On Monday, March 25^th UConn Early College Experience, and the UConn ECE Faculty Coordinators from Spanish,Profs. Gustavo Nanclares and Eduardo Urios-Aparisi met with a group of more than 60 UConn ECE certified Spanish Instructors for their annual professional development workshop.

Prof. Maria Acosta Cruz, Professor of Spanish in the Language, Literature & Culture Dept, Clark University shared her presentation "Ecocrítica, cultura y nación: La cultura puertorriqueña a través de cinco siglos" ("Ecocriticism, Culture, and Nation: Puerto Rican Culture Through Five Centuries") with the teachers. After lunch the instructors engaged in a group activity sharing their creativity and resources with one another. 

UConn Spanish courses offered through ECE.

On Friday, March 3rd, UConn Early College Experience, and the UConn ECE Faculty Coordinators from Spanish, Profs. Urios Aparisi and Nanclares met with certified SPAN 3178 and 3179 Instructors for an in person professional development conference.

After welcoming remarks by UConn Early College Experience Director, Christopher Todd, the group discussed their courses with the faculty and later heard from special guest speaker: Maria Lourdes Casas, Professor in the World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Department, Central Connecticut State University with her talk 'Less is more'/'Menos es Más.'

UConn Spanish courses offered through Early College Experience.

On Friday, November 18, 2022 our UConn ECE Faculty Coordinators for Spanish Eduardo Urios-Aparisi and Gustavo Nanclares ran the workshop “Cinema in the Spanish classroom.” This is their first online workshop out of the four that they will conduct this year (three will be held online and a fourth one in person). The goal of these online workshops is to discuss a single topic and present some practical ideas and resources for the classes and to offer a space for everyone to interact, discuss, and share experiences related to the teaching and learning of Spanish.

In this first workshop the group explored the topic of Spanish and Latin-American short film and its use in the classroom. They discussed the importance and peculiarities of the short film as a genre, shared a number of online resources for Hispanic short films. They then proceeded to discuss and analyze the animation short Niebla by the Mexican director Emilio Ramos. After this analysis, participants worked in groups analyzing visual, technical, narrative, and thematic aspects of the short films Amor, Nuestra Prisión (Carolina Corral Paredes, 2016) and Una Carrerita, Doctor (Julio Ramos, 2015). The workshop ended with a general discussion of the advantages of using this type of cinematic genre in the ECE Spanish classroom followed by participants sharing their own experiences and ideas using film in their classes.

UConn Spanish courses offered through Early College Experience.

On December 17th UConn ECE Faculty Coordinator for Spanish,  Prof. Ana María Díaz-Marcos hosted the ECE Spanish workshop that was dedicated to the memory of Prof. Laurietz Seda who coordinated ECE-Spanish for many years. This year´s the event was entitled "Digital Humanities in Spanish" and forty teachers from across Connecticut participated in the workshop.

Two outstanding scholars were invited to attend and present their work and lead the discussion. Prof. Tina Escaja, Distinguished Professor of Spanish and director of Gender, Sexuality and Women´s Studies at the University of Vermont presented "From bar codes to new technologies for resisting and learning in pandemic times".  Prof. Escaja introduced her creative work on digital poetry and her robopoems. Spanish ECE instructors discussed the possibilities of bringing to the Spanish ECE classroom projects that fall in the intersection of humanities, technology and art. After the break, Prof. Montseu Feu from Sam Houston State University in Texas discussed her latest digital project “Fighting Fascist Spain: Spanish-American press against European fascism.” The conversation evolved around student participation in digital research and recovery projects and possibilities of collaboration in digital publications. There was also a lively discussion on using graphic humor as a tool for learning about historical political activism in the field of Hispanic Studies.

UConn Spanish courses offered through ECE.

On Friday, February 26^th,  UConn Early College Experience and UConn ECE Faculty Coordinators from UConn’s Literatures, Cultures and Languages Department (Spanish), Guillermo B. Irizarry and Eduardo Urios-Aparisi met with ECE Spanish Instructors for their annual professional development conference.

Guest speaker Carlos Gardeazábal-Bravo from Colby College shared his presentation “Taller multimodal sobre derechos humanos latinoamericanos” (“Multimodal workshop on Latin American Human Rights”) with the group and answered their questions. His talk included the implementation of film and other practical applications.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After Dr. Gardeazábal-Bravo’s talk, ECE Faculty Coordinators Prof. Irizarry and Prof. Urios-Aparisi spoke with the ECE Spanish Instructors to discuss issues and resources of environmental issues and their course specific questions and concerns.

UConn Spanish courses offered through UConn ECE.