accessible for a listening audience while showing rigor in the sources they cite to support their perspectives on the challenge of translating these poems.
Prof. Call refers to these as “rustic podcasts” because students produced it with minimal access to audio recording technology. In this sense, it is a great example of the Lab’s interest in supporting access to ambitious assignments using affordable and accessible technology. As you listen to the results, you will catch glimpses of our students’ lives in Oaxaca: birds from the Instituto Cultural Oaxaca’s beautiful garden can be heard chirping in the background, ringing phones and casual conversation give us a glimpse of the busy but convivial life of the Institute.
Available here are: the assignment prompt in Spanish, a questionnaire about the podcast for students, and two podcasts.
