I have mentored graduate students in language teaching and offered them general support. My work with graduate students has involved exchanging ideas about learning activities, thinking through didactic sequences that provide coherence to the learning experiences of our undergraduate students, designing cultural project assignments, and researching cultural texts that enrich our classes.
I have further supported graduate student development through research on pedagogy. For example, during the 2020 spring semester, I organized a research group with two graduate students (with the program director’s approval) to investigate a question that came up during a program meeting where the students were present. The students and I compiled a bibliography, selected and discussed key readings on the subject, and put together a presentation (see below).
In the fall 2020 semester, I continued to work with one of the graduate students in the teaching of L3 Spanish. Using a shared Google document, the student and I created teaching plans, brainstormed ideas for making our classes interactive, and shared resources. The student and I plan on continuing to work together this coming spring (2021) semester in the teaching of L4 Spanish. I have also welcomed another graduate student who will be teaching a section of the course to work with us.
Graduate student success can be enhanced by an intellectual community, so in the summer of 2020 I invited graduate students to gather on a biweekly basis to provide each other status updates on the progress of our work and to set goals for subsequent meetings. I also attend MLA webinars that address current initiatives in graduate student education to learn about new ideas for supporting our students.