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 Yesterday I gave a talk at the Law School here at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. It was for a meeting of the Immigration Law Society, a group of students interested in immigration law. I built the slides and the information on a talk I gave earlier this semester to the interpreters in the Champaign school district. Here are my slides: Interpreting: Language, Culture and Ethics by AnnAbbott If you would like for me to speak to your group about this, you can reach out to me at arabbott@illinois.edu or 217-333-6714. I was very interested in the student questions afterward. Some asked for more detail about ad hoc intepreting, but a lot of students were interested in knowing more about how to improve their language skills. For people who feel that their second language is rusty, I suggested doing a lot of listening and reading (input); then they can find opportunities to practice speaking. If you're watching movies or binging on Casa de Papel on...

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...

Once you find a job living abroad, teaching English, then what? by Ann Abbott As I have written before, many Spanish community service learning (CSL) students want to find opportunities that allow them to continue learning languages, to immerse themselves in other cultures and to live abroad. Teaching English in another country is a popular option. In a previous post, I shared information and resources about how to find a job teaching English abroad . Once you get the job, though, then what? Jst because you speak English doesn't mean you know how to teach. So when I talked to Kelly Klus, about her upcoming move to Barranquilla, Colombia to teach English, she asked me for ideas and resources . Here is the gist of what I told her. Speaking English to English Learners. Kelly will be teaching in an immersion classroom. That means that she will be teaching social studies, science and other subjects in English. So even when she's not teaching English per se, she will s...

What would you do if you couldn't talk to you children's teacher? by Ann Abbott Parent-Teacher conferences are a crucial opportunity for families to communicate with the teachers and make concrete plans for their children's academic success. As a parent myself, I sometimes think of parent-teacher conferences as a way for us to influence how the teachers see and interact with our children: they know that behind each of children are two parents who are interested in their children's success, engaged in supporting their success at home, respectful of the teachers' work, and committed to advocating for our children. Imagine if you couldn't talk to your kids' teachers because you didn't speak the same language. What information about your child would you miss out on? What consequences might that have for your child? How might you be judged as a parent? Each semester, several of my students help at Central High School's parent-teacher co...

by Ann Abbott Writing, I've always known, is not the only way to reflect. In Comunidades there is a picture of a young woman writing in a blank book (p. 128). The caption I wrote says, "¿Es la escritura la única manera de reflexionar? ¿Hay otras maneras de expresar las ideas que surgen cuando reflexionas? ¿Qué piensas de estas otras maneras de concretizar tus ideas? Por ejemplo: dibujar, filmar, sacar fotos, charlar, crear música." Yet in my Spanish community service learning (CSL) courses I tend to emphasize reflective writing. On the one hand, we're used to reading students' writing and we know exactly how to grade it. I used to have students do five-minute oral reflective videos with a webcamera and post them to YouTube, but many students simply couldn't handle the assignment and flooded my TAs with technical questions. Unfortunately, I had to stop using that assignment. On the other hand, new formats can bring out new insights. So it's important that ...

by Ann Abbott I feel a twinge of jealousy when my friend and colleague, Darcy Lear, talks to me about the service learning center at her institution (even though it is currently undergoing consolidation and transformation). At the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, service learning is done individually, sporadically, and with the resources that you yourself can put together. But there is one bright light at the campus-wide level: Valeri Werpetinski at the Center for Teaching Excellence . Our campus now has an active webpage featuring programs and resources for anyone on campus who is interested in starting a service-learning course, maintaining on or building on what they already have. Click here to see the service learning page . Here are some features from the page and events planned for this semester. Service learning workshop plus reading group for this fall (click here to see details) . My teaching schedule this semester overlaps a bit with these events, but I will still ...

by Ann Abbott El Centro Latinoamericano de Aprendizaje y Servicio Solidario is a wonderful example of a service learning program in Latin America. Looking through their site, I am struck by how much our students can learn by analyzing the site and comparing their conceptualization and practice of community service learning (CSL) with ours. I am struck by several things on the site. Cultural meanings of words. "Solidario" and "solidaridad" are used frequently throughout the site. As a cognate, students will easily recognize the word. But culturally, solidarity and "solidaridad" feel very different to me. Aprendizaje-Servicio. In Comunidades (my textbook), I use the term "aprendizaje en la comunidad." CLAYSS and a similar Chilean program I am aware of, both use the term "aprendizaje-comunidad." Obviously, we're talking about the same thing, but I wonder what we gain or lose by using the term "comunidad," or not. Int...

by Ann Abbott Carolina Kloecker is interning at ACCION Chicago this summer, and she forwarded me this great clip of a young woman from Chicago and her entrepreneurial endeavor. I think it's a great example of how young people can build a business out of their passion. (In other words, find your passion first; then build a business around it.) I also love the fact that it shows a person of color building something great and being recognized for it. Finding local angles on the topics that we teach is really important. That's one of the reasons that I like to use The Enterprising Kitchen as an example of social entrepreneurship in my classes. Many of my students read about TEK and say, "I know that neighborhood!" This video was on ChicagoBusiness.com , and in the future I will look her for stories that exemplify the entrepreneurial concepts that I teach in my class. The section with videos is especially rich with profiles, interviews and stories that students would...

by Ann Abbott When I teach social entrepreneurship to my students, one of the first things I need to do is get rid of the mental connection of "Donal Trump" with "entrepreneur." Yes, he is an entrepreneur, but he represents many of the negative connotations of entrepreneurship that our students reject. It helps to give them many alternative examples. I like to giving them examples of real-world social entrepreneurs. Examples of commercial entrepreneurs with a sense of corporate social responsibility. And examples of entrepreneurs that come from countries outside the US. But I also find that students need some new vocabulary to be able to talk about this different type of entrepreneur. (I suspect that this is the case just as much in English as it is in Spanish.) We need to replace words like greedy, corrupt and egotistical with other words like responsible, socially-committed, mission-focused. One of the reasons I really like the video above and the blog post where ...

by Ann Abbott I read with interest one teenager's explanation of how teenagers in general consume media . Aside from using Facebook alot, everything else is very different from how I myself consume media. But as an educator, I am interested in how teenagers and young adults produce media. More and more I find myself asking this question: Do they even want to produce it? It's commonplace for educators to say, "Our students know how to use technology better than we do." Hmmmm. Some technology. Not all. Reading the piece, it struck me that everyone he said about media and teenagers suggest that they use it for entertainment and building relationships. They don't seem interested in using media for education. So should we be so intent on forcing it on them in our classes? I do think there are lots of reasons to use technology in our teaching, but we must go into it knowing that they don't already use many of the devices/platforms that we do. For example, I tr...

by Ann Abbott A former University of Illinois Spanish student, Sandra Mazuera, recently made this cute video for a contest. Another student recently won a contest for his video about his time in China. Still another former student, Nancy Parman, edited videos for my Spanish in the Community class and made great videos of her own. Marcos Campillo, Spanish community service-learning (CSL) extraordinaire, just filmed and edited videos for Comunidades . My friend Joseph Squier founded a very popular University of Illinois course called Writing with Video . I just uploaded a video to Facebook of my 10-month-old treating the faucet handle like a motorcycle throttle. It seems just about everyone is making and sharing videos these days. So can our students give our community partners a hand with the videos they need to make? YouTube's Video Volunteers provides an organized, easy way to put video skills to use. Our students could do projects here, and it's another great example o...

by Ann Abbott Do you ever read a semester's worth of your Spanish community service-learning (CSL) students' reflections and start to feel like it's all a little narcissistic? We ask students to tell us about their experiences in the community, their learning, their plans for the future, and then when they do precisely what we ask of them, we read a lot of "me, me, me." One way to get around that, of course, is to ask them to describe in detail the people in the community, the community itself, and issues. But another way around self-centered reflection is to ask people to write a letter of recommendation. They have to reflect on someone else to be able to effectively recommend them. Plus, knowing how to write a good letter of recommendation is a good transferrable skill. As a bonus, once students know what it takes to write a good letter of recommendation for someone else, they can make their own letter-writers's job easier by supplying them with all the nece...

by Ann Abbott When I teach Spanish community service learning (CSL), I want my students to end the course with a better understanding of the Spanish language, latino cultures and the methodology of CSL itself. In the first classes of the semester, I do walk them through the tenets of CSL, its goals and why we use it to teach Spanish. But I think I'll start using the following activity to teach them the definition. Go to www.nylc.org (always a source of really great information) and click on "what is service learning?" Have students read slide one and then substitute with specific examples from the academic subject of your course. Example: Tutoring children in an after-school program is service. Reading novels in a Spanish literature course is learning. When Spanish students read books in Spanish and English with Latina/o school children, document which words they both had to look up, and report their progress to teachers and parents--that's service learning. (Th...

by Ann Abbott I am convinced that Spanish community service learning (CSL) is very valuable for our students' career plans and development. So I was excited to see a tweet about this podcast about " Common Nonprofit Career Search Questions with Meg Busse ." In it, the speaker answers many questions, including how to highlight your volunteer experience. Here are her answers: Create a category on your resume called "Relevant Experience" and include it there. Explicitly detail the skills you contributed and gained to your volunteer experience. Throughout the podcast, she promotes volunteer work as a great choice for preparing for jobs in general. Listen to the whole podcast for more details. Consider asking your Spanish CSL students listen to it and then shape their resume--and their CSL experience--accordingly. There's even more information at Idealist.org's " Career Corner ."

by Ann Abbott June is gone. July is almost half-way gone. In exactly five weeks from now, my contract begins for the academic year. There are two possible reactions to this: 1. Ahhhh . Five more weeks before my duties start. 2. Ack! I have to get things organized now so that I'm not in a panic when classes start. I'm not panicking, but I am going to start preparing my Spanish community service learning (CSL) courses now. I'll do a little bit each week so that things are as ready as possible when classes actually start. How about you? Will you wait or jump in now? I'm sharing my calendar here. Feel free to follow my calendar and to-do list. Let me know if there are any other steps that should be on the list. And let me know if you run into any snags. Monday, July 13: Course materials 1. Double-check my book order . I had been using a coursepack, but now I'm ordering Comunidades . 2. Re-read the syllabus and make any necessary changes. Again, that change from the c...

by Ann Abbott 1. You have extra time. The way things are set up at the University of Illinois, our Spanish community service learning (CSL) classes meet with the instructor just two hours a week. That certainly doesn't mean the CSL instructors work less, but it does mean that you can have some extra non-classroom time each week to communicate with community partners and students, plan your classes and grade the reflections. 2. You feel inspired. I don't know about you, but after so many years teaching Spanish, sometimes it is hard for me to muster the same enthusiasm I used to have for discussions about "¿Qué hiciste durante el fin de semana?" or oral presentations on Picasso, El Alhambra and paella. Instead, with Spanish CSL you know that your students need you so that they don't fail in the community and that community members need your students to succeed. That may sound like a lot of pressure, but knowing that my teaching actually has an impact in the commu...

by Ann Abbott I never take Facebook quizzes. My friend Darcy Lear never takes Facebook quizzes. But I think we might be the only two people who don't. Since they're so popular, why not consider asking your students to t ake some on-line quizzes in Spanish ? They can be a fun way to review geography , learn about popular culture in Spanish-speaking countries, and find out what kind of personality you really have . Consider using them as a starting point for a reflective essay or an in-class activity. We could even make our own quiz: What kind of community service-learning student are you? What would the questions be, and what categories would they fall under?

by Ann Abbott In a previous post, I talked about building community-university partnerships that respond to community-identified needs . Clear and frequent communication, as everyone knows, is the key to building and maintaining mutually beneficial partnerships. With one of my community partners, I took this type of communication to another level--I joined the Board of the East Central Illinois Refugee Mutual Assistance Center . At our monthly Board meetings I gain new insights into the Refugee Center's resources and needs. That allows me to think about how to match those resources and needs to my community service-learning (CSL) students' needs and resources. At our last Board meeting, one of the Co-Directors said that they would like to do a Public Service Announcement for the local community-access television stations. A perfect project for an enterprising CSL student who wants to gain skills in research, writing and project organization! And in the end, the student will h...

by Ann Abbott As always, the National Youth Leadership Council's newsletter, "The Generator," has very useful information about service learning in it. The Spring 2009 issue focuses on partnerships, and in this post I'd like to focus on the "Research" section written by Bjorn Lyngstad. Lyngstad's piece begins with a question: "How can partnerships best be developed to ensure the success of service-learning projects?" Frankly, in Spanish community service learning (CSL) I think we have it pretty easy. Our students need to develop their Spanish language skills and/or knowledge of Latino cultures. Our partners usually need our students' Spanish language skills to communicate with their stakeholders. That seems pretty easy to square up. The problem is that our students need to use Spanish to do something : answer phones, greet clients, tutor children/adults, help resolve issues (legal, financial, bureaucratic, etc.). So our students need knowle...