My professional development as a teacher
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Collaboration, a key word in my careerTo me, teaching and learning are both the two sides of the same coin. For centuries teachers have shared their knowledge with students creating networks but today the idea of collaboration among colleagues and students is the key to understand the new models of teaching and learning. We are immersed in a technological age where all kind of reading formats are part of our daily life. Internet and multimedia, transmedia, as well as multimodality have radically changed the way we perceive reality and how we understand fiction.
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We all are connected physically and virtually, we exchange pictures, opinions, videos. Students grow up from middle school sharing all kind of experiences through their devices. They interact with each other and among others developing different roles. Classroom, as we knew it has changed as well. The medieval idea of knowledge linked to the space of the monastery where "sapientia" was preserved from laymen and exclusively available to those who treasured the secret, left us a closed and isolated building, the institutional center for education, which is the opposite to the open and public space known as agora–the Ancient Greek idea of learning. Now, although we keep teaching in classrooms, the space is open to the world thanks to the internet. Nevermore are researching and teaching two absolutely private and individual activities. Scholars do not need to travel in order to develop projects with colleagues who live and work in distant parts of the planet. Students can live and experience an immersive environment when learning a foreign language and its literature and culture. So, co-working, collaboration, interaction, consensus, connection, transfers, negotiation, creativity, sharing, exchange, are key concepts to develop a new idea about pedagogy. As Sidonie Smith (former director of the Modern Languages Association) wrote in 2010:
"Experimenting with new media stimulates new habits of mind and enhanced cultures of collegiality. Future faculty members in the modern languages and literatures will require flexible and improvisational habits and collaborative skills to bring their scholarship to fruition. In this environment, the pleasures of deep reading will be challenged by and joined with the new pleasures of distributed readings across networks, as N. Katherine Hayles has suggested. Requiring the dissertation monograph as it is now defined (as a singular and solitary venture) will leave students unprepared for the increasingly collaborative scholarly world of the future and for new ventures in collaborative public scholarship, which seeks to link those in the academy to intellectuals and communities outside it."
Collaboration with colleagues and leadership in the development of teachingTo me collaboration is the key word that defines my entire work, even when I was a student. In 1999, I collaborated with the Spanish "lectorado" in University of Szeged, Hungary, to create and organize cultural immersive events for Hungarian students of Spanish in connection with their academic interests. In University of Nevada, Reno, as an MA student, I also collaborated with my peers to write papers, to make presentations, etc. And as a PhD student in University of California, Davis, I also coworked with my colleagues in order to create all kind of activities, exams, tests, under the supervision of Professors Norma Lopez-Burton, Travis Bradley, Cecilia Colombi and Robert Blake to be used in the Spanish courses we taught as Teaching Assistants.
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Furthermore, four of us created a net of blogs on Spanish Didactics as a tool to be used in our courses and as a start on the use of digital platforms to promote collaboration and interaction among our students of Spanish language and literature. In 2010 I decided to create an entire platform to explore new didactics to be used in face to face courses, specifically I wanted to use digital tools to reinforce interaction among students as well as to improve language and cultural immersion.
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My goal was to facilitate digital literacy for academic purposes to students and the idea came from the need to adopt new formats in the way we exchange knowledge. This was how The Littera Project arose as an educational project developed in collaboration with my colleague Prof. Alvaro Llosa Sanz -today teaching at University of Oslo, Norway- and (again), the Department of Hispanic Studies at University of Szeged, Hungary. Thanks to this collaboration I, along with Alvaro Llosa Sanz, had the opportunity to develop a fruitful bunch of undergraduate as well as graduate courses where new methodologies, didactics and tools were in play during the academic year of 2010-2011.
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From 2012 until 2015 The Littera Project consolidated a solid program of courses with the participation of new institutions that gave us the chance to keep working on this joyful educational adventure. Syracuse University and Hobart and William Smith Colleges hosted The Littera Project, so we could extend our vision. Opening the project to more collaborators was a matter of time. Following the principle of connecting our students as most as possible to an authentic and immersive framework lead us to increase their interaction beyond the institutional space. This was how we stablished specific or regular collaborations with more professors but also with writers, musicians, even with travel bloggers or business people who had a wide range of experiences, all of them useful to show our students to think Spanish as something beyond the pure and raw idea of language, literature and culture. Students had the chance to live Spanish as a global entity linking their personal and professional interests with the entire Hispanic world. Regarding my research, I also participate in academic nets such as national and international professional associations (Humanidades Digitales HIspánicas, ALDEEU, ANPE). I am in touch with colleagues in order to collaborate in colloquia and multiple author academic publications. Students benefit from my scholarly readings and meetings.
Collaboration with students
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dIn a student-centered class, collaboration was the main concept that provided me the dynamics to develop the class itself. I worked with my students managing the information found and shared by them as well as the roles they developed in groups or as individuals. I also organized the content they needed to jump into the search of contrastive data in order to compare materials and drove them into the search of reliable sources. Additionally, I provided the appropriate questions to spark their critical mind and their ability to express an opinion following the academic procedures. We realized how a team can progress in a natural way when learning a foreign language and its literature and culture if there are strong bounds outside and inside of it among its members. Therefore, students were able to learn how to use digital tools for academic purposes at the same time they were covering a specific syllabus on Spanish literature.
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They were able to develop individual projects online (papers on Spanish Literature in the shape of a website), collaborative power point presentations as well as collective papers written in collaboration with their peers and the teacher herself. As a team we discovered a whole new way of working together, deciding the calendar of each activity, discussing how to manage and solve problems during the process of completing an exercise or a task, giving feedback to each other. As teacher I learned from my students how this activity can be improved, how that other should be rethink in order to get a more flexible result, so the student can focus on this particular topic or that specific grammar point. Along with the LMS provided by the university or the blogs we had we needed a community as well. Today, students in Oslo University keep taking benefits from The Littera Project.
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Currently, I collaborate with Literalia, a project developed by Prof. Alvaro Llosa Sanz in UiO. Ana Belén Mañas Gómez and Ingerid Grønnevik Flåskjer are the creators of this list of enriched literary texts in Spanish, using Scalar, the software developed by University of Southern California. The texts are read by undergraduate students in UiO and Høgskolen i Østfold. More colleges from the USA have expressed their interest on it. I am a supervisor in this very-well-rated-by-students initiative.
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