Our Teaching Spotlight allows The Collaborative to recognize Trinity faculty and teaching staff who are demonstrating thoughtful and innovative teaching practices. We hope these features also serve to remind us of our shared commitment to meaningful and intentional pedagogy.

How would you finish the following sentence: being a professor at Trinity means… 

It means that you get to interact with fabulous students, staff and colleagues; and, it means that I get to work in an environment that nurtures learning and encourages risks. 

Your background and cultural identity reflect a focus on geographical borders, where do you recognize the borders in teaching and learning? Especially in American higher education.

There’s several levels of borders... One is personal, one is communal, different kinds of borders. And I think for higher education, the learning and the teaching borders are self, on some levels, self-imposed. There really aren't any. We are all learners. We are all teachers. And it's in the interaction where you may have those borders kind of emerge.

So for me, in the sense of, and what I'm talking about a border is some kind of definitive line where something ends and another thing begins– because borders can be fluid. And I think the classroom, for example, is a very clear… there's a teacher and there are students, and that's the border. Whereas, say, my work study who comes in here and we're working and doing things, that's a different kind of border.

In higher education, you also have hierarchies. The president, the provost, the deans, the faculty, and within the faculty, you have the instructors, the lecturers, the adjuncts, and then you have the tenure track. And so there are all kinds of hierarchies that have borders… these borders do exist in American higher education, not as severe as in the European system. There, it's even worse, if you want to get into it.

But in the United States, higher education is not accessible to everyone. So there's one level of border. It's also a space that, on some level, pushes people away and out. Trinity is not like that…  it self-selects students who want to be here, and who are ready to do “Trinity culture”. It is not easy. 

[When we talk about systems we operate within as a country,] And within systems that have been in place for centuries, it’s really difficult to… not dismantle [them] necessarily, but to [kind of] move within the culture of that institution.

Trinity News has recently highlighted you in an article on the 30th Anniversary of Macondo Writers’ Workshop which you discussed on Texas Public Radio– what does it mean to you to be in (a learning) community and what has that space opened/allowed as a result of its creation and curation?

Yes, Macondo is a writers workshop. Started 30 years ago by Sandra Cisneros here in San Antonio. It has gone to almost every institution of higher ed in San Antonio, and currently, it's housed here at Trinity… we're entering the fifth year of a five-year MOU, we'll end

December 26th, and then we hope to [reinstate] it and have a new MOU, a memorandum of understanding, with the university so that we are [recognized as] a special program– a sponsored program– of the university… 

What it means to me to have that space open, it's just incredible. It's bridging the community of writers, that is Macondo, with my community of learners, that's Trinity, and bringing us together in significant ways. The space itself, when we use the buildings here, the writers stay in the dorms, all of that creates a very special community within the community of Trinity. It only lasts for four days– actually a week– in the summer, but it's like a whole little world within the world of Trinity.

[Interviewer] When you go to universities, especially within a city, it's always this idea of the blank university bubble, right? So how do we bridge that gap? Not just academically, but socially and culturally as well.

… [at Macondo, one of our aims is to exactly do that, to demystify the whole process of being a writer. Who is a writer and the writing itself. So as part of the workshop, we had one for students, that was only a two hour workshop on campus… Then we also had two workshops in the community, with people from the community [and] in spaces in the community… So we go off campus to, in a way, offer the community a chance to participate as well. The

Macondistas, the Macondo writers, who are out there doing the workshops, I'm just thrilled!

It is such a beautiful kind of encounter with the community. 

In 2017, in an article entitled Getting to Know Professor Norma Cantú by Susie Gonzalez you were asked your favorite expression, to which you responded,

"I also like and use: "Cada cabeza es un mundo" (each mind is a different world) because indeed each one of us is a world unto itself."

Does this statement still hold true for you? If so, how do you see this embodied by Trinity students?

Absolutely! It’s still in my signature, in my email, and the reason that it's still there is because it's still true… I believe that if we respect that truism [truth], that everybody has their own world and their own rights and they have a right to be who they are– whatever that is–, we will all, I think, get along much better.

We, for sure, ensure that we respect that world and understand that whatever is going

on in that world– in their mind– is theirs. I'm not privy to how to solve their problems or how to [offer] any support unless they ask… ‘cada cabeza es un mundo,’ is one my grandfather used to use when somebody did something crazy and [you/we] couldn't understand it. ‘Cada cabeza es un mundo,’ You know, who knows what's going on in their head– and so you

respect that.

Is there anything else that you would like to add or say in regards to your teaching or to your students or to the world? 

Wow… To the world… Well, to my students and to the Trinity University community and family, I just feel very privileged to be here and I am very grateful for the honor of serving as the Murchison Professor of the Humanities at Trinity. So that gives me a platform [that] I hope I'm using to [its] best potential– and that is to be a representative of the university and in the community. I do a lot of things in the community, but also to bring the community to Trinity. It isn't all just out there, it's also bringing them in. So for example, in my classes, I have guest speakers… writers right here in San Antonio. 

And you know, that's the purpose of a university, to open minds, to make sure students are exposed to the world that they may not know, [and] to be out there. In the spring, I usually take students on a field trip to go to murals on the west side here, and many of them have never gone to the west side. I mean… why would they? They're here [at Trinity/in downtown San Antonio], everything is around here. Maybe the Pearl, maybe the Quarry, but they don't venture [to] where the neighborhoods are and [where] the people are, the working class folks, and the art. So we go and look at the murals and study them and that's really special. 

To the students, I would say, ‘live every day as if it were your last,’it's an old cliche, but it's so true. We need to live for today and enjoy today. Yes, you plan for tomorrow. Yes, obviously that's the role of a university education, [to] prepare for the future. But once you leave Trinity, it will be a different world, so enjoy it while you're here and take everything: attend every single lecture you can, all the free films that they offer. Just take advantage of everything that is here, because that doesn't happen in most universities. I have taught in an inner city school in Kansas City. I have taught here at UTSA, in Laredo– a border university– and those universities do the best they can, but they don't offer students the level of engagement with the arts, with social sciences, with a lot of things, [as well as] … lectures and events. So enjoy [it] while you are here, go for it!

To the world, I would say pretty much the same thing: enjoy and acknowledge, be grateful for whatever is on your plate that day, [and] just give thanks.