Faculty voice: Reflections on the fall 2025 Spartan Bus Tour

CLS Faculty Dr. Lucía Cárdenas Curiel is an associate professor of bilingual/multilingual education in the Department of Teacher Education in the MSU College of Education. After traveling with the Spartan Bus Tour through northern Michigan and the Upper Peninsula, she shared these remarks at the closing reception on Oct. 21.

Read this story in Spanish.

Thank you, President Kevin Guskiewicz, for hosting this tour, and thank you to the Spartan Bus Tour executive planning committee for creating this unique opportunity and for leading and organizing such a meaningful experience for all of us.

Dave, Natalie and Candice — I can assure you that every participant has felt your cariño throughout each event. Cariño is like “care” in that it conveys responsibility, attention and kindness. Yet, in Spanish, cariño carries an added sense of purpose of affection, warmth, closeness and tenderness. If care comes from the mind, cariño comes from the heart — and I can say we truly felt your heart in every act and gesture throughout these days.

Muchas gracias from all of us, and sincere thanks to every member of the planning committee for making sure we had everything we needed during the tour.

President Guskiewicz reminds us that not all learning happens in the classroom. He emphasizes the importance of understanding both the opportunities and challenges within Michigan’s diverse communities to foster meaningful connections and build research collaborations across the Mitten State.

As I shared during my introduction on the bus yesterday, I immigrated from Mexico as a young adult. I came to this state to make a difference for our immigrant families and communities — especially in times when they are under attack. My name is Lucía Cárdenas Curiel, and I am a first-generation immigrant from Mexico and an associate professor of bilingual/multilingual education in the College of Education’s No. 1-ranked Teacher Education Program. Today, I am humbled to represent our faculty in sharing reflections from the past three days we’ve spent in community, traveling across the Upper Peninsula.

I do not pretend that my voice speaks for everyone, but I hope to lift a few points we must consider as we navigate these challenging political times — times that have left higher education in a vulnerable position to uphold the goals and values of our land-grant mission.

We — faculty, staff and administrators — may have had different reasons for joining this tour. During your introductions on the first day, I heard many fascinating stories, including how Morgan-Vigil Hayes carried six mobile phones to test internet reliability across the UP. I have to admit, though, that my initial motivation was simply needing a few days away from my preteen daughter.

Joking aside, when I first heard about this trip from my colleague, Patricia Edwards, I thought it would be a wonderful opportunity to step away from the intensity of the tenure process and to finally learn more about the community I’ve called home for the past eight years. That was my plan all along when I moved across the country from Texas, but the disruption of the pandemic, the demands of being a single mother to a four-year-old and the pressures of the tenure track delayed those plans.

As I’ve shared, community is at the heart of who we are, where we come from, and how we sustain ourselves. Several years ago, I introduced a required course for all teacher candidates pursuing certification on how to teach bilingual and multilingual learners. In this course, we begin with a project called Linguistic Community Walk. I designed this assignment to help future teachers explore the communities surrounding the schools where they complete their mentored teaching experiences.

Last week, my students turned in their Linguistic Community Walk assignments. We debriefed at the beginning of class and again at the end, just before I wished them a restful fall break. I asked them about their plans for self-care, and they asked me what I was planning to do. I told them about the Spartan Bus Tour. Then suddenly, I heard a scream from the back of the room.

“Dr. Cárdenas! This is your own linguistic community walk! You need to record it and report back to us!”

I couldn’t help but laugh — and, of course, I agreed with them. I admit, I’m a little nervous about how they’ll assess my walk! But I decided to take their challenge seriously and use this reflection as an opportunity to design my version of a community walk.

Because of time, I chose three artifacts from the sites we visited to reflect on. I’m framing my reflection through two lenses that guide my own work: place-based education and multiliteracies framework. I’ll close with a few critical points to keep reflecting in our teaching and research.

Artifact one: Gabby Hanson’s mural at the printing press in Cadillac, our first stop on the tour.

As I shared with you, I work closely with the education coordinators at the Broad Art Museum and I’m a strong advocate for the arts, especially as powerful entry points for bilingual and multilingual learners to connect through language and creative expression. I’ve also written about teaching bilingual gallery art lessons.

Gabby’s mural taught us so many lessons: learning from local history, living with joy, mentoring youth, practicing humility and developing new skills through community collaboration.

Multiliteracies pedagogy reminds us to integrate students’ lived experiences, skills and diverse discourses, as well as the multimodal texts they engage with daily — words, images, gestures, sounds and tangible objects that all mediate learning.

Artifact two: The maple syrup creations at the MSU Forestry Innovation Center — the cotton candy, gold sugar, gold dust, seasoning rubs, candies, maple cream and more.

Adrienne St. Vincent described her process as one of experimentation, trial and error, and scientific inquiry. Place-based education invites us to situate learning within real-life contexts, connecting directly with people and places. Her work embodies that: learning by doing, grounded in local culture and environment, transforming knowledge into art, science and entrepreneurship.

Artifact three: The wild rice from the Keweenaw Bay Ojibwa Community College.

As Kathleen Smith,, the elder, said, “Culture is within ourselves.” It took her time to reach that understanding, but once she did, she reclaimed her culture and became the caretaker of the wild rice for her tribe. What an incredible responsibility — to nurture her people, to sustain her culture and to literally feed her community.

Language is culture. Culture is language. We are culture and language.

I invite all of us to hold onto these truths in every project we pursue.

To close my reflections, I want to share that I didn’t just learn about regional rural health care, I experienced it firsthand. I spent five hours at urgent care in Marquette due to a spider bite!

It was a long wait, and I’ll admit I was tired and impatient, but what I witnessed confirmed everything we heard about rural health care. They cared for me, not just as a patient but also as a person. They didn’t ask for my insurance right away. They listened to my story, made sure I could continue the tour, and decided to give me an antibiotic injection instead of sending me home with pills. They even filled my prescription for all day today and sent it to my pharmacy in East Lansing so I could pick it up when I arrived back home. That’s care — from the heart. That’s cariño.

Throughout this trip, I saw so many connections to my own culture and story: cross-generational learning, family labor and perseverance. Sorting wild rice reminded me of sorting beans with my mom as a child at our kitchen table. Walking through the iron mines made me think of my great-grandfather who fled the Mexican Revolution in 1910 to work in the U.S. and then returned to Mexico. In Mexico, we wouldn’t have Big John on the big sign, we’d have la Virgencita who performed that miracle. At the lighthouse, the folk stories echoed La Llorona, and at the Upper Peninsula Research and Extension Center, they found how to answer the need of tortillerías to find the right kind of masa by cross-pollinating corn from yellow corn and Indigenous flint corn, finding a special hybrid corn that produces the starch needed to make tortillas. I never expected to find so many connections between the UP and my own roots.

I leave today with my heart full and deeply grateful for this experience.

There is hope when we focus on culture, language, empathy, people’s stories, joy, history, humility and science.

We must continue this work in community, collaborating with each other, not against each other.

Muchas gracias.