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Congratulations are due to Dr. Tracy Quan, who recently won a 2020 UD Center for the Study of Diversity Fellowship Grant in the amount of $7500.
The 2020 CSD Fellowship Grant will support Dr. Quan's on-going work on understanding the challenges and opportunities that engaging linguistic diversity in language learning and teaching offers, especially as it intersects with social identities, difference, and power. During the grant period, Dr. Quan will advance a study that explores students' language attitudes before and after community engagement courses in Spanish. In collaboration with a Spanish immersion school in Wilmington, university students will participate as teaching assistants in weekly field placements. Through class discussions, assignments, and structured reflections, students will also explore issues related to bi/multilingualism in Delaware and the U.S. The following research questions guide this study: How does community engagement develop students' sociolinguistic and critical language awareness? How can instructors create space for these types of learning to occur? How does this development relate to students' backgrounds? This study is part of a larger project, "Critical approaches to Spanish language pedagogy in the U.S.," that responds to the need to develop curriculum and practices that leverage the knowledge of students and local community members, encourage multilingualism and translingual competence, and contest marginalizing discourses related to Spanish and Latinxs in the U.S.
