Natalia Crespo: Former Spanish in the Community Instructor Finds Success at Michigan Tech

by Ann Abbott

Just as I like to feature the successes of our Spanish community service learning students on this blog, I also like to share good news about our talented instructors.

Natalia Crespo was a graduate student in our department when she taught SPAN 232 "Spanish in the Community." As always, Natalia was a thoughtful and engaged instructor, challenging her students at the same time that she supported their work in the classroom and in the community.

Natalia graduated and moved on to a job at Michigan Tech. You can click here to read about her work in their Humanities Department. Just the other day, Natalia wrote to me with some good news:

"I'm glad to let you know that I have been offered a tenure track position here at Michigan Tech University! Fernando and I like very much this place and I am very excited with the idea of settling down here and start planning long-term projects after so many moves we had in the past."

She also told me some things that she is doing in her teaching at Michigan Tech:

"Since I arrived here, I have been teaching classes that meet three times a week and I have implemented the use of the computer lab every Friday. What we do is basically the kind of activities I used to teach in the Composition class at UIUC (Span 214). We work a lot with the web, we use YouTube videos for practicing listening activities and I have students record "informes", an activity that consists in making a dialogue in front of the web cam (something similar to the "diarios digitales" in "Spanish for the Community")."

We were lucky to have Natalia as a student and TA in our program, and I was especially fortunate to have someone with her maturity and talents teaching "Spanish in the Community." I'm glad to see that some of the things we do at the University of Illinois have transferred to MTU with her.

Natalia is also a very talented writer. You can read some of her published work here.

Congratulations on your success, Natalia. And thank you for your contributions to the Spanish & Illinois program while you were here.

Natalia Crespo

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