Spanish & Illinois

Next year's conference will be in Salamanca, Spain. by Ann Abbott This year's annual conference of the American Association of Teacher of Spanish and Portuguese celebrated the 100th anniversary of our professional association. The inimitable and admirable Sheri Spaine Long invited me to participate on a plenary panel consisting of several people who had written essays or rejoinders for the centenary issue of Hispania that will come out in December of this year. It promises to be an expansive look at where we have come from and where we are going as a profession. I'd like to share below my presentation from the plenary. What do you think our challenges are as a profession? What do you think "Spanish" means today and for the future? Do you think that teaching Spanish in this political climate requires us to rethink anything we do? Or teaching it in this changing environment of higher ed? I'd love to hear your thoughts. ***********************...

Look below to click on the links from the slide above. By Ann Abbott  On Friday I will give two talks. One is a noon-hour workshop on service learning, and the other is a quick description of a classroom project for our School's Share Fair . Here's what I will share in the second talk. Connecting Students with Alumni: A Classroom Networking Project Making the transition from language student to working professional can be a difficult and mysterious process to our current students. In my Business Spanish course, students work on a networking project that connects them to former students who were in their seats just a few years ago but are now in the working world. I will share the specific steps and resources I use for this activity—from researching alumni LinkedIn profiles to writing a “cold” networking email. This activity can be adapted to any language and any course.  On their end-of-the-semester course evaluations, several students listed this project as o...

by Ann Abbott I'm our department's Director of Undergraduate Studies. I work hard with our advisor, Tasha Robles, to try to increase the number of students in our courses and our major/minor. It's not easy. And yesterday I was sad to see that our numbers are low compared to the Spanish programs in most other universities in the Big Ten. (By the way, Indiana University is doing something right!) And it's even harder when students don't have enough information to get excited about our courses. As of right now, with just a couple of days before students begin registering for spring 2017 courses, this is our situation: Several sections of "generic" courses don't have a title or description in the online course catalog. The advisor has received no flyers about any courses. I haven't seen any promotional materials for any courses except for Basque. I'll share the checklist below with our faculty. How do you advertise your co...

by Ann Abbott This is just one example of the wonderful information that can be found at Rice University's CLIC website, Bridging Research and Practice . Last weekend I was very happy to attend the Annual conference of  the Consortium on Useful Assessment in Language and Humanities Education (CUALHE) at Notre Dame . I wanted to attend the conference because in my role as Director of Undergraduate Studies in our department, I will need to lead the assessment efforts when our university goes through its accreditation process in a few years. (My awareness and interest in this level of assessment comes from presentations and conversations with Dr. Staci Provezis in the Provost's Office .) Indeed, I picked up many good ideas about assessment, and I hope that our department can follow through on some of them. For me and my interests for our department, the highlights were these sessions: " Teaching and Testing Interaction Competence " by Maryam Emami, Kevin Garcí...

by Ann Abbott One of the hats I wear in my job is Director of Undergraduate Studies. I work closely with our advisor, I speak directly with potential students and their parents, and I am on our department's curriculum committee. On the one hand, I am passionate about Spanish and how it can help students understand our world differently, better. Studying Spanish, studying abroad in Barcelona for one year, and doing the PhD in Spanish literature gave me many wonderful experiences and tools. That was back in the 80s and 90s. On the other hand, I see some very important tensions that make me wonder about the long-term growth of Spanish as a serious, engaged, intellectual program on US college campuses. 1. Spain-centric programs Spain has central role in both the typical curriculum and in students' imagination of "Spanish," yet Spain is a small piece of the Spanish-speaking world and of Spanish-language cultural production. 2. Spanish as a tool Many student...

by Ann Abbott One of the hats I wear in my job is Director of Undergraduate Studies. I work closely with our advisor, I speak directly with potential students and their parents, and I am on our department's curriculum committee. On the one hand, I am passionate about Spanish and how it can help students understand our world differently, better. Studying Spanish, studying abroad in Barcelona for one year, and doing the PhD in Spanish literature gave me many wonderful experiences and tools. That was back in the 80s and 90s. On the other hand, I see some very important tensions that make me wonder about the long-term growth of Spanish as a serious, engaged, intellectual program on US college campuses. 1. Spain-centric programs Spain has central role in both the typical curriculum and in students' imagination of "Spanish," yet Spain is a small piece of the Spanish-speaking world and of Spanish-language cultural production. 2. Spanish as a tool Many...

by Ann Abbott It's well known that enrollments in higher ed programs in the humanities are decreasing. A lot. It has hit languages hard. Spanish, too. It seems we're all scrambling with no clear strategy that we can have complete confidence in. First of all, we don't really know from the students themselves why they are choosing to stay away from our programs. How can we fix a problem we don't understand? Still, the Head of my department and I went in search of some potential solutions. We knew that the Department of Communication at our university had successfully reversed a very big dip in enrollments some years ago. We talked to them about how they did it. Remember, there are no magic bullets. We probably need a combination of strategies, and we might even have to change some things about the very nature of our programs. (Ugh, it's so hard for people to change.) But here are the strategies that we walked away with. Consider your name   They changed th...

by Ann Abbott I'm looking forward to attending the 3rd International Symposium on Languages for Specific Purposes in Phoenix  this week. Not only will I be able to see wonderful colleagues and friends (too many to list here), I always come away from this conference (and the CIBER Business Language conferences that have been folded into this one) with new ideas and renewed energy.  A quick glance at the conference program , and you can see that many languages are represented, many professions and many approaches. Whenever there are speakers from the professional world, I always take away tidbits of information that I can work into my activities, so I'm happy to see that there is a panel on Friday evening. I also want to learn more about Spanish for the health professions because we have a lot of student demand for that, but no course. (I haven't blogged yet about my student's independent study this semester in which she is working at a local hospital and writing up ...

My notes from the CIC meeting of language program directors. by Ann Abbott It's good to have a peer group. You can share and compare because you know that you're in similar situations. And that's what the CIC annual meeting of language program directors and executive officers is all about. (Although I'm not a language program director, I am the Director of Undergraduate studies; that's why I go.) But the things driving our discussions--helping our students learn the most possible, integrating technology intelligently, combating declining enrollments, and running large programs effectively--concern all language educators. So I'll share some things here. In the interest of privacy, I'll keep things very general, and I won't share the names of the university or person who presented the ideas. Hopefully you can find one or two things that could help your language program and courses. There's no particular order to this list. Course titl...

by Ann Abbott I'm so happy with the networking emails that my Business Spanish students wrote for their networking project this semester. And I am ecstatic with the responses they have received from Mr. David Mackinson and Mr. Benjamin Brodner ! (The third person is currently in the middle of moving his office to Singapore--bad timing but also shows that the students chose a fascinating person and career.) But it took work to get there. I have very smart, talented and hardworking students. If their networking emails needed to be informed, edited and shaped, then I think everyone could benefit from the information that took their messages from okay but slightly problematic to very good. Here, in order, are the steps you can take to make sure your networking emails or direct messages are sharp, clear and compelling. Read advice about how to compose networking messages. As with most topics, there is already a lot of good advice on the internet. Sometimes, though, a task s...

by Ann Abbott I recently received a message from a former student who applied to the " English Opens Doors" program in Chile  and asked for a letter of recommendation.  " I'm emailing you to let you know that I applied for the English Opens Doors Program. It's a government run volunteer program in Chile were they place you in a classroom (5th-12th grade) with another Chilean teacher and you help teach the speaking/listening part of English." I was delighted to write her letter because she was a model student and person. (As an aside, you might be interested to see what I ask all my students to provide me when they ask for a letter . I didn't ask this student, though, because the form was short and the details of her work with me were fresh in my mind.) Furthermore, one of my former students went on this same program several years ago: Jason Flynn . I quickly submitted her letter and received this message from her in response: "I wil...