This piece is part of a series by participants in the Winter 2025 Open Knowledge Fellowship, coordinated by the Mina Rees Library. Fellows will share insight into the process of converting a syllabus to openly-licensed and/or zero-cost resources, as well as their experiences teaching undergraduate courses at CUNY.

Photo by Sebastián González

Pierina Pighi Bel is a journalist, MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish (New York University), and PhD student at the Latin American, Iberian and Latino Cultures (LAILaC) program. Her main interests are South American feminism and Mad Studies.

When I was younger, I used to watch telenovelas (soap operas) with my abuelita in Peru in the afternoon and after having lonche (a breakfast-like that people eat at night). Later in life, I met non-Spanish speakers who learned the language by watching telenovelas. For example, this semester (Spring 2025), I teach elementary Spanish at Queens College, and I have an Albanian student who is fluent in the language but says she has never taken a class. When I asked her how she had learned Spanish, she replied, “With telenovelas!”.

So, for some time, I had wanted to combine these two elements: the sentimental value of soap operas (even though I know they can be problematic nowadays), and my Spanish language work. Also, since I started teaching Spanish, I have seen some students who can’t afford the class book or the supplies, so they made me think about the importance and urgency of building syllabi with resources that are accessible to all. The Open Knowledge Fellowship (OKF) was the perfect space to bring all these components together and develop my idea of uniting telenovelas and Spanish teaching, with legitimate materials that are free for everyone to access

The OKF’s sessions presented a vast range of sites to my cohort, including libraries, repositories, directories, databases, and search tools, where we can find open-access resources ―books, journal articles, and other types of content. The goal, to build a “zero-textbook-cost” course (ZTC), is an essential concept given the reality that many students can’t afford textbooks. The OKF’s sessions were also helpful in distinguishing legitimate from predatory journals and in learning to manage self-publication platforms, like CUNY Commons hosted in WordPress, where you can put all these resources together and share them with the public for free.

Thanks to these tools, I designed a site called “Español de telenovelas” (Spanish From Soap Operas). Students can learn or practice different grammar topics on this site in a highly entertaining and engaging way: by watching telenovela scenes that illustrate them well and listening to their lyrics. Most of the telenovela clips I embedded are from Mexican telenovelas, but I expect to expand the scope to other countries. Thanks to the criteria provided during the Fellowship, all the clips and songs come from authorized sites that I could identify.

I also included other legitimate links where students can continue practicing their Spanish with the help of telenovelas. For example, they can watch “Destinos,” a telenovela accompanied by explanations in English, and on one link from OER Commons, they can even create their own telenovela script!

This site allows me to incorporate my teaching practices from the classroom and extend them to

Venezuelan telenovela actress Hilda Carrero

a different platform. These practices include using audiovisual resources, sharing cultural content that connects to students’ interests, and promoting group activities and interactivity. Students can comment on the site and share their favorite telenovelas’ clips, as long as they come from a legitimate source.

I expect the site not only to help students with Spanish but also to inspire and motivate them to look for open resources for all their classes to increase their autonomy and educational freedom.

Of course, as I said earlier, I know that telenovelas can be problematic. They usually are very conservative and machistas, some are even racist and classist, and the dialogue tends to be unrealistic. So I reserved a tab on my site to help students learn the history of telenovelas and to think critically about them, their content, and how they represent issues relating to race, class, gender, and sexuality. I’ve gathered a few articles that analyze different aspects of telenovelas, for example, how they affect or relate to the social discussion of topics like abortion and other women’s issues. I plan to add more and maybe incorporate my own research on telenovelas. Being critical about the content people consume is one of the purposes of education, and not just receiving it as innocent entertainment, as it is never innocent.

Ultimately, the fellowship has given me tools to enrich not only my Spanish class content but also to connect it with my interests and research, and to improve any class I teach in the future so that it can live beyond the classroom and encourage students to engage, learn, and think in meaningful ways.

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