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Home > Spanish Teachers Form Lingua Franca at AATSP Meeting
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Spanish Teachers Form Lingua Franca at AATSP Meeting
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by Sheri Spaine Long
University of Alabama
Birmingham, Alabama
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Destination: Rio
Imagine some 500 participants of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese (AATSP) speaking Spanish, Portuguese, and English in a myriad of dialects and creative combinations to forge a lingua franca for professional development at the eighty-fourth AATSP Annual Meeting in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from July 29 to August 2. This was the AATSP's first meeting in a Portuguese-speaking country. This group of over 12,000 educators rotates its professional meetings to a variety of sites abroad every few years to offer its membership direct contact with the languages, cultures, and literatures that they teach, research, and study. Rio de Janeiro's spectacular natural beauty and welcoming people -- who call themselves Cariocas -- provided an ideal site for K-16 and postgraduate Spanish and Portuguese pedagogues, researchers, and practitioners to exchange ideas, learn, and grow.
High school AP Spanish teachers attended over 20 literary sessions that focused on the 38 authors on the newly minted and revised 2002-2003 critical reading list for AP Spanish Literature. With the expansion of the AP Spanish Literature authors from five to 38 this academic year, interest in learning more about a broader group of authors and their works was a high priority.
The featured event was an AP Spanish session organized and chaired by Scott Shearon from Glenbard High School in Illinois that focused entirely on poetry for AP Spanish. Titled "Teaching Poetry Across the AP Spanish Curriculum," the session illustrated a pedagogical approach advocating the integration of poetry into the AP Spanish Language curriculum; it was presented with Edra P. Staffieri from the Spanish Resource Center at Indiana University-Purdue University. Other sessions included speakers Marta S. Zamora of the William Penn Charter School in Pennsylvania, who presented "García Lorca's Poetry in the AP Spanish Language Class;" Michael Carlo from Princeton High School in Princeton, New Jersey, who presented a Guillén poem from the AP Spanish Literature reading list; and Ken Stewart from Chapel Hill High School in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, who presented "Lo fantástico vs. lo real en Julio Cortézar," also from the reading list.
The College Board and AATSP Join Forces
With a common goal of encouraging the teaching and study of Spanish throughout the world, AATSP and the College Board recently agreed to a pioneering collaboration to provide quality resources to the AP community. As part of the collaboration, AATSP is helping to support the development of a catalog of reviews of teaching resources for AP Spanish Language and AP Spanish Literature to be part of the Teachers' Resource Catalog at AP Central. Both AATSP and the College Board are working cooperatively to promote professional development opportunities for both AP teachers and teachers of Pre-AP years of Spanish. This agreement is a model effort as the two organizations join forces to enrich the support each can provide to the teaching community.
The AATSP conference offered a multitude of ways to develop professionally (workshops, plenary sessions, presentations, and panels) so participants could become more competent and confident AP Spanish Language teachers. Sessions on Spanish language pedagogy, linguistics, literature, and culture ran continuously for five days, enhancing participants' abilities to teach, develop, and renew their passion for the Spanish-speaking world from a variety of perspectives.
The Rio de Janeiro branch of the Instituto Cervantes, a worldwide organization based in Spain that was founded to promote the Spanish language, hosted a special event. Spain's Ambassador to Brazil, José Cordech, welcomed the AATSP at the site of the Instituto Cervantes in downtown Rio de Janeiro. Enrique Ruiz de Lara, Spain's Tourism Consul to Brazil, gave a presentation. The Director of Rio de Janeiro's Instituto Cervantes, Dr. Javier Escudero, an AATSP member and well-known peninsular literary critic, also spoke on Spanish in Brazil. Additionally, the evening's program included a lively panel organized by Dr. Escudero discussing the present and future challenges of Spanish studies in Brazil and the United States. The panel members were Professor Magnolia Brasil Barbosa do Nascimento, Universidade Federal Fluminense; Professor Leticia Rebollo, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro; Professor Joy Renjilian-Burgy, Wellesley College; Professor José Rodríguez-Valentín, Universidad de Puerto Rico, Bayamón; and Professor Rafael Salaberry, Rice University.
In step with the AP mission, the AATSP annual meeting in Brazil prepared, inspired, and connected AP Spanish teachers in preparation for teaching Spanish in a global context, which will ultimately improve and strengthen AP Spanish instruction and students.
Sheri Spaine Long is an associate professor of Spanish and interim chair of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate-level Spanish language, culture, and literature. She holds an associate appointment to the Board of Directors of the National Museum of Language and has been appointed to the national task force on professional development for the New Visions in Action Project for Foreign Languages.
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