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My family and I came to �鶹��Ƶ in 1998 from New England. Like many people, we said we would give it a try for 2-3 years and then re-assess. Some 15 years later…here we still are.

I came here to work with the language faculty and to help run the Cooper International Learning Center. In addition to being a beautiful facility, the CILC set the standard on campus for what a collaborative computer-assisted learning center should look like. Our motto is “This is Not a Quiet Lab” because we encourage people to speak, sing, talk, watch movies in the languages they are learning. We also have a hammock, cockatiels, a fish tank and occasionally jazz on Friday afternoons. It’s a cool place to be.

For the past 10 years I have been the Director of the CILC and a member of the �鶹��Ƶ Department. As a teacher, I believe in project-based learning. As a technologist, my area of expertise is social media (in particular blogs) in the language classroom. I believe my job, as a teacher and as a technologist, is to create opportunities for students to engage with Spanish speakers outside of this bubble we call �鶹��Ƶ. The CILC works with Sebastiaan Faber and the OCLC and has been a part of the amazing ObieMAPS project. Together we are finding new ways to support language learning and teaching at �鶹��Ƶ.

Language study may be foundering at other schools…not here. Many students take languages at �鶹��Ƶ not because they have to, but because they want to make connections between what they learn in the language classroom and the world around them. I love being a part of that process. I love helping students collaborate with one another in order to take charge of their learning. I love watching them go out and change the world, one Spanish-speaker at a time.