Something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, and it’s one of those things that once you see it you can’t unsee it, is what happens when a student walks into my classroom and the language the course is taught in isn’t the language they think in. I’m talking about my ESL students, my Spanish-first students, anyone whose native language isn’t English and who has to do something that most of us never even consider, which is translate every concept in real time, process it, apply it, and then produce work that demonstrates understanding, all while operating in a language that requires extra cognitive effort for every single step.
That’s a double load, and we don’t talk about it nearly enough. When I teach typography, I’m talking about readability, legibility, hierarchy, how type communicates before anyone reads a word of it, and those concepts are already abstract and challenging in your first language. Now imagine processing all of that through a translation layer that’s running constantly in the background, eating up cognitive bandwidth that your English-speaking classmates get to spend on the actual material. The Spanish-first student sitting next to the kid who grew up in an English-speaking household isn’t working on the same assignment. They’re working on a harder version of the same assignment, and the grading system treats both versions as if they’re identical.
And here’s what really gets to me, you know, the thing that connects this to everything else I believe about education. The design resources available in Spanish, the real Spanish-native resources, not the Google Translated ones that read like a robot had a stroke, are almost nonexistent. If you’re a Spanish-speaking student trying to learn typography or layout or color theory and you want to study in your native language, your options are slim to the point of being insulting. We talk all the time about accessibility in design, about making sure our work serves diverse audiences, and then we fail to apply those same principles to the people we’re training to do the work.
I had a student, brilliant designer, creative mind, the kind of thinker who sees connections other people miss, and her written assignments were a constant struggle. Not because she didn’t understand the material, she understood it better than half the class, but because expressing that understanding in academic English was an additional skill the course was demanding without acknowledging it was demanding it. And her grade suffered for it. Not because she wasn’t learning. Because the measurement tool couldn’t separate what she knew from how well she could express it in a language that wasn’t her first.
This is the same problem I see everywhere in education, the system measuring one thing and calling it another. We say we’re measuring design competence but we’re actually measuring design competence plus English proficiency plus cultural familiarity with how American academia structures arguments and assignments. And for students who come in with all of those things already in place, the system works fine. For everyone else, it’s an obstacle course disguised as a level playing field.
I don’t have a complete solution for this yet, and I want to be honest about that. But I know it starts with acknowledgment. It starts with looking at your Spanish-first student and understanding that the C on their transcript might represent more learning, more effort, and more growth than the A on the transcript of the student who walked in already speaking the language the course rewards. And it starts with asking ourselves a question that the industry should have been asking for a long time: why haven’t we built real, native-language design education resources for the millions of Spanish-speaking students who deserve to learn in the language they think in?
Keep Reading
- Nobody Gets There the Way They Planned
- Meeting You Where You Are
- The Fax Man
- He Showed Up for the Wrong Job and Got Two Stanley Cup Rings
Go deeper: Study Smarter, Not Harder · All Primers
