Spanish & Illinois

by Ann Abbott In one of the final lessons (22) in my texbook Comunidades , I take students through a series of classroom activities to help them think about their academic and volunteer experiences in the Spansih in the Community course as actual pre-professional experience. It's important for them to articulate what they did with their community partner in the form of resume items, job interview answers or cover letter sentence.  This isn't easy! They are used to compartmentalizing: school versus work. They are used to shaping their academic learning into academic essays and their job experiences into job-search materials. So I was delighted when one of my students, Megan, decided to write her final reflection about the career connections with her Spanish community service learning work for a local immigrant helpline. She gave me her permission to share this excerpt below, and I will highlight the most relevant points. However, the whole piece is an excellent examp...

by Ann Abbott In some ways the Fall 2016 semester was on of my most difficult.  But in one specific way it was the best: I scheduled specific times for taking care of all my weekly teaching tasks and did them. That's right, every week I graded, entered grades in Blackboard, and responded to student problems promptly. Preparing the final grades was no problem whatsoever because everything was ready to go. Hurray! What a relief! In the past, my calendar showed my teaching times (of course) and my office hours. But I used my office hours to address whatever was on my desk, answer emails, decompress, any number of things that push and pull all of us during a normal workday. I would also make my office hours available in Doodle polls for committee meetings. But this semester, I guarded my office hours carefully and used them to catch up on my grading and prep immediately following class. So in that spirit of organization and prioritization, I'd like to share my deta...

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...

Can-do statements for spanish community service learning from Ann Abbott by Ann Abbott It was such a pleasure to got to the Ohio State University last week. I had the opportunity to meet faculty and graduate students from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. I learned about the wonderful community-based projects they are doing, and I shared some things with them, too. In particular, I'd like to note the wonderful contributions to the areas of community-based learning, public engagement, heritage language speakers, and US Latinos done by the following faculty members there: Glenn Martínez Terrell Morgan Elena Foulis Anna Babel Of course I also have to rave about my friend and co-author Holly Nibert who is their new Language Program Director. But quickly, before I start this week by tackling my email (which I know is the opposite of what the productivity experts say you should do, but...), I just wanted to jot down the take-aways that I hoped to provide ...

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...

Follow me at @AnnAbbott, and I will follow you. by Ann Abbott As much as I love social media, I just can't seem to integrate Twitter fully into my life.  When I joined Twitter several years ago, I would tweet after each class I taught, summarizing what I had done with students. It was a nice way to share my approach to community service learning (CSL) and to promote my textbook, Comunidades: Más allá del aula .  But then I got out of the habit. At this point, Twitter is a place where I go every couple of weeks to be inspired by others. I was delighted that Carolina Egúsquiza @cegusquiza reached out to me via Twitter this past week.  First, she shared the link to my blog and specifically called out how much she liked reading the students' posts: Blogging can feel kind of lonely. Even though you see the stats and know that people are reading what you post, few people leave comments. You don't get the instant feedback that Facebook or Twitter ...

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...

Students watched this interview with a Guatemalan businesswoman.  (On left, choose "Videos" then scroll down to Unit 3 videos. by Ann Abbott When students do Spanish community service learning (CSL), they can get a myopic view of Latinos in the US. They form close relationships with the individuals with whom they work, but it's necessary to always bring them back around to the larger context. Today, in "Spanish in the Community" we did that in several ways. 1. Share.  In pairs, students had five full minutes to simply share about their work in the community: what they have done lately, how it is different than at the beginning of the semester, what their goals are for the rest of the semester, etc. 2. Become informed.  We did part of Lección 15 from Comunidades: Más allá del aula -- ¿Son noticias para nosotros? (pages 98-101). For a fun get-up-and-move-around activity (p. 100),  I did the following: Print several different articles from to...

My prompts and students' exit tickets in "Spanish in the Community." by Ann Abbott Exit tickets are a new concept for me. On Twitter and Pinterest, I follow many language educators who teach K12. I was curious about the "exit tickets" they mentioned. (Just google "What is an exit ticket" and you will see lots of definitions and resources.)  So today I tried it in my class.  1. Signature Search.  First we did a signature search about their spring break activities and the transition back into their CSL work.  Encuentra a alguien que… Actividades Firma 1. haya viajado en avión durante las vacaciones. 2. haya visto Los juegos del hambre . 3. haya hecho un trabajo voluntario durante las vacaciones. 4. haya hablado español durante las vacaciones. 5. haya hecho su trabajo en la comunidad ya esta semana. 6. haya hecho algo interesante/curioso durante las vacaciones. 2. Comunidades  ...

Example of student "recado" that gives the wrong message. by Ann Abbott Once again I observed in my "Spanish in the Community" course that students need help with basic office tasks that they are called upon to do in their community service learning (CSL) work.  Students may think that taking phone messages and filing documents is easy and even "beneath" them.  My colleagues in Spanish may think that teaching this is not "intellectual."  But semester after semester I see that doing these seemingly simple tasks reveals several things. First, we underestimate the complexity of the linguistic and cultural knowledge required to do these tasks in Spanish and with information from/about Spanish-speakers. Second, these tasks necessiate the use of many higher-order thinking skills: First, students have to understand the information they hear on the phone (in the case of taking a message). This alone is difficult and requires a lot ...

by Ann Abbott This video has haunted me ever since I saw it about 24 hours ago. I had many other things on my to-do list for today, but I dropped everything and wrote a lesson plan about the video . I plan to use it with my Spanish community service learning students when we do Lección 14 ¿Por qué emigrar? in Comunidades . Because I wrote this lesson plan quickly, I'm sure there are typos and other kinds of mistakes in it. Please leave your corrections and suggestions in a comment! I will improve the lesson plan based on your suggestions and share the updates here.

[Note from Ann Abbott: As an extra project, one of the "Spanish in the Community" students watched the videos that accompany  Comunidades: Más allá del aula  and has blogged about several topics that emerged for her. You can see the videos yourself: click on this link for Comunidades: Más allá del aula By "Welcome," choose "Unidad 1" from the dropdown menu Hit the "Go" button Click on "Videos" in the left navigation column] by Haley Dwyer Topics Although the accents were the most challenging part of watching these videos, the range of topics was the most interesting for me. The vast majority of the topics that were discussed during the videos were both informational and pertinent to the information that I have learned throughout the semester. Because many of the topics that were discussed are not things that I normally talk about, in English or in Spanish, my knowledge of the Spanish language was truly tested. The main thing that...

[Note from Ann Abbott: As an extra project, one of the "Spanish in the Community" students watched the videos that accompany  Comunidades: Más allá del aula  and has blogged about several topics that emerged for her. You can see the videos yourself: click on this link for Comunidades: Más allá del aula By "Welcome," choose "Unidad 1" from the dropdown menu Hit the "Go" button Click on "Videos" in the left navigation column] by Haley Dwyer Accents Throughout watching these videos, the one thing that I believe challenged my Spanish the most is the varying accents that I heard. Because most of my Spanish language learning has been spent in a classroom and not traveling the world, I have only been exposed to a few different accents. Listening to the different accents was both frustrating and enjoyable. Not only did the accents make what the speakers were saying easier or difficult to understand but I also noticed that t...