Spanish teacher at Baltimore School for the Arts
Keywords: Cultural immersion, Ethnic Identities, Comparing Education Systems, History and Indigenous Populations Today
I am a Spanish teacher at Baltimore School for the Arts, a high school in Baltimore City, Maryland. I hold a master’s degree in social work from my country of origin, Guatemala, and another in Secondary Education from Towson University. I have extensive experience teaching Spanish, and I always integrate culture as part of my curriculum because of the richness it brings to the linguistic experience, but most importantly because we all know that when students learn about other people, they are more likely to become the compassionate adults we want them to be.
Read more about Ileana
I have worked extensively in curriculum development during my many years of teaching. I have created semester-long classes and full units on socio-economic and cultural topics that are important and relevant for my students to explore, including Latinos en los Estados Unidos, Centroamérica: su historia, su política y su cultura, and La Cultura a través del Cine to name a few. In light of this, participating in the Fulbright-Hays Project Abroad to Peru was an amazing opportunity for me to expand my cultural understanding of other countries in the Spanish-speaking world, and to be able to incorporate that new knowledge into my curriculum.
Our 6-week immersion program studying and learning about Peru’s culture, literature, art, and history has given me not only the depth and breadth I needed to understand the country’s rich and diverse culture but also the tools and resources I needed to design new curriculum in meaningful and thoughtful ways. I have created lessons on multiple topics, including the history and challenges of indigenous populations in the Americas, heroes and heroines from underrepresented communities, the education system in Peru, and I have added literary work and art from diverse authors and artists to my existing lessons.
As a Spanish teacher, I consider that one of my greatest responsibilities is to help my students not only to improve their communication skills, but also to gain awareness and appreciation for the culture of the people whose language they are studying. As Parker Palmer, author of The Courage to Teach (1997) puts it. “We know that the fear fades when people meet the stranger and learn not only that the stranger lacks horns but may even come bearing gifts.” Young people need to learn about the world in order to develop a clear understanding of what it means to act in the world with empathy, open-mindedness, and moral conviction in our increasingly changing pluralistic society.