Are you a Heritage Spanish teacher? Are you looking for a community of heritage Spanish teachers to share ideas with ? Read below!

Last week I had the privilege to attend a heritage Spanish workshop in Austin, Texas hosted by the University of Texas at Austin.  I attended this conference for FREE (yes!). How did this happen? Well this amazing university has a center called COERLL (Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning) that has diverse research projects going on and one of them is dedicated to Heritage Spanish. Below is a brief description of this organization. 

COERLL- heritagespanish.coerll.utexas.edu/
This is an amazing resource for heritage Spanish teachers who need help building curriculum, answers to questions and/or simply advice from other colleagues in the discipline. They have created a Heritage Spanish Cafe heritagespanish.coerll.utexas.edu/groups/heritage-spanish-cafe/ which you can join for FREE! Here you can post, share and have access to numerous resources. The idea behind this Cafe is to create a community in which heritage Spanish educators share materials with each other in order to make our lives easier :) You will not get monetary compensation for all the materials you share, BUT you do get credit as the author and owner or the materials.  They do however have  an amazing opportunity where you can create a lesson/ materials for the heritage classroom and potentially get payed for it. Here is a description of this opportunity per COERLL:
The Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning (COERLL) invites you to apply to become a COERLL Collaborator for the Heritage Spanish Teaching project. As Collaborators, you will continue to build on the activities you create in the 2017 workshop with the aim of sharing the final versions on COERLL’s Heritage Spanish website. In support of your continued pedagogical work, COERLL will offer an honorarium to each COERLL Collaborator ($300 to $500) upon completion of your project.
You can access this information here : coerll-collaborator-application-heritage-spanish.docx

Once you join the Cafe, you will have access to all the documents, power-points and videos of topics discussed in the workshop I attended. Below are some of the themes discussed: 

• Creating units that empower students. One of the presentations by Claudia Holguín Mendoza discussed the importance of teaching students about sociolinguistics in order to fully prepare them. Another unit that was briefly mentioned was about Corridos. The AWESOME thing about this is that these units are available for free to all educators who are part of this community. Check them out!
• Maria Carreira also presented on how one can utilize the 5Cs (ACTFL) in the heritage classroom as well as the proficiency guidelines (ACTFL). I think the best take away from this presentation is that a great number of our heritage students come in the classroom with a intermediate language proficiency. 
• Jose Esteban Hernández and Yanina Hernández also presented about themes and writing reflections they utilize in their heritage Spanish  program in order to engage their students and meet all of their needs. 

This was an awesome conference! Once again, all the materials and resources are available once you join this FREE community for heritage Spanish educators. I hope this was somewhat helpful!

:) Nancy Fret 

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