Spanish SWAG Symposium 2023I am so grateful to Spanish Teachers Bridge the Gap for assisting me in attending a professional development symposium for Spanish teachers who primarily serve Black American students. I was able to connect with various teachers from different states and even one from Memphis! As the youngest person there, I was able to open up about my difficulties as a newer teacher and receive powerful feedback from other Black women on how to use my unique life experiences to enhance my students’ knowledge of the Spanish language. One of the most interesting things I learned from the symposium was how to use an individual student’s learning style and ideological approaches to education to help empower them to engage in authentic, high quality, and goal-oriented Spanish learning. The symposium really focused on reflecting on my own teaching practices and how I can better serve my students by integrating linguistic and cultural nuances in the Spanish classroom. I truly feel that I left not only with a new professional circle, but I also left with some outstanding tools to bring back to my school, my Spanish team, and most importantly my students.
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2023 AATSP Annual Conference in SalamancaBetween June 26-29, I was immersed in the beauty of the Universidad de Salamanca in Salamanca, Spain as I attended and presented at the 105th AATSP conference. Not only did I enjoy working with the educators attending my presentation, "Encouraging Proficiency Through Literature: Microcuentos in the L2 Classroom," I also attended a variety of sessions on everything from the gamification of language acquisition to using movement to develop reading skills. As an educator, I have wanted to share more presentations with the greater language education community to give back to this group that has been so supportive of my own learning journey. I was excited the teachers who attended my presentation had not worked with microcuentos before and were open to including them in their curriculum next year in order to teach with authentic texts.
Besides offering a variety of sessions, the AATSP also provided educational tours of the university and city, so of course I took full advantage of these valuable tours. I have been developing a unit about education, “¿Te gustaría estudiar en el extranjero?” to encourage my students to study language abroad, and gaining a better understanding of the universities of Spain gave me new ideas for this upcoming year! 2023 AATSP Annual Conference in SalamancaSTBGF not only made attending the AATSP’s annual conference in Salamanca a possibility, but enabled me to refine and reinforce my passion for teaching Spanish and the Spanish-speaking world. I took advantage of this opportunity to attend sessions on topics ranging from literacy development to student-centered practices to dynamic evaluation. Furthermore, I enriched myself by touring Salmanca’s cathedrals, deciphering Latin with former colleagues in monasteries, and traveling within Asturias to retrace the history of Don Pelayo. I’ve had the privilege to live in Spain before moving to Tennessee to teach middle school. I graduated from the Universidad de Navarra in Pamplona. During this time, I explored Navarran history, read impassioned debates distinguishing catalán from valenciano on a train to Barcelona, and marveled at the iconic landmarks of Andalucía. Salamanca, however, on the opposite side of the country, had always felt just out of reach. It was an especially meaningful experience to return to Spain, specifically for Salamanca.
Just as learning a language can be an infinite process, opportunities for growth as a language educator are abundant. I connected with talented teachers and observed their practices and innovations in the classroom. I simulated strategies to engage students in classroom novels, analyzed Italian-Spanish translation strategies, and collected an absurd amount of recommendations for books, podcasts, and teacher resources along the way. I’m returning to Tennessee reinvigorated and eager to apply what I’ve learned. The chance to visit Spain, immerse myself in the language, and expand my knowledge of the Spanish-speaking world and language-teaching methods has inspired me to invest more time and energy into my own curriculum development projects and continue connecting with other language educators in Tennessee. I intend to present at this year’s TWLTA conference on how methodologies typically used in Latin instruction can be applied to modern languages and younger learners. Thank you again to STGBF for the support. Undoubtedly this organization is an invaluable resource of Spanish teachers in Tennessee. Acronyms: Spanish Teachers Bridge the Gap Fund, American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese, Tennessee World Language Teaching Association 2023 AATSP Annual Conference in Salamanca, SpainThis year´s AATSP Conference in Salamanca, Spain, exceeded my expectations, and several elements contributed to that. With deep appreciation I want to thank Spanish Teachers Bridge the Gap Fund for making this extraordinary opportunity attainable for me this summer! The walking tours of Salamanca arranged by AATSP helped me to orient myself in this amazing ¨living museum¨ of a city, and I was able to absorb valuable information about its rich history through the generous and knowledgeable guides. The people and characters connected to Salamanca that I have learned and taught about for so many years came to life. Since three international associations collaborated to offer this incredible gathering of over 1,000 educators from 40 different countries, the connections and interactions were such that I have never experienced before! As always, the AATSP conferences provide a networking platform for teachers, and I am appreciative to have met so many who share common concerns, goals, and interests. We were encouraged during the plenary session by the U.S. Embassador to Spain, Julissa Reynoso Pantaleón, ¨Enseñanza es una profesión y una vocación. Mejoramos la calidad de la vida de los estudiantes en tantas maneras…Bilingualismo es nuestro super-power!¨ Throughout the conference, we were affirmed and connected as educators. The number and variety of sessions available for professional development was overwhelming (in a very positive way)! There were at least two sessions in every time slot that sparked my interest or provided needed support and relevant pedagogical information to help me in the classroom and beyond, and after experiencing them, I believe that those offered were outstanding and timely, such as addressing the needs of traditional students and heritage speakers in our classrooms. Other examples of sessions that I chose ranged in theme from helping my students become published writers and artists, to incorporating student-led Spanish communication with dance and video, using student-created storybooks in Spanish with community outreach connections, to a study of the Spanish Civil War and the Franco era. A sincere THANK YOU, to the Board of Spanish Teachers Bridge the Gap Fund for your financial support in partnering with me to participate in this inspiring experience. I know that incorporating what I have learned will impact my students´ growth in the classroom and beyond. Thank you for supporting Spanish teachers and for encouraging us to grow personally and professionally through these opportunities.
This has been nothing short of a banner year for me professionally. I am so pleased to say that I have done so much professional learning and growing this school year. I feel that the instructional practices and pedagogies I have learned and tried have really helped my students with engagement, and had helped me absolutely fall in love with my work. It is hard these days for a teacher to love all that they do. My job also has its shortfalls. But when I am in front of my students just using the target language and learning more about them and their interests, the atmosphere of the type of work we do completely changes.
My students inspire me every day with their brilliance. I am blessed to teach some of the most gifted minds in this generation. They are so incredibly hardworking that it makes me question my own efforts sometimes. Honestly, to keep them engaged in the classroom can be a bit of a challenge, simply because even though they may be novice language learners, they are definitely not novice thinkers. They need complex cultural themes to enrich them. This is one reason why I find Comprehensible Input (CI) strategies so useful. When we work in the target language so exclusively with compelling and comprehensible input, we do the difficult mental work of moving to faster processing between languages. I spend much of my personal time researching CI. I am in several language teacher Facebook groups. I listen to several podcasts by language teachers and linguists, like “Talkin’ L2 with BVP,” “Language Latte,” and Tennessee’s own “We Teach Languages.” I’ve read several books this year about CI, and I’ve purchased several curriculums out of pocket. I read countless blogs and watch YouTube channels of classroom demonstrations. But I knew the biggest impact to my teaching this year would be attending a CI-specific conference where I can learn from the masters of the techniques- curriculum writers like Tina Hargaden, classroom management gurus like Bryce Hedstrom, national board-certified teachers like Kelly Ferguson, linguists like Stephen Krashen, authors of readers like Karen Rowan, creators of teaching methods like “Teaching Proficiency Through Reading and Storytelling” like Blaine and Von Ray, and so many others. I loved getting to meet my idols in person. I was thrilled to walk away with tangible TPRS techniques and compelling input to insert into the classroom immediately, the following Monday. I absolutely notice a difference in my students since following these techniques. Nothing piques a students’ interest like paying attention to a picture talk where baby pictures of them are the main subject. Bryce Hedstrom’s classroom jobs and student pair structures using culture has helped tremendously saving time in pairing students, while simultaneously teaching them geographical and cultural tidbits. Tina Hargaden’s academic card talk put a refreshing targeted spin on a non-targeted CI classic. The most opportune moment for me after attending Mitten CI was finding out that the conference creator, Erica Peplinski, who teaches early education Spanish in Michigan, told everyone after the conference that her district has decided to do away with her position and language in elementary levels. This is such a sad reality for language teachers in this day and age. Most people do not pay attention to the need for another language in the global economy, and instead believe in and promote the prestige of English (and sometimes, English only). This makes me even more grateful for the crowdsourcing that enabled me to visit Michigan and take part in the Mitten CI conference, because there may not be an opportunity in the future. Most other CI conferences are twice or more as expensive, and this was a great way for me to expand my professional horizons while staying within the teacher budget. I am forever grateful for all the support and help that afforded me this opportunity, and one day when I am able, I will most certainly pay it forward. |
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