Spanish & Illinois

by Ann Abbott It was the week after spring break, and I had just returned from a wonderful yet long trip to Japan to see my daughter who is studying abroad in Nagoya. I was looking forward to seeing my students later that day, but I wasn't sure how I was going to make the class interesting and engaging. Scrolling through my Twitter feed, I found just what --and who-- I needed: @tanyaboza. I have followed Prof. Tanya Golash Boza's work for years: her blogs, her books, her articles. But it was only recently that I found her on Twitter. She is just as a smart and generous there as I had come to expect from her. She shared the series of videos about race and racism that she has developed for her students. She shares her publications and thoughts freely. And on the morning when I needed inspiration, she provided it in this tweet: I am pleased to share my latest publication with you, on how families experience the deportation of a loved one: https://t.co/DnStaA5mbJ p...

by Ann Abbott I think it's really important to use the first day of class to set expectations and get students excited. I try to teach it as a typical class so that they know what to expect. However, I have learned over the years that for community service learning courses, it is a good idea to ease into things, to take one step at a time, to use class time to tie up the many loose ends this kind of pedagogy can create. I usually post my lesson plans on the UIUC Spanish Community Service Learning Facebook Page . Why? Because I post a lot of links that we then use during class for information and analysis. I also often have students write responses to my posts as a way to share their analyses, questions, etc. So look for the blue picture above that will accompany my lesson plans for this semester. With that in mind, here are my lesson plans for the first week of SPAN 332 Spanish and Entrepreneurship: Languages, Cultures and Communities. Week 1, Day 1: Presentación del cur...

This flowchart makes the information very clear: there is no "legal path" for anyone except the very privileged. by Ann Abbott Florencia Henshaw invited me to speak to her students in SPAN 308 " Spanish in the US ," and I was delighted to do so. I think we need even more of an emphasis on Spanish in the US and that students need to understand better the complex realities of Spanish and Spanish speakers in the US. The topic of the week was "El e spa ñol en la vida pública." I don't know exactly how she was planning to frame that topic, but I decided to talk about our public discourse towards undocumented Spanish-speaking immigrants and our public policies related to them and their lives. I'll share my notes and resources below in a list format. I only had twenty minutes to talk, and I didn't take the time to structure this as a lesson like I normally would. But maybe something here will strike you and you could develop an actual lesson...

What books do you have on your shelf? Read on to find out Mark Wehling's book recommendations. by Ann Abbott In last semester's "Business Spanish" class, student teams had to do a networking project that culminated in each team reaching out to one of my former students to ask for career advice. (We did the work over several weeks, but here's a link with most of the information about the project .) My hope is that students learned about how to network appropriately. But of course the real gift was that all three former students answered the current students and gave them valuable advice. Such valuable advice. I won't delay any further, just enough to say that I had goose bumps reading Mark's reply (below). He is truthful, inspiring and detailed. I think he should write a book. Here's his email! Hola Kristin, Shamir, Haley, Daniel, y Xuefei (quieren copiarl@s?) Me da mucho placer poder contestar estas preguntas y ayudarles de esta mane...

by Ann Abbott Here's an outline of my class today. The question we want to answer by the end of class is: ¿Sabemos cómo trabajar en la comunidad de manera culturalmente apropiada? Warm up In our last class we talked about mandatos -commands (Lección 5 in Comunidades: Más allá del aula ). So I´ll start with some Simon-Says-style commands, that they have to listen to distinguish if they are for the whole class or just one student. Levántate. Levántense. Salten. Salten dos veces. Da la mano a la persona a la par. Den la mano a la persona a la par. Siéntense. Lección 6 in Comunidades This lesson starts off with one of my favorite activities of all time: asking students how many continents there are. Then sharing with them how many continents other countries believe there are. This really hits home the idea that even things we think of as "facts," things we were taught in school as "facts," are embedded with our own culture and cultural val...

by Ann Abbott I have shared my first-day-of-the-semester lesson plans before. Here's the first day from last semester, focusing on the constant back-and-forth between big-picture learning and up-close-and-personal learning .  Here's the first day from one year ago .  I think the first day is really important. You have a chance to make a big impression. So I always teach. I don't go through the syllabus and tell them I'll seem them next time. So here's what I did on the first day of class of the Spring 2015 semester. It walked them through our never-ending cycle of class, community, class, community... Class I thanked students for signing up for this course. I know that it is an elective and that for many students it doesn't officially "count." It takes a special student to take one the unique work for this class and to show solidarity with a vulnerable community. Then I put them into pairs, told them to talk five minutes (hablar s...

by Ann Abbott I already know that some (most?) of my colleagues think that community service learning and languages for specific purposes are not intellectual enough. Not theoretical enough. They've even used the term "Mickey Mouse" to describe the work. If they only knew that I have my students practice taking phone messages over and over! Why? Because it's difficult. It requires high levels of listening comprehension. They need complete accuracy. From all the information that is thrown at them, they have to understand it, re-arrange it, evaluate it, prioritize it and then re-write it for the message reader. That's hard!  And it's necessary for their work in the community. Absolutely necessary. So despite what my colleagues would say if they knew (maybe they do know...), I spend time on this each semester. You can't help in the community if you get phone numbers wrong, misspell names, give incomplete information or leave unclear in...

by Ann Abbott A wonderful resource for business Spanish students or anyone who is interested in entrepreneurship of any kind (commercial, social, academic, cultural, etc.): Lecciones de emprendimiento para principiantes . Diego Saez-Gil is a young, experienced, Argentinian entrepreneur who explains the entrepreneurial process in a friendly tone and with lots of very specific examples from his own experiences and others'. After the introduction, there are eight lessons, each around 10 minutes. Click on the video above, and it should automatically take you through all of them. Or go to the website to see them separated out . Language students will hear how business people talk about business concepts. In some cases it reinforces vocabulary and concepts from textbooks, and in other cases it introduces new vocab and ways of thinking about business. They will also see examples of businesses based on new media; textbooks tend to feature traditional business models almost exclusiv...

by Ann Abbott Translating gives me a headache. It's too hard. I never feel sure of myself. And even though I know that according to the rules you're supposed to translate from your second language (Spanish or Italian, for me) into your first language (English, for me), I also know that what our community needs desperately are translations from English to Spanish. My colleague Prof.  Anna María Escobar  received a request from a community organization for a translation. She asked if my students might be able to do it. Normally I would have said no, but instead I planned the lesson below. Note: One of my students (Cassie Grimm) is involved with a student start-up called  StudyCloud . I love to support student entrepreneurs, so this semester I am using StudyCloud as my course management system. As you'll see from the screen shots below, it works like Facebook in many ways and provides a much more visually-engaging learning experience than Blackboard. #1.  Firs...

Students formulated their own questions, then answered them. by Ann Abbott My "Spanish in the Community" students took their midterm exam last week, and now I am framing the second half of the semester in a slightly different way. I want to build a wider perspective into the class (looking at local, regional, national, and global dimensions of immigration) and most importantly: show students that the knowledge we gain in classes (and life) can be put to use to do something . So here's how today's class was structured. I shared  Illinois Coalition for Immigrant Refugee Rights'  press release about Senator Dirk Durbin's  Call for Administrative Relief from Deportations , and asked students to simply read it. Unless you are fully steeped in immigration reform and the issues that surround it, the press release raises questions. So I put students into pairs and told them to generate a list of at least ten questions they had about the information in th...

by Ann Abbott Today marks the tenth year since I started teaching Spanish community service learning. That's a big accomplishment. That's ten years of: working with wonderful community partners, especially The Refugee Center, my first community partner. forming relationships with committed, engaged students, many of whom are now friends of mine. watching the local Latino community change, usually in relationship to the hopes then disappointments of comprehensive immigration reform. forming friendships and alliances with other language educators who are committed to creating a contemporary curriculum that includes CSL. balancing the extra demands that CSL places upon us. Despite all this time, I still get nervous on the first day of the semester. In fact, until about 30 minutes before teaching my "Spanish in the Community" class at 10:00 this semester, I wasn't exactly sure what I was going to do with my students today.  So I went to Pinterest . ...

My students' thank-you notes, ready to send to our community partners. by Ann Abbott I recently read this article about the importance of writing a follow-up note after a job interview .  Basically, the conclusion is that if you do not send a thank you message, you will not get the job. I'm happy to say that my Spanish community service learning (CSL) textbook, Comunidades: Más allá del aula , includes an activity in the very last Lección that requires students to write a thank you note to their supervisors in the community. There are specific instructions about what information to include, because I found over the years that students did not always know what made a compelling note. They need to include specific details to support an over-arching statement of what they have learned by working at the organization. Not only is this professionally important, it is also culturally important.  I always tell students that in most contexts in Hispanic cultures, it i...