Jornadas culturales: español avanzado en línea is an online book for Spanish learners of the 21st century seeking to achieve advanced proficiency in the language. The book addresses a substantial gap in the textbook market; namely, the lack of suitable tools and materials to enable intermediate learners to overcome a language barrier normally faced at the intermediate-mid proficiency level. We have enclosed a more in-depth description of the project, should this be of interest to you. Included as well are our curricula vitae.
Jornadas is grounded on a novel and quantitatively tested pedagogy developed by Clara Román-Odio in her language courses at Kenyon College. This approach promotes a greater emphasis on communicative, analytical, and thinking skills and a heightened focus on the global perspective by creatively integrating social media and other information technologies into the learning process. In the aggregate this pedagogy has been shown to successfully bridge the above-mentioned gap by supporting two interrelated goals:
- To improve “core” language skills (listening, speaking, reading, and writing) through the application of online systems; and
- To acquire “higher-level” language skills (such as storytelling, public speech, close textual analysis, and writing analytically) by incorporating a pedagogical approach that enables the development of critical analysis and cultural literacy.
Such approach is deployed via comprehensible input based on contextualized cultural materials such as narratives, poems, essays, films, music, visual art, and current events of the Spanish-speaking world. Cultural content serves as the basis to support the development of major skills at the advanced level, as described in the ACTFL proficiency-based checklists: writing analytically, reading and interpreting unedited texts/films, listening and grappling with public media, and speaking in public.
Cultural content is supplemented by on-line practice using an integrative approach that combines the acquisition of advanced vocabulary, grammar review, short readings, writing strategies, listening and viewing in order to consolidate cultural literacy and language acquisition. To ensure students’ advancement in core and “higher level” language skills, the book incorporates a scaffolding testing system, including online pretests, tests, post-tests and self-assessments, to help learners become aware of their own areas of strengths and weaknesses.
Las autoras
Clara Román-Odio is Professor of Spanish at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, with a specialty in literature and society in the late twentieth century. Prof. Román-Odio has taught advanced Spanish for 25 years at Kenyon in addition to courses in Latin American poetry of the 20th century, women writers, contemporary Latin American short story, Mexican literature, cultural productions of the borderlands, and others. Author of Sacred Iconographies in Chicana Cultural Productions (Palgrave 2013), and Octavio Paz en los debates críticos y estéticos del siglo XX (tresCtres Editores, Galicia: España, 2006), she has published extensively on the U.S.-Mexico borderlands cultural productions and feminisms of color. She is co-editor of two volumes, Transnational Borderlands in Women’s Global Networks (Palgrave 2011) and Global, Local Geographies: The (Dis)locations of Contemporary Feminisms (Letras Femeninas 33.1, 2007). She has contributed over two-dozen peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters in her areas of specialty. Recent areas of scholarly interest include oral history, digital storytelling, and community-engaged learning and research.
Ana Ramírez, alum of Kenyon College, chairs the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at St. Andrew’s School in Middletown, Delaware, where she has worked for twenty years. Ana leads student trips abroad for language immersion. She is also Assistant Head for Leadership and teaches all levels of Spanish including Advance Level courses.
Cheryl Johnson, also alum of Kenyon College, is an instructional technologist for the Department of Modern Languages at Denison University in Granville, Ohio. Previously she taught Spanish at Princeton Day School and The Pennington School in New Jersey. She helped to write model Spanish curriculum for the Ohio Department of Education in 2005. She currently serves on the Ohio Foreign Language Association’s board as executive vice-president. In addition to this project, Ms. Johnson is currently working with Assistant Professor Jason Busic on “Translating the Translators: the Arabic New Testaments of Medieval Iberia”, a digital humanities project and with Hanada Al-Masri on “The Arab American Community in Central Ohio: Negotiating Cultural Identities and Adapting Traditions”, a digital oral history project.
Jornadas culturales 