By SHANNON O. WELLS
Pitt’s Keila Grinberg has long lamented the linguistic and cultural gaps that inhibit educational practice opportunities between Latin American and U.S. scholars.
An international partnership made possible by a $3 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education — the largest grant CLAS has ever received — aims to bridge those gaps between Pittsburgh and two specific countries in Latin America.
“What this will enable us to do is something that I have always wanted to do, which is facilitate the learning of English by Latin American-based scholars and teachers,” said Grinberg, Latin American History professor in the Dietrich School’s Department of History. “This is one of the main gaps (in) people training, and it also opens opportunities for career development, because they don’t speak English.”
Pitt’s Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS), for which Grinberg serves as director, is partnering with the English Language Institute (ELI), the School of Education and Dietrich School, among others on the “Bridging Classrooms Across the Americas: A Reciprocal Language and Cultural Exchange Initiative.”
Supported through the federal Mutual Education and Cultural Exchange (MECE) Program, the CLAS team proposed a three-year reciprocal educator exchange initiative that engages 150 teachers from the U.S., Colombia and Brazil — 50 per country — in sustained professional development focused on language learning, intercultural collaboration and civic education.
It intends to combine intensive language training, classroom collaboration and cultural immersion to strengthen teaching in English, Spanish and Portuguese. The grant abstract states the initiative’s goal to “promote, improve, and develop the study of modern foreign language training and area studies in United States schools, colleges, and universities by supporting visits and study in foreign countries by teachers and prospective teachers.”
The program provides opportunities for teachers and prospective teachers to improve their skill in languages and cultural knowledge of people in those countries.
The grant accommodates what Grinberg called “very intense English training” for 50 Spanish teachers from Colombia and 50 from Brazil, who will visit Pittsburgh, and 50 English teachers from the U.S. who can travel to Medellín Colombia, or Santarém, Brazil, to learn either Spanish or Portuguese. Medellín offers opportunities to explore urban innovation and educational transformation, while Santarém provides a setting for learning about the Brazilian Amazon’s cultures, communities and environment.
“Those travels will also include a component that is a history of the place, so everyone will have 10 classes or sessions for us to teach history,” Grinberg noted.
Those on the Pittsburgh end of the exchange will focus on U.S. history. “And we’ll do the same in Colombia and in Brazil,” she explained.
Participants will complete language instruction, cultural orientation and collaborative curriculum planning before traveling. As part of the approximate three-week international residencies, educators will participate in classroom observations, co-teaching, intensive language study, and engagement with local communities.
The program’s third phase calls for teachers to design lesson plans geared toward creating opportunities to exchange their knowledge, “so we can advance the teaching and learning of languages across the continent.”
“I think this is really amazing that in this scenario we’ll be able to do that,” Grinberg said.
As the grant abstract explains, educators in Colombia and Brazil often lack access to “sustained English-language immersion and structured engagement with U.S. educational practice,” while U.S. educators rarely have comparable opportunities for deep engagement with Latin American classrooms and languages.
This produces what the abstract called “hemispheric inequality” in access to high-quality language and intercultural learning that is compounded by gaps in civic knowledge.
“Familiarity with U.S. history and governance remains limited among many Latin American educators, just as knowledge of Colombian and Brazilian contexts remain thin among their U.S. counterparts,” the abstract said.
The program addresses these asymmetries “through genuine reciprocity across all three cohorts.”
‘High reputation’ and structure
Pitt was among three learning institutions to receive the grant funding, with $2.2 going to the University of Pennsylvania, while California State University campuses at Los Angeles and Fullerton collectively received $4.8 million. The former’s linguistics department will focus on South Africa, Kenya and Ghana. Cal State L.A.’s Pan-African and Africana studies program also include South Africa and Senegal as well as Asian languages.
When the call for grant applications went out last June, Grinberg admitted her expectations weren’t high.
For starters, the federal government changed Title VI/NRC grants that support area and language training in the U.S. When those were canceled, CLAS applied to MECI based on its support for cultural exchange and teaching of languages.
As the grant’s principal investigator (PI), Grinberg worked with Luz Amanda Hank, assistant director for partnerships and programming at CLAS, and Luis G. Van Fossen Bravo, its associate director, to put together and apply for the grant.
“I thought we would not get it. I was very, very surprised,” Grinberg said. “In the call, they said they would only grant four centers in the whole country. This is why I imagine many centers didn’t apply. I don’t know how many applicants there were, but they, from the beginning, said that we were No. 1.
“So, I was very surprised with both outcomes.”
She noted that the six core areas covered by the University Center for Global Studies (UCIS) being considered “national resource centers” helped Pitt’s chances.
“In the last competition, we were one of the very few universities that got all the centers funded by the federal programs,” she said. “Pitt has, I think, a very high reputation on international education and the teaching of foreign languages. I think that’s one of the reasons that we got this grant.”
She also credits support from UCIS leadership and Pitt Research in helping the CLAS team design the brand “in the way that we wanted,” but also with the “specificities that sometimes we don’t get when we’re just writing ourselves. We got feedback, we got reviews.
“Externally, I think, we have a very high reputation, and internally we got the necessary structure and support that we needed to apply for such a big grant.”
This MECE-driven project has a broader scope than was originally laid out through the Fulbright-Hays Act, which coordinated between the U.S. Departments of Education and State to accommodate experiences abroad for U.S. educators.
“As someone who learned English later in life, I think that this one attracted me precisely because of the possibility of providing not only Spanish and Portuguese training, but also English training for teachers in Latin America,” Grinberg said. “We did not have a model.”
She noted that Luz Amanda Hank, who was “really crucial in the development of this,” is from Colombia, where Pitt has strong collaborations. “We thought that this would be a way for us to design a triangular collaboration between teachers in those places.”
With the seemingly elusive grant secured, Grinberg noted that the real work begins now.
“We have our groups in each country, and now we will sort of organize those meetings. The first thing is how to select the teachers from each place. In each place we’ll have partners. In Pennsylvania we have partners in education too, and we will start this application process for high school teachers to apply for that.”
In spring the team will complete the process of gathering teachers, determining what students will participate, “and then we’ll start putting together the language training.”
Grinberg emphasized the importance of working with the ELI, which provides the language-instruction element.
“For the history lessons, we’ll partner with the history department in the different places (and) universities and their departments of language and history.”
She and the team are hoping big things can come from a small but focused cohort.
“It’s not a big team. In each country we’ll have different groups, but the core team is very small.”
Shannon O. Wells is a writer for the University Times. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.
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