{"id":95891,"date":"2014-08-22T06:17:21","date_gmt":"2014-08-22T10:17:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=95891"},"modified":"2014-08-26T10:08:30","modified_gmt":"2014-08-26T14:08:30","slug":"spanish-teachers-hone-skills-at-summer-institute","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2014\/08\/spanish-teachers-hone-skills-at-summer-institute\/","title":{"rendered":"Spanish Teachers Hone Skills at Summer Institute"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Eduardo<\/a>
Eduardo Urios-Aparisi, associate professor of literature, culture, and languages, leads an Early College Experience summer training institute for high school Spanish teachers. (Peter Morenus\/UConn Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cLike going to Spain for a few days\u201d was how veteran Spanish teacher Joanne Choquette of Plainville High School described a recent three-day professional development institute at UConn for high school teachers.<\/p>\n

Ella Kremens, a Spanish teacher at Wolcott High School, said the UConn program, conducted entirely in Spanish, provided an immersion experience. \u201cIt was like a post-graduate course towards my master\u2019s at the University; the discussion was at that level.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another participant, Ira Becker, who teaches Spanish at Enfield\u2019s Enrico Fermi High School and grew up in a bilingual family, relished the wide range of accents, expressions, and culture at the institute, noting that Spanish teachers in Connecticut often have a variety of native speakers in the classroom.<\/p>\n

Choquette, Becker, and Kremens were among a group of high school Spanish teachers from around the state who journeyed to Storrs to take part in a new Spanish Summer Institute, an intensive multi-day program of lectures and interactive seminar discussions.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe wanted to re-ignite why these educators love this discipline and decided to become Spanish teachers in the first place,\u201d said Ana Maria Diaz-Marcos, associate professor of Spanish literature and cultural studies, who spearheaded the Institute along with Eduardo Urios-Aparisi, associate professor of cognitive linguistics and Spanish cultural studies.<\/p>\n

Together they designed the institute \u201cas if we were in Madrid, seeing Spanish movies, talking about Spanish art, design, and fashion,\u201d said Diaz Marcos. They even found a Spanish caterer to prepare dishes from Spain so they could work food into the conversations.<\/p>\n

The institute was sponsored by UConn\u2019s Early College Experience (ECE) Program, which works with high schools in Connecticut to help students get an early start on their university careers. Since 1955, UConn has provided access to University coursework through the ECE (previously known as High School Co-op). The program currently offers 50 courses in 23 disciplines at 167 partner schools, to motivated students who want to study university-level material while still in high school.<\/p>\n

A part of the Office of Early College Programs, UConn ECE certifies both the coursework, which is developed by UConn faculty, and the instructors, to ensure that the UConn courses taught in high schools are the same as courses taught on campus. Currently, more than 10,000 high school students are participating, taught by 942 certified instructors, who are all designated as adjunct UConn faculty.<\/p>\n

In 2011, in collaboration with UConn biology faculty, ECE developed a three-day intensive summer institute program for high school teachers, who typically return to UConn for one-day workshops throughout the year to keep their certification.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe wanted to create a summer institute for teachers, to get them back in the lab and get their hands dirty, to provide them time to network with their UConn colleagues and get new ideas and tools to take back to their classrooms,\u201d said Brian Boecherer, associate director of the ECE program.<\/p>\n

There have been four biology institutes to date, and they have become popular not only with the teachers, but also with faculty, prompting the program to launch Spanish and chemistry institutes this summer.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe UConn departments see this as a great outreach to their ECE colleagues, as well as a fun way for increasing the capacity of the high school adjuncts,\u201d says Boecherer. \u201cWhat\u2019s more, as NSF grants have started to require that funded research be connected with the community, this is a successful avenue for building that distribution network.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Ana<\/a>
Ana Maria Diaz-Marcos, associate professor of literature. culture and languages, facilitates a discussion among high school Spanish teachers during a summer training institute at Oak Hall. (Peter Morenus\/UConn Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

For the Spanish Institute\u2019s agenda, Urios-Aparisi and Diaz-Marcos used material from their own research to explore the cultural evolution of Spanish identity. He studies film, art, theater, and humor in the media, and recently published a book on acclaimed Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar. She has published books on fashion and the rise of feminist consciousness in modern Spain. Together, they facilitated discussions on the role that fashion, design, art, and film have played in creating an image of modern Spain.<\/p>\n

The curriculum had three levels of activity targeted to students\u2019 fluency and comprehension.<\/p>\n

Diaz-Marcos said talking about fashion in high school is a sure way to capture attention. \u201cOf course we do very canonical things like reading a 20th-century novel, but if fashion is the topic, and if I\u2019m 16 or 17 years old, I\u2019m like \u2018yeah, I want to know more about that\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

Veteran Spanish teacher Raul Morermans, said the summer institute was \u201ca fabulous experience.\u201d Now teaching at New Britain\u2019s new Capitol Region Education Council (CREC) Medical Professions and Teacher Preparation Magnet school, the Argentinian-born ECE instructor said, \u201cFashion is a fantastic idea to bring back to the classroom. If I get a discussion like that with my students,\u201d he joked, \u201cI\u2019ll retire.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A recent Early College Experience professional development institute provided an immersion experience for high school teachers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":95896,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1715,1],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[46],"class_list":["post-95891","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-community-impact","category-uncategorized"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-05 17:25:54","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95891","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95891"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95891\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":95944,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95891\/revisions\/95944"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/95896"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95891"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95891"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95891"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=95891"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=95891"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}