Welcome to Nuestra comunidad latina, an open educational, content-forward resource for first-semester students of Spanish that seeks to foster appreciation of the Spanish-speaking world and contributions of Latinos to American society while developing novice-mid proficiency in productive and receptive skills. We’re Lennie Amores, PhD (University of Miami), and Janice Rodríguez, MA (University of Pennsylvania), and we have a combined fifty years of experience teaching college students.
Why write a textbook? That’s a good question, especially at a time when digital scholarship is still in its early stages. A lot of things about teaching and learning weighed on our minds, and eventually they tipped the scales in favor of creating our own text.
First, we felt that it was time to move beyond a purely communicative approach to teaching world languages and to a content-forward one. Machine translation is getting better and better every year, so if the only thing we offer our students is enough Spanish to interact with others on autobiographical topics, we’re not offering them anything more than the device in their back pocket can. To us, it was more compelling to engage our students in discussing, albeit in grammatically and lexically simple ways, matters worthy of the interest of the adults they are becoming, matters that impact their lives directly. We incorporated ways for our students to personalize that material, because interpersonal communication builds community in the classroom.
Beyond that, we observed that the cost of textbooks and subscriptions to online materials had become a barrier to higher education for many learners. If a college degree is an intellectual and economic benefit to our students—and we believe that it is—then every step we take to break down barriers is one in the right direction.
Also, we love building things.
That led us to developing an open educational resource. We drew on the American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages’ (ACTFL) work on world-readiness standards for learning languages and the can-do statements they developed with the National Council of State Supervisors for Languages. From the Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition at the University of Minnesota, we learned about content-based instruction. Creative Commons provided a wealth of information about licensing materials for shared public use. The work of fellow educators that’s shared online helped us bring lively and differentiated instruction to our students for instruction and practice inside and outside the classroom.
The hardest C. ACTFL’s five Cs (communications, cultures, connections, comparisons, communities) undergird all language instruction. For us the one that is the hardest to find in commercially prepared textbooks has always been communities. So that’s where we started, with community. When students begin at our institution, Albright College, they become members of the Reading, Pennsylvania, community, a community that is two-thirds Latino. We asked ourselves, “What do we want our students to know about Latino communities in the United States?” The answers to that question formed the themes of our textbook—the location of the Spanish-speaking world; family and celebrations; community, business, and public art; and the Columbian Exchange’s impact on the identity of peoples who live in the Americas. We built backwards from there, choosing the grammar and vocabulary that learners would need to read, talk, and write about nuestra comunidad latina.
Many hands make light work. We acknowledge with gratitude those who have helped us to bring this project to its fruition.
Allison Ulaky, Class of 2020 (Spanish, urban affairs, and anthropology), who conducted and transcribed video and audio interviews for Nuestra comunidad latina as part of her summer 2018 Albright Creative Research Experience.
The members of our campus and wider community who generously shared their time and allowed us to record interviews with them that are now housed in a digital archive at Albright College’s F. Wilbur Gingrich Library.
Sandra Stump, Interim Library Director and Associate Library Director & Collection Management Librarian, and Sidney Dreese, College Archivist and Special Collections Librarian at Albright.
The extremely supportive and patient members of Albright’s Division of Digital Strategy and Infrastructure, especially Karen Rodgers, Instructional Designer, without whose keen editing eye, superb organizational skills, and boundless generosity this Pressbook would not have been completed.
Our students of Spanish 101 who helped us pilot this course for three semesters. They built their own communities as they learned about our comunidad latina.
Envoi. To our students, this book is for you. We hope that you see yourselves and your community reflected here. To our fellow educators, this book is for you, too. It bears the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, which allows you to remix, adapt, and build upon our work non-commercially provided that you credit us and license your new creations under the identical terms.
¡Bienvenidos a la comunidad! Enjoy the journey.
Saludos cordiales,
Lennie and Janice
