Providence College students write bilingual book for children
By Liz F. Kay
Providence College students and a professor collaborated to create a bilingual children’s book that shares the students’ stories about growing up as speakers of both Spanish and English.
Our Heritage: Short Stories of Bilingual Youth in the Northeastern United States was written by students in the Spanish for Heritage Speakers course taught by Ana Cecilia Iraheta, Ph.D., associate professor of Spanish.
Heritage speakers are exposed to a language from a young age but receive their formal education in a different language. Many students in Iraheta’s course grew up in a home where Spanish was spoken but have never studied the language formally, she said.
After visiting several public libraries in Rhode Island, Iraheta noticed a lack of bilingual books in English and Spanish that accurately represented Hispanic culture.
“I believe bilingual books can be a valuable resource that can help accomplish multiple purposes: they can help all children become aware of the power of bilingualism as well as to become culturally competent,” Iraheta said.
Our Heritage is part of Phillips Memorial Library’s collection and is available to download from its Digital Commons.
Iraheta received a grant from the Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity and Inclusion for the project, which began in the Fall 2023 semester. The students wrote autobiographical stories in Spanish, then adapted them for a younger audience and translated them into English.
The exercise allowed the students to practice grammatical structures such as the imperfect tense, which Iraheta said is often a struggle.
“Many of them come in with the idea that the Spanish they speak is broken,” Iraheta said. “Participating in something like this, and seeing a concrete product of their skills, tells them that what they know is valuable, and that they have the opportunity to take what they know to a different level, to improve, and to do something significant with it.”
Alejandro Guzmán ’26, a neuroscience major from Puerto Rico, said taking the heritage speakers course as a sophomore helped him internalize his struggles growing up Hispanic. He wrote “El Poderoso Michael/The Powerful Michael.”
“I got to know a lot of people who spoke different Spanish than mine, and everyone had their own unique story in life,” he said. “I’m hoping that some people can relate to my story and that my story could help them in some way.”
The Fall 2024 class also wrote stories and translated them into English for a second volume. This semester’s class is recording an audiobook version of both the first and second volumes in the Media Production Studio at the library. The Media Production Studio, a collaboration between the Writing Center and the library, provides students with hands-on production experience. The audiobook will also be accessible through Digital Commons and traditional podcast platforms.
Jake R. Turcotte ’23, ’26G, who edited the book with Iraheta, began studying Spanish as a seventh grader. He said that the experiences recounted in the stories are relatable to all language learners.
“It provides a boost of confidence for not only the writers of these stories, but also those who read them,” he said.
Turcotte, who majored in Spanish, biology, and humanities as an undergraduate, also worked with Iraheta on research to help students for an earlier project in which students created websites for immigrant-owned businesses. He is currently earning a master’s degree in higher education at PC.
The book project was a collaboration of students who are heritage speakers and those learning Spanish as a second language, Iraheta said.
“We have learned to see that we share experiences, and instead of seeing those experiences as something that divides us, we have learned to see those experiences as something that unites us,” Iraheta said.
Turcotte connected Iraheta with Angelina Tanzi ’24, a studio art major, who illustrated the first volume of Our Heritage. Siobhan Lahiff ’28 is illustrating the second volume, which will be published in the spring. Lahiff is a psychology major who wrote about her love of art and drawing in an assignment in Iraheta’s Intermediate Spanish course, and the professor invited her to be involved.
The students read their stories to children at the South Providence Public Library in October 2024. The children then visited Providence College with their families, where they toured campus and celebrated their partnership with music and dance performances.
Iraheta received the college’s Innovation in Teaching Award in 2025. This semester, she will begin a new project to use artificial intelligence and virtual reality to assist Spanish language learners.
