The B3 Book: Teaching Stories from a Bilingual University
The Office for Bilingual Integration invites faculty to contribute a teaching reflection essay for a forthcoming edited volume highlighting innovative teaching practices in B3-designated courses at The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.
This volume will showcase concise, engaging narratives that illustrate how faculty bring bilingual, Spanish, and Contextualized Sociolinguistic Practices (CSP) to life across disciplines. Rather than presenting formal research studies or instructional manuals, the book will feature authentic teaching stories—personal reflections that capture the challenges, discoveries, and rewards of teaching in a bilingual university.
Whether your course is taught bilingually, in Spanish, or incorporates contextualized sociolinguistic practices, your experience can inspire colleagues and contribute to a growing community of educators committed to student-centered teaching practices.
Write in English, Spanish or Bilingually
This is a book about B3 teaching, and we want the book itself to embody the multilingual values at the heart of B3. Thus, contributors are invited to submit their essays in English, Spanish, or both. We encourage authors to write in the language—or combination of languages—that best represents their voice, their teaching, and the story they want to tell. Bilingual essays might move between English and Spanish throughout the narrative, incorporate dialogue or classroom language practices, or use the two languages in other purposeful ways. Our goal is to ultimately make the complete volume available in both English and Spanish through the support of the Translation & Interpreting Office (TIO), creating two versions of the B3 Book and expanding its impact. In this way, multilingualism will not simply be something the book discusses—it will be part of how the book is created and shared.
What We Are Looking For: Teaching Stories
We are not seeking traditional research articles or formal descriptions of entire courses. Instead, we invite teaching stories: accessible, reflective essays grounded in experiences from your B3 classroom or B3 journey/experiences.
Your essay might begin with a moment—a conversation with a student, an assignment that worked differently than expected, a challenge you encountered, a change you made to your course, or an experience that caused you to rethink your teaching.
From there, tell us the story of what happened, why it mattered, and what you learned.
Successful essays will help readers see B3 in practice while also inviting them to think differently about their own teaching.
Your teaching story might explore:
- Your first experience teaching a B3 course
- Finding your voice as a bilingual or Spanish-language instructor
- Moving beyond translation toward meaningful bilingual pedagogy
- Using Spanish for disciplinary learning
- Translanguaging and flexible language practices in the classroom
- Contextualized Sociolinguistic Practices (CSP)
- Connecting course content to the Rio Grande Valley and borderlands
- Bringing community knowledge and lived experience into the classroom
- Designing bilingual or multilingual assignments
- Rethinking assessment in a B3 course
- Supporting students with different levels of Spanish or bilingual proficiency
- Developing disciplinary vocabulary across languages
- Creating opportunities for students to use their linguistic resources
- Community-engaged or place-based learning
- Student identity, belonging, and confidence
- Technology and AI in bilingual teaching and learning
- An assignment or activity that changed your teaching
- A B3 strategy that did not work as expected—and what you learned from it
- A moment when students changed the way you thought about language or teaching
- Collaborating with colleagues or community partners for B3 teaching
- How teaching B3 changed the way you think about your discipline
- Advice you wish you had received when you began your B3 journey
These topics are intended as inspiration, not limitations. We are interested in the teaching story that has been most meaningful to you.
Essays should be approximately 1,000–2,000 words. Please follow the structure and guidelines below in order to develop a consistent organization for the book.
- My Course: A Brief Snapshot
Give readers enough context to understand your story. You might briefly identify:
- your full name and title/position (as you would like it to appear)
- the course and discipline;
- the students you teach;
- the B3 designation or practices you incorporated; and
- anything about the course context that is important to the story.
Keep this brief—the heart of the essay should be your teaching experience.
- My B3 Story
How did your B3 journey begin?
What motivated you to incorporate bilingual, Spanish, or contextualized practices? What were you hoping would happen? Did you have uncertainties or questions when you began?
This is an opportunity to help readers understand why you approached the course as you did.
Again, keep this brief – 3-5 sentences.
- In the Classroom
This should be the heart of your essay.
Tell us about one or two experiences that bring your B3 teaching to life. You might describe an assignment, classroom conversation, student project, community experience, teaching challenge, or unexpected moment.
Help the reader picture what happened.
What did you do? What did students do? What role did language, culture, community, or context play? What made the experience meaningful?
- What I Learned
Reflect on the experience.
- What surprised you?
- What worked particularly well?
- What was challenging?
- Did anything not work as you expected?
- What did you learn from your students?
- How has the experience changed your teaching?
- What might you do differently next time?
We especially welcome honest reflections about experimentation and growth. A meaningful teaching story does not need to be a story in which everything went perfectly.
- B3 Takeaways: Try This
End by sharing something with your colleagues.
What is one idea, strategy, activity, or lesson from your experience that another faculty member could adapt to their own classroom?
Think of this as the practical takeaway from your story: If a colleague remembers one thing from my essay, what would I like it to be?
We encourage a style that is:
- Personal: Write in your own voice and from your own experience.
- Reflective: Tell us not only what you did, but what you learned.
- Story-driven: Whenever possible, show B³ through actual moments and experiences.
- Accessible: Write for colleagues across disciplines rather than only specialists in your field.
- Practical: Give readers ideas they can imagine adapting to their own teaching.
- Multilingual: Use English, Spanish, or both in ways that authentically reflect your voice and experience.
First person is encouraged. Academic citations may be included when useful, but this is not intended to be a traditional scholarly article.
Why Your Story Matters
There is no single way to teach B3.
Across UTRGV, faculty are interpreting and implementing bilingual, Spanish, and contextualized teaching in ways shaped by their disciplines, their students, their communities, and their own linguistic experiences. Bringing those stories together allows us to learn from one another while documenting an important part of UTRGV's continuing development as a bilingual university.
Together, these essays will tell a larger story: what it means to teach, learn, experiment, and grow in a bilingual university situated in the Rio Grande Valley.
We invite you to tell your B3 story—in English, en español, o en los dos.
You are also welcome to join us at our B3 Book teaching conversations. See details and register on the Becoming B3 page.