Welcome! ¡Bienvenidxs!
We are a dynamic group of educators at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese in the School of Languages, Literature, and Cultures at the University of Maryland. We share an interest in second and heritage language teaching and learning, and the Latinx/o/a community in the US, and more specifically the DMV (District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia).
Our goals include:
1) Facilitating local teachers’ professional development by means of offering pedagogical workshops and sharing resources
2) Creating bridges between theory and practice to assist teachers in implementing research-informed pedagogy
3) Fostering dialogue and collaboration by creating a community of practitioners, researchers, scholars, and members of the community
MEET THE team
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Ana Patricia Rodríguez is associate professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and U.S. Latina/o Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she teaches courses in Latin American, Central American, and U.S. Latina/o literatures and cultures. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research interests include Central American and U.S. Latina/o literatures and cultures; Central American cultural production in the U.S.; transnational migration and cultural production; diaspora studies; violence and postwar/trauma studies; gender studies; U.S. Latina/o popular culture; community-based research; and Latina/o education (K-16). Professor Rodríguez has published numerous articles on the cultural production of Latinas/os in the United States and Central Americans in the isthmus and in the wider Central American diaspora. Her books include De la hamaca al trono y al más allá: Lecturas críticas de la obra de Manlio Argueta (co-edited with Linda J. Craft and Astvaldur Astvaldsson; San Salvador: Universidad Tecnológica, 2013) and Dividing the Isthmus: Central American Transnational Histories, Literatures, and Cultures (University of Texas Press, 2009). Professor Rodríguez was elected President of the Latina/o Studies Association (LSA) (2017-2019) and serves on the Advisory Boards of the Smithsonian Latino Gallery, Washington History, Central American Resource Center (CARECEN), and Casa de la cultura de El Salvador (Washington, D.C.).
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Elisa is Assistant Professor of Spanish Applied Linguistics and Director of Spanish Language Courses at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is the founder of the open-access, multilingual online journal E-JournALL, associate editor for the Journal of Spanish Language Teaching, co-editor of the Routledge Innovations in L2 Spanish Language Teaching, and consultant editor for HUMOR. Her research focuses on second language (L2) and heritage language (HL) pedagogy and teacher education; applied linguistics; L2 pragmatics, humor, and multimodality. She has published several chapters in edited volumes by Routledge, Brill, John Benjamins, as well as articles in journals such as Discourse Processes, Intercultural Pragmatics, HUMOR, Journal of Spanish Language Teaching, and Applied Linguistics, among others. She has collaborated in the development and dissemination of two digital humanities project, COMUN-ES and the Portal of Hispanic Linguistics. COMUN-ES is the first virtual and global research community in three key areas of Hispanic Studies, Literature and Cultural studies, Hispanic linguistics, and Spanish Language Teaching. The Portal of Hispanic Linguistics is the first open-access portal funded by the HISPANEX Grant of the Spanish Ministry of education, Culture and Sport with the goal of disseminating and promoting research, teaching, and scholarly collaborations in the field of Hispanic linguistics. She is the lead researcher on an NEH project (2021-2023), Multimodal Corpus of Heritage Spanish, which will lead to the creation of the first annotated, bilingual, multimodal corpus of written and oral discourse produced by heritage speakers of Spanish in the U.S. in English and Spanish. The corpus will purposefully include speakers from different sociolinguistic generations of the understudied and under represented varieties spoken in the DMV (the DC-Maryland-Virginia area). The project will engage scholars, educators, and students in the field of Spanish as a heritage language (SHL) as well as members of the Latinx community to create an open-access online resource that will facilitate the study of SHL discourse and will also impact SHL teaching at all levels, from teacher preparation programs to curriculum design and SHL assessment. The corpus will also serve as a digital repository representing the voices and experiences of the diverse population of Latinx Spanish heritage speakers from the DMV area.
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Evelyn is Principal Lecturer, co-founder, and coordinator of the Heritage Language Program in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at The University of Maryland, College Park. She specializes in heritage language education and teaches Spanish language and Spanish for the Health Professions. She regularly organizes a variety of community engagement and teacher education activities with students and colleagues in the Washington DC metropolitan area. She was a pioneer in connecting digital humanities and SHL teaching through the development of digiat teaching modules for REACH (Recursos para la enseñanza y el aprendizaje de las culturas hispanas) in 1999, a project funded by NFLC. She has extensive knowledge of the DMV heritage Spanish community and expertise in SHL research and pedagogy. |
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Manel is Associate Professor of Spanish Applied Linguistics, Director of the MA track in Hispanic Applied Linguistics, and Head of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Maryland, College Park. He has been an OPI Certified Tester since 2007, and ACTFL Certified Workshop Facilitator since 2018. In addition, Manel has worked as an Associate Director for the School of Spanish at Middlebury College (VT), since 2009, where he teaches graduate courses on Spanish language teaching methodology, and coordinates PArLAR, a research group focused on Program Articulation and Language Acquisition. Manel’s research deals with second language (L2) and heritage language (HL) pedagogy and teacher education; L2 classroom interaction and context(s); applied linguistics; and sociopolitical issues in L2 and HL teaching and learning. He has published in journals such as Language Teaching Research, Foreign Language Annals, Spanish in Context, Heritage Language Journal, Hispania, and Cultura & Educación, among others. He has co-authored Lingüística hispánica actual: guía didáctica y materiales de apoyo and Introducción a la lingüística hispánica actual: teoría y práctica (Routledge). He has edited or co-edited a number of volumes, including Lingüística aplicada del español (Arco Libros, 2007), Spanish in the United States and Other Contact Contexts: Sociolinguistics, Ideology and Pedagogy (Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2009), The Routledge Handbook of Hispanic Applied Linguistics (Routledge, 2015), Multiliteracies Pedagogy and Language Learning: Teaching Spanish to Heritage Speakers (Longman, 2018), and Handbook of Spanish Language Teaching: Metodología, recursos y contextos para la enseñanza del español (Routledge, 2019). Dr. Lacorte has been the guest editor of two special issues on Spanish language teaching methodology and Spanish teaching in the United States for the journals Miríada Hispánica (2013) and Journal of Spanish Language Teaching (2014), and Revista Nebrija de Lingüística Aplicada (2020). Between 2004 and 2015, Manel was a co-editor (with Judy Liskin-Gasparro) of the Theory and Practice in Second Language Classroom Instruction Series (Pearson Education). He is currently an associate editor for the Journal of Spanish Language Teaching, and co-editor of the Routledge Spanish Language Handbook Series.
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José Magro is Assistant Clinical Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at The University of Maryland, College Park, where he works on antiracist curriculum development and teaches all levels of Spanish and Sociolinguistics courses. With a Ph.D. in Hispanic linguistics, a M.Ed., and a B.S. in Social Psychology, Dr. Magro specializes in Critical Applied Sociolinguistics. His research interests are Critical (Antiracist) Pedagogies, Hip-Hop Pedagogies, Second and Heritage Language Learning and Teaching, Bilingualism, Language and Identity, Language Ideologies, and Spanish in the USA. He has published book chapters and articles in journals such as Linguistics and Education and the Journal of Sociolinguistics. His book, Language and antiracism: An antiracist approach to teaching (Spanish) language in the USA, will be published by Multilingual Matters in 2023. Dr. Magro is also a well-known MC who, along with his rap group El Club de los Poetas Violentos, developed the foundations for Spanish rap during the early 1990s socio-politically charged peripheric Madrid scene; during the 2000s, after moving to Brooklyn, NY, he worked with consolidated and emergent Black and Latinx Hip-Hop artists helping to consolidate the Latino Hip-Hop movement.
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