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Educator, Mentor, Researcher, Advocate
Educator, Mentor, Researcher, Advocate
Biography
Dr. Stacey Alex is an assistant professor of Spanish at Morningside University in Sioux City, Iowa. She specializes in Latina/o/x Studies. She enjoys teaching a variety of courses that explore Language and Culture, Spanish for the Professions, and Latina/o/x Communities in the US. She created an online oral history project, Latinx Stories of Siouxland and she is the co-author of a Mi idioma, mi comunidad: español para bilingües, an open-access textbook for Heritage Language Learners of Spanish that centers on students’ experiences with language, identity, and belonging in the Midwest.
Between earning her BA and MA in Spanish literature at the University of Iowa, Dr. Alex taught middle and high school Spanish, dual language Spanish and ESL in West Liberty, Iowa. She also coordinated a K-8 ESL program at Escuela Bella Vista in Maracaibo, Venezuela. She completed her PhD in Latin American Literary and Cultural Studies at The Ohio State University.
Her research examines how Latina/o/x communities create a sense of belonging through cultural and narrative resistance in the face of racialization resulting from U.S. immigration policies, the media, and educational institutions. In her dissertation, Dr. Alex analyzes undocumented Latinx narratives across theater, comics, memoir, and music as decolonial cultural production and counter-storytelling. The works examined rely on surrogates to publicize and justify everyday undocumented disobedience that otherwise would not be shared for fear of deportation. Attending to the diverse and, at times, contradictory perspectives and approaches to social transformation found across these works positions undocumented communities as dynamic social agents that draw on a wide variety of ways to forge a politics of possibility.
Dr. Alex also researches Latin American and Latina/o/x pop culture, identity politics, and gender and sexuality through radio, children’s games, folklore, and children’s literature.
You may contact Dr. Alex at alexs@morningside.edu
BELOW: Dr. Alex leads a virtual Spanish-language baby shower game for Spanish Club students to celebrate the upcoming arrival of her second child. Dr. Alex enjoys raising her two children bilingually. Morningside students join Dr. Alex's family at Thanksgiving to share food and some favorite songs.
About me
Teaching has allowed me to learn from a diverse group of students and their families: middle and high schoolers in rural Iowa, K-8 English Language Learners in urban Venezuela, and university Spanish world language students as well as Latinx heritage language students in Iowa and Ohio. Yet, across my experiences, I found curriculums, practices, and policies that did not reflect the diversity of my students’ lived experiences and perspectives. At the same time, my community and family in Des Moines became more diverse because of immigration to our area. While I saw this to be incredibly enriching, I also witnessed how fear and hate increasingly limited the life chances of marginalized groups. This prompted me to consider how the colorblind multiculturalism that I grew up with failed to confront the continuation of social inequities. I decided to teach critical thinking by encouraging students to consider the systemic nature of these inequities and value worldviews different from their own.
During my PhD program, I learned a great deal from Ohio State’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion. I helped organize cultural programming, trainings on the challenges facing students from families with mixed immigration status, a Latinx mentoring program to confront our broken educational pipeline, and a summit to inform K-12 educators and administrators about the bias facing heritage language speakers in bilingual programs. I also participated in implicit bias trainings and grounded my research on Latinx literature and culture in Critical Race Theory. Here at Morningside, I make the diversity of Latinx and Latin American perspectives central to my teaching and service. I am also proud to serve on Morningside University's committee on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. I look forward to working with faculty, staff, and students toward building practices and policies that empower minoritized voices on our campus.
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