Episode 8: Elena Costello Tzintún

You've found yet another episode of Tell Me More!, a podcast for amplifying the work of graduate students. Congrats! This time around, Dr. Elena Costello Tzintún, a recent graduate of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the Ohio State University (this episode was recorded while she was a PhD candidate at OSU). Dr. Costello Tzintún is an applied linguist with a focus on race, equity, and inclusion who examines the role of interpreters in healthcare settings to improve accessibility in such spaces along the lines of culture, discourse, and practices of health.

In this episode, Dr. Costello Tzintún chats to us about a program for marginalized students to access university while also giving them a profession in health care while still in high school, which is work that came out of her dissertation research. Specifically, Dr. Costello Tzintún argues that, when you take marginalized students gifts and present them as unique skills, they can then access dual enrollment programs, receive college credit, and learn to navigate academia. She also chats about several other programs and groups she has been a part of, all of which advance an assets-based framework for multilingual people.

Be sure to check out Scholars of Color in Language Studies (SCLS) on Twitter, and join their Facebook group (especially if you are a BIPOC scholar doing work at the intersection of language). If you'd like to learn more about the show, find links to things we talked about, find transcripts, or sign up to be a guest, please check out tellmemorepod.com. Feel free to follow us on Twitter at @TMM_Pod, too. Be well and safe as we enter into the Fall 2021 semester. We here at TMM are rooting for every academic right now.

Links to things discussed in this episode:

• Scholars of Color in Language Studies (SCLS)
• Interpreters for the Medical Profession through Advanced Curriculum and Teaching (IMPACT)
• Dreamer’s Interpretation: Facebook and Website
• Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad, by Jonathan Rosa
• Sites of Translation: What Multilinguals Can Teach Us about Digital Writing and Rhetoric, by Laura Gonzales