Teaching

My teaching is related to my views in research (see my research statement below). I use the classroom experience in my research, and provide students with opportunities to experience the relationship of teaching and research. I have a very good idea of what it takes to acquire a new knowledgment in a classroom setting. In addition to being a teacher and a researcher I am still a successful learner of additional languages and of academic topics of my interest. Part of my confidence regarding how we learn can be attributed to enlightening statement by Edgar Allan Poe: ”Abstruseness is a quality appertaining to no subject of human consideration, per se. To him who approaches them by properly graduated steps, all topics are alike in facility of comprehension.” I share this confidence with my students.

I do not carry any particular cognitive banner. I simply keep abreast of all teaching and research trends and use good sense when applying a given trend to my classrooms. In fall 2017, I will teach one of my classes online. I have been working on the materials for this class for about one year. The materials that I am developing for this online class is another innovative initiative that I bring to my Department of Spanish and Portuguesed and KU. In the second class that I will teach, I will also present to my students a new approach to language instruction in Spanish, which consists of simplifying the syntactic rules for transitivity and intransity of verbs in a single semantic rule based on the concepts of verbed and verber. The verbed/verber view of in/transitiviy is quite new and promising, and I decided to explore this idea with my students of Spanish in fall 2017. This will be an opportunity for my students in SPAN522-Advanced Studies in Spanish and I to explore new ideas in Second Language Acquisition. I will be working on this component of my course with a linguist at the Wake Forest University, in North Carolina, Dr. Luis González.

Therefore, I stay informed of new developments in Linguistics, but my teaching takes into account that teaching is not saying and learning is not listening, a saying that I borrowed from a classmate in graduate school, when I attended the University of Carolina at Chapel Hill. By the same token, I also subscribe to the ancient belief that we learn by teaching. My classes reflect these views of mine. I do make my students present or “teach” topics that we study on a regular basis, in the first 15-30 minutes of my classes. Each of them is given c. 7 minutes to make their presentations. My role during these short presentations is to moderate, correct and guide them as needed. This strategy prevents student from listening.

My assessment of how I achieve my teaching goals is based on the student performances. I honor student efforts and progress. I evaluate their efforts and progress through examinations and assignments that are either given to the whole class or in a one-to-one basis. Their main research papers also show me how well or not they assimilate the materials and consequently how I achieve my goals.

Teaching is also mentoring. My mentoring takes into account our expectations and responsibilities, as students and teacher. In our dialogues, I listen to and reinforce their awareness of our context of expectations. My one-to-one contacts with students are opportunities to discuss such awareness, our learning successes and failures. My teaching is strongly guided by the idea that good academic practices are key to succeeding as language learners, future teachers or professionals.