Alyssia Miller De Rutté debuted her class Spanish for Swiftie Purposes at CSU this summer. The course focuses on teaching Spanish through the use of all things Taylor Swift.

Originally from Pennsylvania, Miller De Rutté has been teaching for about 13 years and has been an assistant professor of Spanish for specific purposes at CSU since 2022.

“I love it at CSU,” Miller De Rutté said. “It’s a lot of fun with lots of opportunities for teaching, research and development. The students are great.”

She also leads the languages for specific purposes team in developing coursework for professional Spanish, which she said is a relatively new field.

“We’re working on expanding our course offerings to give students those practical skills that they can go out and use, once they graduate, in their job,” Miller De Rutté said.

Spanish for Swiftie Purposes (Taylor’s Version) was offered online as a 300-level course over eight weeks last summer. Everything in the course was Taylor Swift themed, from the grading scale to the assignment names. The idea for the course started as a joke at a faculty dinner, but Miller De Rutté believes sparking interest in new ways can help with student motivation in a course.

“You really get to dive into how people think across cultures, and you can’t really get that without knowing the language. I think what’s fun about using lyrics and music is it opens the mind, like a window, to other countries and cultures and other points of view.” -Alyssia Miller De Rutté, Spanish for Swifty Purposes professor at CSU

“In language education in general, we’re at a point where we need to be more conscious of that,” Miller De Rutté said. “We have to innovate; we have to make sure we’re meeting the students where they’re at and helping them achieve the goals they have as well.”

The students worked on coming up with a Swiftie dictionary, which consisted of Spanish terms one needs to know to be a Swiftie.

“We did corpus linguistics, so we looked at all of her lyrics across all of the albums and analyzed the most common words or themes she talked about,” Miller De Rutté said.

The course also looked into pop culture and current events associated with the album eras as well as what was going on in the world when Taylor Swift was touring in different countries. Miller De Rutté also used modern technology as a tool.

“We did some translation of songs and we incorporated AI and Google Translate to see where we can use technology effectively but know the limits of it,” Miller De Rutté said.

She emphasizes the importance of learning another language to help with professional growth and opportunity for any major and focus. Miller De Rutté explained that language is more than just learning grammar and structures; it helps students teach empathy and trust and builds relationships across cultures. This is emphasized even more by the use of music.

“You really get to dive into how people think across cultures, and you can’t really get that without knowing the language,” Miller De Rutté said. “I think what’s fun about using lyrics and music is it opens the mind, like a window, to other countries and cultures and other points of view.”

Language skills benefit communication as a whole, and it can be beneficial for professionals in any field to learn how to understand others.

“How can you disagree in a language and still have respect for others?” Miller De Rutté said. “How do you build empathy? These things are so essential to what we do. These skills of conflict resolution, mediation and empathy are what transcend all of the languages. It’s about that human connection.

She says there are many reasons to study a language. While the skills students learn can provide them with a higher salary and make them more desirable to employers, they also support brain development and brain neurology.

“Language skills actually help your brain so much,” Miller De Rutté said. “There’s so many studies on how learning languages can help with Alzheimer’s and dementia, and there’s just so many benefits to it.”

She said Spanish for Swiftie Purposes received an overwhelmingly high level of participation throughout the course, especially for an online summer course.

“I loved reading all the discussion posts and grading all of the assignments,” Miller De Rutté said. “It didn’t feel like work for me because the students were so into it, and that just showed in their writing and their assignments. It was really great to see their engagement with the content and the course itself. … They were really supportive of everybody, so I feel like Taylor would be proud of the community we built there.”

Miller De Rutté hopes to teach the course again in the future, but Spanish for Swiftie Purposes is just the beginning of the future of language education. The languages, literature and culture team is continually focused on innovating how they teach language to meet the needs of students year after year.

“We’re integrating technology and coming up with different types of courses we can offer to help bring language education into 2024 and beyond,” Miller De Rutté said.

Reach Maria Kantak at entertainment@collegian.com or on Twitter @CSUCollegian.