Spanish & Illinois

by Megan Knight This past week at Leal, my fifth graders were learning how to compare and contrast in Spanish. Every day of the week, the teacher brought in different foods for the kids to touch/eat/smell/etc., which I thought was a really neat thing to do. On Wednesday when I was there, the food was cheese and the teacher ended up making all the kids (including me J) quesadillas. There were shredded cheeses, string cheese, and slices of cheese, and the kids had to look at the cheeses, smell them, touch them, and then they could eat them. It was really neat because I didn’t know how to say half of the descriptive words they were using, like “shredded,” “bitter,” and “string,” and some of the kids didn’t know how to say them either, so it was a learning experience for all of us. That is one of the many perks that come from volunteering for this class: that we get to learn while we help the students learn also. I think the idea of community based learning is so great because everyone gai...

picture: SPAN 332 students, Liz and Alex. My "Spanish & Entrepreneurship" students had to write their first reflective essay before many of them had actually begun to work in the community. So I asked them to reflect on the information in this post and the report it linked to . Specifically, I asked them to answer these two questions: ¿Qué opinas del informe? ¿Crees que tu preparación coincide con lo que buscan los empresarios y gerentes? ¿Cómo (no) coincide esta clase con los temas presentados en el informe? Student responses were very interesting. They were happy to see that employers value experiential learning (including community service learning) more than other types of rote learning. Some students, however, were surprised by finding #3: " Most employers indicate that college transcripts are not particularly useful in helping evaluate job applicants’ potential to succeed at their company ." Those students felt that within their university environment, GP...

Spanish community service learning students are getting the word out about SPAN 232 and SPAN 332. Out of all the team projects in this semester's Spanish & Entrepreneurship course , one group (equipo #6: Alyssa Forsyth, Lisa Medearis and Melissa Schaaf) has had to hustle to meet its early deadline: the March 9th Public Engagement Symposium . That's why I was excited to see the official program for the symposium and see the description of their poster (page 16, #67): " Serving the Spanish Speaking Community through Community-Based Learning: Spanish 232 and Spanish 332 " These two courses apply the teaching method known as community-based learning (CBL). Students of either course are provided with the opportunity to volunteer a total of 28 hours with a community partner organization that serves the Spanish-speaking community throughout Urbana-Champaign. We hope to share our first-hand experiences working with our community partners while expressing the benefits obje...

by Natalie Bodmer After an orientation session and another training session I thought I was more than prepared to start working with the children. However, the night before my first day I became nervous about what I was going to do with the students and if my Spanish was in fact good enough to be able to really help the student learn concepts like math and science. I was assigned to tutor a 4th grade boy. I went to pick him up from his classroom, and he was a little shy at first. He introduced himself to me in English and then him and his friends started joking around in Spanish. It was interesting to see how comfortable he was speaking Spanish with his friends, and then he felt as if he had to speak English with me. I started asking him questions in Spanish to let him know that he could use Spanish with me if he was more comfortable with it. His response surprised me because he seemed shocked to see that I could speak Spanish and he was willing to use whichever language he was mo...

Ana Suárez Vázquez and Ignacio A. Rodríguez-del-Bosque (2008). “The Importance of Business Spanish for Multinational Companies Which Operate in Hispanic Markets: An Exploratory Study.” The Business Journal of Hispanic Research 2.3, 26-34. The authors of this study asked training managers from multinational companies that operated in Hispanic markets about their need to have employees trained in business Spanish. The articles makes several points: These businesses feel that business Spanish is important. However, few companies actually invest in training their employees in business Spanish. These companies need employees trained in business Spanish in two areas: external communications with the market and internal communications within the company. What is the message for my Spanish & Entrepreneurship students? It's important that you invest in learning business Spanish now, while you're at the university (and in my class!). This will be valued by employers of this specif...

by Sarah Moauro photo: Sarah Moauro and Mrs. Anh Ha Ho Over the past few weeks, my work at ECIRMAC has varied daily. Some days I come in and immediately begin translating documents while answering the phones that are ringing off the hook, while on others I sit around in an empty office, occasionally taking a quick call while doing some homework or reading up on ECIRMAC and its events. Usually my weekly two hours spent at the center are somewhere in the middle range between these two, working on a small scale project for an ECIRMAC employee or client. During these days are when I come across little experiences that make me think and, more so, smile. Last Wednesday was one of these middle ground days. I came into the office, took a few phone calls – it seemed like it was panning out to be a pretty slow day. Then, about half way through my hour, one of the staff members came in looking to work on a flyer she was planning on using in the upcoming Fundraiser Dinner. She came up to me, saw ...

I was intrigued by this story about the cultural gaps between Chinatowns and China in the most recent Inside Illinois . My students work with recent immigrants who are not "selling" their community to outside tourists. However, the article brought to mind this question: For students who have studied abroad, what cultural differences do they note between the Spanish-speaking country where they lived and the Latino community in Champaign-Urbana?

Government linguist. What does that term mean to you? Well, in a meeting I recently attended, that phrase set off quite a controversy. Combining the terms "government" and "languages" can be contentious. Language educators strive to teach a language so that students can gain greater insights and respect for the peoples who speak that language and their cultures. Spanish community service learning is certainly an example of that. We want our students to work in the community in culturally-appropriate ways and to exit the community with a more informed view on immigration issues. On the other hand, it's no secret that sometimes the US government looks at language skills as an "arm" in their military and political strategies. That conflict of interests is hard to reconcile. And that's what makes the National Language Service Corps so interesting. No spying. No military work. Instead, members of the corps would help in situations like these: " A...

Resources was the topic this week in my "Spanish & Entrepreneurship" course. For the reflective essay, students had to write a fundraising letter for their community partner organization. Students wrote great, convincing letters. The most effective letters opened with anecdotes. I want to share a couple of them here. Not only are they models of how to open a fundraising letter and hook the reader. They are also examples of why Spanish community service learning is such a powerful learning experience. Anecdote #1 Exactly one week ago we received an unexpected phone call that left us all in disbelief. A volunteer had answered the call first, and within seconds of her trying to calm down the person on the other line with “Calme, todo estará bien” (“Calm down, everything will be okay”) we instantly knew something was not right. Our Spanish co-director took the call, a look of genuine concern and determination never leaving her face. We soon learned that the woman’s daughter, ...

The Center for Advanced Language Proficiency Education and Research's information on Project Work states the following: "In project-based learning environments students create a product that is realistic and meaningful or inquire about an issue or concern that is relevant. In so doing, they engage in a range of activities over an extended period of time. These activities include solving or analyzing a problem, analyzing a text, monitoring learning progress, evaluate learning and collaborating with others. "Participating in project-based learning in other languages, places learners in situations that require authentic use of language (Van Lier) in order to communicate and to carry out tasks that are very much part of the world outside the classroom. Many educators strongly believe that project-based learning environments not only create opportunities for students to actively participate in their own learning but also allows them to become more self-directed learners of oth...

Photo: Guadalupe working with Mateo Ossman (former Spanish CBL student volunteer) at the Refugee Center . I always ask the grad students who teach "Spanish in the Community" to attend an orientation session at one of the community partners along with the students for a couple of reasons: The TAs aren't required to volunteer during the semester, so this is their chance to actually see where some of their students work. It helps them to relate better to their students' comments and questions during the rest of the semester. They can better understand why we spend time in class talking about answering phones and classroom management techniques if they have heard the supervisors talk about those issues themselves. It also opens their eyes to what is going on outside of campus. Many of our TAs have similar university experiences as our undergrads--living in a campus bubble. One of my TAs recently sent me a summary of her trip to the orientation at the Refugee Center . I wa...

Do your Spanish community service learning students tutor Latinos and help them learn English? Many of my students who work at the Refugee Center do, and this website can help them .

Congratulations to Ann Bishop for receiving the University Scholar honor! You can read more about her scholarship in this Inside Illinois article. Let me list the ways that Ann's work is important for the Spanish & Illinois program: Her community informatics courses incorporate service learning. She is Head of the Civic Engagement Task Force. Students who were in both of our courses took what they learned about community informatics and made a website for the Refugee Center ( www.ecirmac.org ) when they had none. She founded S.O.A.R.--the afterschool tutoring program at Booker T. Washington in which many of my SPAN 232 and 332 students work. She has worked closely with Ben Mueller and others on the Latino Media Initiative. Ben produces Nuevos Horizontes , a Spanish-language radio program that my students utilize to improve their listening comprehension skills. Her summer interns in Paseo Boricua in Chicago have worked under the umbrella of the Spanish & Illinois Summer ...

Spanish community-service learning puts students into the middle of complex, real-world problems. Some problems my students have faced and helped chip away at include: Gathering and organizing volunteers to help pull off a fund-raising dinner. Helping immigrants/refugees file their tax returns. Aiding a teacher who is trying to attend to her students' individual needs while at the same time making progress with the class as a whole. (My students often work with individual students on their reading or math while the teacher attends to other students' needs.) Addressing the community's need for safe, educational after-school care (SOAR). Providing Boy Scouts with uniforms. And many more. However, students dash in and out of the community for two hours a week and may not fully realize "the whole story" or see that their task is just one aspect of treating "the whole problem." That's where I see the advantages of project-based learning for our Spanish co...

I was reading a Parenting magazine the other night and laughed out loud when I identified with a couple of these quotes. I never thought I'd be the mom who... ...doesn't cook when her husband goes out of town. ...doesn't brush her children's hair every single day. It made me think, what if you substituted the word "Spanish teacher" for "mom"? Here's some of mine. I never thought I'd be the teacher who... ...doesn't brush her own hair before teaching. Look at my hair in this picture--ack! ...gets e-mails from her students wondering when they're going to get their homework graded. ...makes up the lesson plan in her head while walking from my office to the classroom. ...writes on the chalkboard even when I teach in the College of Business building that has all the fancy technology. ...momentarily forgets what the capital of Paraguay is. ...hasn't read a book in Spanish in longer that she will actually admit! ...doesn't have the...