Mentorship and pedagogical training by working one-on-one with a faculty member on the development and design of an undergraduate, upper-division level course in their area of specialization.

The course is designed for Graduate Students in linguistics, foreign language education, graduate students in other departments, including those who study literature but would benefit from a foundational knowledge of linguistics and pedagogy.

Language of Instruction:

Although the emphasis and examples in the course draw specifically from Spanish and Portuguese, the course will be taught in English, allowing students to focus on language learning in a language of their choice.

Course Description:

Our traditional foreign language methodology is confronting the reality of our digital age: instant access to information, video, audio, chats, conversations with people from anywhere at any time, and communication & information flows. All of these potentially change our pedagogical approach, which lead us to assess whether technology and social media are a hindrance or an asset to our language learning. In this course we look at two strands. First, we survey new digital options and tools in learning foreign languages. Second, we survey those options within the context of theories and models related to second language acquisition. That is to say, is there any theoretical foundation behind the effectiveness of these digital foreign language-learning tools? The course will include four units:

1. Tools to organize materials, sort presentations, build portfolios: e.g., padlet.com, blendspace.com, wikispaces.com, getkahoot.com, YouTube Channels, Facebook Groups, Twitter Feeds, etc.
2. Tools to enhance individual practice: e.g., memrise.com, mangolanguages.com, hello-hello.com, duolingo.com, busuu.com, livemocha.com, FluentU.com, LinqQ.com, HelloTalk.com, OpenLanguage.com, etc.
3. Tools to enhance classroom activities: e.g., video conferencing (e.g., zoom, teams, gotomeeting), Aurasma.com, Vyclone.com, List.ly, coogle.it, etc.
4. Tools that become available via Open Educational Resources and Creative Commons licenses: e.g., Brazilpod, Tá Falado, Conversa Brasileira, Língua da Gente, etc.

Theoretical Underpinnings

Among the theories that have had the greatest relationship to how we correlate language learning and social technologies is that of cognitive and social constructivism (e.g., Dewey, 1933; Fosnot, 2005, Piaget, 1972; Vygotsky, 1978; Bruner, 1990; Koohang, Riley, Smith & Schreurs, 2009). For the social constructivists, knowledge is something that is constructed within a social context. People in a community help each other out, lend support, interact with one another, serve as shadow guides, and build on each other’s progress. One of the major tenets of constructivism is that it is always collaborative. This has direct implications for language acquisition coupled with innovative social technologies, where learning is not simply the memorization of vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar, and syntax, but it is an active situation where people construct their meaning within a social context. The theory behind general cognitive and social constructivism correlates well with many of the second language acquisition theories that have evolved over recent years.

References

Bruner, J. (1990). Acts of meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Dewey, J. (1933). How we think: A restatement of the relation of reflective thinking to the educative process. Boston, MA: Heath and Company.

Fosnot, C. T. (Ed.). (2005). Constructivism: Theory, perspectives and practice(2nd ed.). New York: Teacher's College Press.

Koohang, A., Riley, L., Smith, T., & Schreurs, J. (2009). E-Learning and constructivism: From theory to application. Interdisciplinary Journal of E-Learning and Learning Objects, 5 91-109. http://www.ijello.org/Volume5/IJELLOv5p091-109Koohang655.pdf

Piaget, J. (1972). The psychology of the child. New York: Basic Books.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Requirements and Grading:

The final grade is based on the percentage of total points earned (A = 94+, A- = 90+, B+ = 87+, B = 84+, B- = 80+, C+ = 77+, C = 74+, C- = 70+, D+ = 67+, D = 64+, D- = 60+). Points are distributed on the following basis:

40%     Four oral presentations on content of units

30%     Four 1,000-word reaction papers on course units

10%     One bibliography of topics related to unit of interest

20%     YouTube Channel or Portfolio Project.

Possible Class Materials and Readings

                 Journal of Language Learning and Technology, http://llt.msu.edu

                 Foreign Lanuage Annals, https://www.actfl.org/resources/foreign-language-annals(See expecially Vol. 53, No 2.

                 Lamy, Marie-Noëlle and Katerina Zourou (Eds). 2013. Social Networking for Language Education. Palgrave Macmillan.

                 Walker, Aisha & Goodith White. 2013. Technology Enhanced Language Learning: Connecting Theory and Practice. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

Course Description:

This course is a graduate-level introduction to the central concerns of sociolinguistics. The course will focus on some of the major findings this type of research has yielded. The emphasis of this course will be placed on the analysis of linguistic variation at both the phonological and the morphosyntactic levels. The class will be very hands-on, including training on software programs. Readings, exercises, and discussions will center on methods of data collection, variable rule analysis, and the interpretation of data.

COURSE DESCRIPTION:

Contemporary global cities in the Spanish Caribbean survive. Survival is the narrative of our times.  Their timeless forms of brega, luchaor inventosvary, but they do survive thanks to their human energy and capacity. She, the one who survives, is always in fight or flight response, showing her scars, moving forward. To discuss dead and mourning in cities that survive will seem like a complete paradox.  Is survival included in what political philosophers have termed life?   Whose lives counts as lives? And what makes for a grievable life? (Butler) Is the survivor real? And what about death? Who mourns and how? This course examines the vulnerable bodies that live and die in contemporary Caribbean societies (Hispaniola, Cuba, Puerto Rico). Shaped by colonial, post-colonial histories and now neoliberal orders, Caribbean bodies are ciphers from where life, death and the afterlife are understood.  While, vulnerability is the marker for all bodies shaped by contemporary global conditions, post-colonial Caribbean bodies carry a specific phenomenological imprint, the one posed by the “object” itself, that of the object-body who’s enslaved, run-down, dehumanized, and currently lives under stressful conditions. This course will look at the “orthography of the wake” (Sharpe) in the work of Caribbean authors, performers and film and visual media producers from the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba and Puerto Rico and its diasporas to examine the ways in which these representations critique globalization, temporality, and reflect around life, death and futurity. We will examine the works of contemporary authors such as Cezanne Cardona, Pedro Cabiya, Eduardo Lalo, (Puerto Rico), Legna Rodríguez, Carlos Lage, Antonio José Ponte, Ena L. Portela (Cuba), Edwidge Danticat, Danny La Ferriere and Roxane Gay (Haiti); and Junot Díaz, Loida Maritza Pérez and Anne M. Lara (Dominican Republic); along with essays, performances and films from performers such as Javier Cardona, Las Nietas de Nonó, and Colectivo Moriviví among many. The course will be taught in Spanish, readings will be in Spanish and English.

Books available at Amazon.com

Cezanne Cardona, Levittown mon amour (short stories)

Pedro Cabiya, Tercer mundo (novel)

Loida Maritza Pérez, Geographies of Home (novel)

Anne M. Lara, Konjhur Woman (poetry) Selections of Queer Freedom: Black Sovereignty (essay

Carlos Aguilera, Teoría de la transficción

Danny Laferriere, How to make Love to a Negro (short stories)

Eduardo Lalo, donde (essay), Simone (novel)

Carlos Lage, Habana’s Underwater (novel)

Edwidge Danticat, The Art of Dying (essay), Brother I am Dying (memoir)

Junot Díaz, This is how you lose her.

Grades: 100%

1 op.ed. 20%

2 oral reports and class blog 30%

Oral participation 20%

Final essay 30%

Topics in the literatures and cultures of Spanish America, Spain, and related diasporas.

COURSE DESCRIPTION:

Despite Brazil’s centrality in a vast range of discourses about the tropics, the nation has remained a marginal player in the mainstream (Anglophone) academic research about the hermeneutics of tropical nations, societies and their environments.  In recent years, however, we have seen an emergence of studies of the transnational imaginings of the Brazilian tropics, or Brazilian cultural “tropicalities” (David Arnold), in eco-criticism, environmental history, post-colonial and cultural studies, cultural geography, and so on. One of the anticipated contributions of these studies involves expansion of the field’s canon, which has mainly represented other formerly-colonized regions in Africa, Asia and the British and French Caribbean (Nancy Stepan).

Brazilian Cultural Tropicalities thus proposes to explore the less-studied yet prolific cultural and intellectual production about the Brazilian tropics, by way of historically-contextualized analyses of a variety of discourses—namely, fiction, essays on tropical medicine and geography, memoirs and travelogues, film, and photography. Although thematically structured, this seminar will provide a historical overview of key concepts and myths comprising the New World tropics—from Montaigne’s tropical paradise and Montesquieu's dystopian tropics to Humboldt’s writings. Besides analyzing the interfaces of these foundational imaginings with post-colonial Brazilian nationalist narratives of mestiçagemand cultural autonomy/uniqueness, the seminar will also examine the ways the shifty tropical hermeneutics of Brazil mobilized 19th and 20^thcentury debates and politics of mobilities and acclimatization, epidemic diseases, violence and de-forestation. Finally, this course will engage with key utopianisms or doctrines of Brazilian culture and society, such as Gilberto Freyre’s luso-tropicalism, Oswald de Andrade’s cultural cannibalism, and the kitsch politics of Caetano Veloso’s Tropicália.

Brazilian Cultural Tropicalities ultimately proposes to demonstrate the centrality of Brazil, and the New World in general, in the global meanings, symbology, memory, and knowledge of the inter-tropical cultural zone. Drawing from new imperial studies and theories of bio/necro-politics, the course also proposes to politically frame discourses of the Brazilian tropics.

Grading:

Active class participation, including exercises such as leading class discussions (20%); one oral presentation of the final paper proposal (20%); and a final research paper (60%). Instructor will use “plus” and “minus” grades for final course grades.

This seminar is intended to appeal not just to doctoral students in the program in Iberian and Latin American Studies (ILA), but also more broadly to graduate students in Latin American studies, comparative literature, and Brazilianists from all fields. Although reading knowledge of Portuguese is highly recommended, this seminar will be taught in English.

Primary and Theoretical Works (a selection):

Elizabeth & Louis Agassiz. A Journey in Brazil(& photography)

Oswald Andrade. Manifests; O Rei da Vela

Claude Lévis-Strauss. Tristes tropiques

Caetano Veloso. Verdade Tropical

Davi Kopenawa. A queda do céu

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. Cannibal Metaphisics

Nancy Leys Stepan. Picturing Tropical Nature

Ann Laura Stoler. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power

Mimi Sheller. Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies

Feliz Driver and Luciana Martins (eds). Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire

David Arnold. The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze

Hugh Cagle.Assembling the Tropics: Science and Medicine in Portugal’s Empire, 1450-1700

Jaime Benchimol. Dos micróbios aos mosquitos: febre amarela e a revolução pasteuriana no Brasil

Corey Ross.Ecology and Power in the Age of Empire: Europe and the Transformation of the Tropical World

COURSE DESCRIPTION:

The term pan-Americanism has, for more than century, problematically evoked intra-hemispheric solidarity based on supposedly common shared colonial ties, geopolitical imperatives, business interests, and other discourses of trust, friendship or propinquity linking different states, parties and other entities within the region. This new graduate seminar will work from the premise that the pan-American paradigm has guided much more US and especially Latin American intellectual and cultural production than has generally been acknowledged.  Accordingly, we will interrogate diverse cultural practices in light of recent scholarship shedding important new light on the concept.  Through an analysis of both canonical and marginal texts from different media-- print culture, cinema, popular music, photography, and other cultural practices--the course will draw out and carefully study hegemonic as well as critical expressions of hemispherism:  from foundational texts of the 19th and early 20th centuries (Bolívar, Monroe, Sousândrade, Martí, Rodó, et al) to Hollywood "Good Neighbor" films and Brazilian chanchadas [musical comedies]; from state-sponsored radio broadasts and advertising campaigns to anti-imperial pop art, free jazz, and protest music and poetry of the 1960s and 1970s.  We will be especially attentive to the postcolonial concept of Global Americanity (Saldívar), and to political, racial, and sexual spaces of dissidence within pan-American and pan-Latin American literary movements, cultural projects, and other related organizations and expressions. 

This course is designed to develop theoretical and analytical tools related to cultural and postcolonial studies from a (mostly) global South/Latin Americanist perspective. It is meant to appeal to a fairly broad array of Latin Americanists and US Americanists from different disciplines across the humanities.  At the same time, we will cover many literary and cultural works that should be of use to PhD students in Latin American and Iberian Literatures and Cultures.  

Final grades will be based on regular class participation, three oral presentations, and a final research paper. Reading knowledge of Spanish and Portuguese is required.  Though written work for this course may be submitted in Spanish, Portuguese, or English, the seminar will be conducted primarily in English. 

Preliminary questions: race, postcoloniality, and hemispheric citizenship

David Luis Brown, "Waves of decolonization and discourses of hemispheric citizenship," from Waves of decolonization

Juliet Hooker, Introduction to Theorizing Race in the Américas

Gabriela Mistral, "El grito" (1922)

Gastón Figueira, "Creo en tí, Panamérica" (1943)

Pan-Americanism and resistence: the groundwork (19th century)

Sara Castro-Klarén, "Framing Pan-Americanism: Simón Bolívar's Findings," from CR: The New Centennial Review3.1 (Spring 2003). 

José Saldívar, "Migratory Locations: Subaltern Modernity and José Martí's Trans-American Cultural Criticism," from Trans-Americanity

James Monroe, “The Monroe Doctrine," from Holden & Zolov, Latin America and the United States: a documentary history

Simón Bolívar, "Letter from Jamaica" (1815)

Simón Bolívar, "The Angostura discourse" (1819)

José Martí, "Coney Island" (1881), from En otra vez: antología de la literatura hispana de los Estados Unidos

José Marti, " "Nuestra América" (1891) from Vitier, Nuestra América: edición crítica[e-resource].  English version from Hassett and Muñoz, Looking North. 

Pan-Americanism and resistence:  the groundwork (20th century)

Richard Cándida Smith, "Pan-American Culture" fromImprovised Continent

U.S. Congress, “The Platt Amendment, from Holden & Zolov

Theodore Roosevelt, “The Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine” (Holden & Zolov)

José Enrique Rodó, Ariel (1900, selections)

Rubén Darío, "A Roosevelt" (1905)

Victor Haya de la Torre, "A Latin American Doctrine of Anti-Imperialism," from Holden & Zolov

Garras de oro(dir. P.P. Jambrina, 1926)

Hemispheric blackness

Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora[selections]

W.E.B duBois, selected writings

Dária Jaremtchuk, "Abdias do Nascimento nos Estados Unidos: um 'pintor de arte negra'" inEstudos Avançados(2018)

Abdias do Nascimento, selected writings and paintings

Gayl Jones, Corregidora(1975)

Mestizaje, biopolitics, and the Hemispheric Imaginary

Marilyn Miller, "The cult of mestizaje," from Rise and Fall of the Cosmic Race

Joshua Lund, The impure imagination [selections]

José Vasconcelos, La raza cósmica/The Cosmic Race(1925) [selections]

José Bento Monteiro Lobato, O presidente negro: romance americano do ano de 2228 (1926)

Contesting Corporations

Ricardo Salvatore, "Panamericanismo práctico: acerca de la mecánica de la penetración comercial norteamericana," from Salvatore, Culturas imperiales

Sousândrade, "O inferno de Wall Street / Wall Street Inferno," from O guesa (1888)

Pablo Neruda, "The Dollar's Lawyers," Standard Oil Co.," "United Fruit Company" from Canto general (1950)

Guillermo Gómez-Peña, "The Imaginary Effects of a Trans-American Free-Trade Zone" (2004) from Ethno-Techno

Hollywood, hegemony, and Pan-American Fear

Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, preface, Empire

Jason Borge, "Lettered City of Angels," from Latin American Writers and the Rise of Hollywood Cinema

The Gringo in Mañanaland(dir. Dee Dee Halleck, 1995)

Horacio Quiroga, "Miss Dorothy Phillips, mi esposa" (1919)

Hollywood es así(Jorge Délano, 1944)

Hollywood and Good Neighborism

Sarah Ahmed, "Recognizing Strangers," from Strange Encounters

Catherine L. Benamou, "Dual Engined Diplomacy: Walt Disney, Orson Welles, and Pan-American Film Policy during World War II," from ¡Américas unidas!

The U.S. Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, “Marketing Pan-Americanism” (Holden & Zolov)

It's All True(incomplete; dir. Orson Welles, 1942)

Saludos Amigos(dir. Walt Disney, 1942)

Guillermo Villarronda, Poemas a Walt Disney (1942, selections)

Performing Allegiance

Ana M. López, " Are All Latins from Manhattan? Hollywood, Ethnography, and  Cultural Colonialism," from King, Mediating Two Worlds

Kathryn Bishop-Sánchez, "Imitating Miranda: playing with camp, drag, and gender norms," from Creating Carmen Miranda

That Night in Rio (dir. Irving Cummings, 1941)

Aventurera(dir. Alberto Gout, 1950)

Carnaval Atlântida (dir. José Carlos Burle & Carlos Manga, 1952)

Visualizing Hemispherism

Ricardo Salvatore, "Exhibiciones,"from Imágenes de un imperio

Richard Cándida Smith, "The Muralistas Arrive," from Improvised Continent

Amy Spellacy, "Making Pals in Panama”: U.S.–Latin American Relations and the

Trope of the Good Neighbor in Coca-Cola Advertising during the 1940s," in Domínguez & Desmond, Global Perspectives on the United States. 

Selections from Listen, here, now!  Argentine Art of the 1960s: writings of the avant-garde.  New York: Museum of Modern Art, c2004. 

Cildo Meirelles, Coca-Cola Project(1970)

Coca-Cola: 50 anos com arte(1992)

Antonio Caro, El imperialismo es un tigre de papel(1973), Marlboro(1973-1975), and Colombia -- Coca-Cola(1976)

Anti-Americanism and Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano

Ana María Dopico, "The 3:10 to Yuma," from Ross & Ross, Anti-Americanism

Zuzana Pick, "Convergences and Divergences," from The New Latin American Cinema: A Continental Project

John F. Kennedy, "The Alliance for Progress" (1961)

Now(dir. Santiago Álvarez, 1964)

The Hour of the Furnace, part 1 (dir. Octavio Getino & Pino Solanas, 1968)

Yawar Mallku(dir. Jorge Sanjinés, 1969)

Syncopated Hemispherism

Jairo Moreno, "Imperial Aurality: Jazz, the Archive, and US Empire," from Radano & Tejumola Olaniyan, Audible Empire

Jason Borge, "The Afterlives of Jazz," from Tropical Riffs

Julio Cortázar, El perseguidor(1959)

Carlos Lyra, "Influência do jazz" (1961)

Jaime Pericás, Nuestro jazz(1966)

Buscando a Chano Pozo(dir. Rebeca Chávez, 1987)

Ambivalent Consumers

Eduardo Galeano, "The Invisible Sources of Power," from Open Veins of Latin America

Selections from How to read El Pato Pascual : Disney's Latin America and Latin America's Disney, edited by Jesse Lerner, Rubén Ortiz-Torres

Néstor García Canclini, "Consumption is Good for Thinking," from Consumers and Citizens

José Agrippino de Paula, PanAmérica[1967, selections]

Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, Introduction toComo leer al pato Donald/How to Read Donald Duck (1971)

Supervised preparation for the doctoral degree qualifying paper. Designed to be taken in the same semester the student submits the paper.

Preparation of field lists, and critical summaries of these lists, under faculty supervision. Prepares students for Iberian and Latin American Languages and Cultures 396.

Supervised preparation for the dissertation proposal for the doctoral degree. Designed to be taken in the same semester the student submits the proposal, typically the sixth or seventh long semester of study.

Preparation of the report required to fulfill the requirement for the master's degree under the report option.

Supervised writing of the dissertation for the doctoral degree.

Supervised writing of the dissertation for the doctoral degree.

Supervised writing of the dissertation for the doctoral degree.