Teacher resources

During our conversations, several people shared links to pages that provide specific strategies or guidelines for teachers.

Debbie shared with us the National Urban Alliance as a source of resources and teaching strategies; here is their online resource page. It includes a "best practices" portal that is worth exploring.  Another resource that she has used is CALLA (Cognitive Academic Language Learning Approach).

Cindy's school district uses "S.I.O.P." which is aimed at English Language Learners (ELL) but probably just as useful for any learner (with the idea that "universal design" to make things accessible to some ends up making things more accessible to all).

"The Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP) Model was developed to facilitate high quality instruction for ELs in content area teaching. It is used in hundreds of schools across the U.S. as well as in several other countries."

For material about language teaching and classroom strategies, CAL is the Center for Applied Linguistics, and is another good resource hub, as is CARLA here at the UMN. I especially recommend CARLA as a portal where you can see how faculty are relating their research in the classroom to their publications, and then creating teacher workshops to put together the expertise of teachers as individual practitioners and researchers who can compare the experience of many.

If you have any other suggestions, why not leave them in the comments?

The Colombian group ChocQuobTown won a Latin Grammy for this hit song "De Donde Vengo Yo". They express pride in their home, a region of Colombia with a strong African legacy. In a country where one in five people is "afrodescendiente," they confront racism and discrimination with their music, using hip-hop but also local rythms and traditions to distinguish themselves from Bogotá. Millions of Afro-Colombians have been displaced from their land by the massive rush to cultivate palm oil.

Biking around the U.S. to understand immigration

My colleague Louis Mendoza undertook an ambitious project the year he biked around the United States, on the search for stories about the immigrant experience. Here is his blog: A Journey Across Our America, which he is turning into a book. You will find his adventures fascinating.
Here is his description:

From July-December 2007 I'll be biking across the U.S. This experience will be the basis for book that follows José Martí’s 1891 call in "Our America" for a distinctively American culture, one that embraces rather than denies, the dynamic and organic relationship between place, language, and experience that shapes the American continent. In the blog I'll document the exchanges I have with people about the Latinoization of the U.S. as well as my own life experiences and thoughts.

The education system in Spain and the EU: learn more

Araceli Fernández and Raúl Gómez, our wonderful guests, talked to us about the issues of educational standards in the European Union and how this affects Spain.

Here are some links where you can find out more about some of the things they mentioned:

For basic information click on this links for the European Union home page.

The national exam that students in Spain must take to enter college degree programs is called La Selectividad.

The Pisa Report (informe Pisa), which draws on date from EU countires, is described here.
A set of changes to be applied to all EU member countries' systems of higher education to bring them into equivalence with each other is called The Bologna Accords. It is quite controversial, because the standards clash with long-existing traditions of university autonomy, some of which protect academic freedom, but some of which also maintain the monopoly on hiring among a few.

Finally, here is a page that has some more information about the situation for Latin American immigrants to Spain.

pecha kucha tips

Pecha Kucha events are organized by 20 X 20



Pecha Kucha tips

UMN Library Resources for the public

Wilson Library is the home for the liberal arts collections. Its home page has links to lots of goodies.
For the purposes of teachers not affiliated with the UMN, there are resources on the K-12 instructor support page. for example, Debbie works with College in the Schools (CIS) and there is a support page for them.
On the K-12 support portal, I want to highlight the Research Project Calculator, which spells out the steps in a project with links to resources, "how-to" pages, and lots of great planning material. I think this might be great not only for students's use but also for my assignment planning.

"Flores de otro mundo": what is the "topic"?

Today we watched the film "Flores de otro mundo" (1999) directed by Icíar Bollaín. The movie's page on IMDB gives us details of the production and also allows people who have watched the film to post their opinions or reviews (called "user comments"). There are six of these mini-reviews for "Flores" and some of them are quite thoughtful.
One of these reviews caught my attention because, on one level, the writer "got it wrong" in that he said the film was about two couples, not three. This viewer, who gives his location as Hong Kong says that the film is about "women from third world countries" in search of husbands, and that it focuses on "two couples." Yet the film clearly shows three couples, not two. The third woman is from Spain: from Bilbao in the north. We see why he might have focused exclusively on the women who were not citizens when he goes on to say that he has seen similar situations closer to home, with relationships between women from mainland China who marry men from Hong Kong as a way to better their circumstances. Perhaps Marirrosi's story was "invisible" to him because she is portrayed as an educated woman who was portrayed as not seeking economic or legal status, and her relationship with Alfonso seemed more to be about "choices" rather than survival.

I highly recommend looking at all these reviews.

If you were to summarize in a few sentences what this film is "about", what might you say? What is its "topic" in the sense that we see the film as proposing a set of ideas or a vision of its subject? Please leave a comment!