Inside CSU’s Taylor Swift Spanish course with a big reputation

Media contact:
Cadence Cardona
[email protected]

During the summer 2024 session, Colorado State University Online students with a blank space in their schedules – and who loved Taylor Swift – were in luck. The class “Spanish for Swiftie Purposes (Taylor’s Version)” was launched, and Swifties could take their knowledge of the pop megastar to a collegiate level. 

The experimental, online course was created by Alyssia Miller De Rutté, an assistant professor of Spanish for specific purposes, and was the first of its kind. It represented the innovative ways CSU faculty are developing new and engaging avenues to teach students and has captivated learners across the United States.  

Jamison Taylor, a junior at CSU studying languages, literatures and cultures as well as international studies, was one of the first students in the course who found the class through an Instagram post. Until the first day of class, she felt confused about what “Spanish for Swifties” would cover, but the syllabus slideshows instantly established how the two topics were intertwined. 

“It wasn’t just confined to Taylor Swift,” Taylor said. “The content was looked at through the lens of her music, which was really neat.” 

Miller De Rutté conducted the eight-week, three-credit class during the summer 2024 session, and it was an immediate hit. She received swarms of messages from students asking if they could take the course, even for no credit hours, and likewise heard from teachers and professors asking to audit the course. 

The Swiftie syllabus

As fun as a class based on a pop star might be, “Spanish for Swiftie Purposes (Taylor’s Version)” had the serious aim of helping students develop Spanish proficiency and cultural knowledge through the lens of Taylor Swift. In the class, students analyzed and translated lyrics to compare to Spanish artists’ lyrics and discussed the influence of pop culture in Spanish culture and communities. The only requirement for the course was the prerequisite of “Reading and Writing for Communication-Spanish,” or LSPA 300; Miller De Rutté said students did not need to be hardcore Swifties to enroll.   

“We can bring in so much culture and language even when the subject matter is English based,” Miller De Rutté said. “Taylor Swift is a serious subject matter too, and I think people brush that off sometimes. But there’s a lot of work being done about her lyrics, storytelling and analyzing it.”  

Still, Miller De Rutté made sure to work in some fun when creating the course structure.   

“I used gamification as the course organizing principle. Everything was gamified, including the grading scale,” Miller De Rutté said. “You start at zero points, just like you would in a game, and you complete different activities, assignments, post on discussion boards — and you keep earning points.”   

She said gamification transformed students’ engagement and excitement for the course because, instead of getting points deducted, students actively worked to improve their level.  

During the class, students completed activities that took them from the beginner grading status of “Taylor Swift Trainee” to the top-grade status of “Swiftie Superstar.” The gamified grading scale included a total of 16 levels for students to achieve in place of the regular letter grade scale.   

By the end of the eight weeks, students created a “Swiftie Dictionary” using corpus linguistics, an empirical method of studying language from real-world texts and recognizing terms that show up repeatedly in Swift’s songs. This was just one of many activities students completed in addition to practicing Spanish orally and reading text.   

“I really liked it, it was the first gamified course I took,” Taylor said. “It never felt super tedious doing the work because I was learning about something I already was interested in, and in a new way.” 

A class that didn’t make for a cruel summer

During a faculty dinner in 2023, Miller De Rutté jokingly mentioned the idea of a Spanish Swiftie course, but the “what ifs” lingered. After some more thought, she turned the hypotheticals into a formal course proposal.   

The first experimental course session coincided with Swift’s international Eras Tour. She performed in countries including Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, which contributed to more real-life class discussion surrounding the culture of Spanish speaking countries and how the themes in Swift’s songs might disconnect or match with their cultures.   

I think this is an example of how you can have fun with pop culture,” Miller De Rutté said, “even if she’s not Hispanic and she’s not Spanish speaking.”   

Miller De Rutté has taught a variety of medical Spanish courses at CSU for the last four years, and despite loving what she teaches on a day-to-day basis, she found joy and growth in teaching the Swiftie course. Grading was exciting, and she learned from students who were making their own new connections and ideas around the course’s topics.   

“In language education right now, we need to be innovative and think of something new,” Miller De Rutté said. “We can’t keep doing the same old, same old. If it doesn’t work, let’s see how we can tweak it.”  

There are no current plans to offer the Swiftie course again, but the course still has the option for two more experimental sessions.  

“I would love to offer it again, and if the Swifties demand it, we will do what we can,” Miller De Rutté said.