The goal of the session is to bring together college instructors to consider the impact teaching Early Modern literature could have on the development of cross-cultural competence, and language acquisition, as well as to workshop ideas for how to effectively teach and assess literature and language in various contexts. The panel hopes to reinforce the inspiring collaboration between the literature and the arts in their quest to educate future generations of students and support world languages programs overall. Carmela Mattza and Anita Damjanovic will chair the panel. Together, Damjanovic and Mattza will moderate the discussion and tease out the many ways studying literature can assist in language acquisition and cross-cultural competency.
This session will feature panelists with expertise and training in the Early Modern literature and Second Language Acquisition. Thanks to their differing interests and expertise, this special panel will attempt to show how teaching literature can promote second language acquisition and multi/cross-cultural competence. Participants will share their expertise starting with a presentation by Megan Mercedes Echevarría and Iñaki (Ignacio) Pérez-Ibáñez, that focuses on how strategies similar to those used in a Content and Language Integrated Learning approach can be used to help students develop their communicative proficiency while gaining specific knowledge about the Spanish Golden Age period. Next, Keith Budner will rely on La vida es sueño to navigate how classroom setting impacts the discussion of themes of civilization and barbarism. Finally, Sarah Faggioli will show how making the familiar unfamiliar enhances critical thinking, and student-led discussions in the classroom resulting in higher outcomes in interpersonal speaking.
Megan Mercedes Echevarría and Iñaki (Ignacio) Pérez-Ibáñez work intends to contribute to the growing body of research that illustrates it is possible to teach literature and promote language acquisition at the same time (Paesani & Willis Allen 2012; Polio & Zyzik 2009; Katz 2002). They will demonstrate that Golden Age Spanish texts are optimal tools to help students develop their communicative proficiency and will share strategies that facilitate the integration of these texts into courses at all levels of Spanish curricula. Their primarily practical approach will underscore the importance of keeping language proficiency in mind in any L2 course. With adequate implementation strategies, Spanish Golden Age texts can be used to develop such proficiency while also advancing students’ skills in critical thinking skills, textual and literary analysis, and integration of other disciplines and cultural studies into their language studies. This approach also helps students progress in their abilities to communicate about familiar topics related to their immediate needs. It also allows for them to expand those skills to narration and description in different time frames, as well as discussion of issues that affect their own communities and that affected other global communities, an essential characteristics of the advanced proficiency level.
Keith Budner will demonstrate how college instructors could approach a dichotomy that predominates in Spanish literature, yet which is also one of the trickiest to approach in today’s classroom, that of ‘civilization vs. barbarism’ as it relates to the theme of ‘Being Human.’ Budner will discuss how the Golden Age drama La vida es sueño provides a means of addressing this difficult topic precisely because it overturns the problematic narrative of a developmental human hierarchy and because its setting of Poland is so far removed from the arena of early modern colonialism where this topic frequently emerges. Calderón’s Segismundo illustrates how even a prince at the pinnacle of the socio-political ladder can become barbarous. Through close reading of Calderón’s drama, students will encounter a conceptual network of vocabulary and terms which they can use to navigate this complicated theme long integral to questions of the human and that, as mentioned, is relevant to all studying Golden Age and/or Latin American literature be it in college or in prison.
Sarah Faggioli’s teaching goal is to make familiar texts, such as the Bible, Dante's Divina Commedia, Vittoria Colonna’s Rime, etc. new and unfamiliar through slow, close readings that encourage students to ask the deeper questions: Who am I? What does it mean to be human? What is my responsibility to my community? In a society in which everybody is so connected to others through social media, one may never have been so disconnected, our social fabric so frayed. With this in mind, her presentation focuses on how to introduce topics, such as friendship and love (lust, romance, caritas) in Dante’s Commedia. The question prompts she uses in the classroom not only encourage deep, critical thinking, and student-led discussions and presentations, they are also the criteria for a teaching process in which students are not only learning a second language, but also achieving a greater awareness of who they are, their relationship to others, and possibilities for the future.
Each presenter will have up to 20 minutes to present their ideas for how to teach and assess an Early Modern text of their choosing. The remaining 15 minutes are reserved for Damjanovic and Mattza to briefly comment on the presentations and moderate the resulting discussion.