n July 2013, Charla Lorenzen, associate professor of Spanish at Elizabethtown College, traveled to the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese Conference (AATSP) in San Antonio, Texas.
At the Association, Lorenzen gave her presentation “Advocating for Equality: a Funds of Knowledge Approach to Service Learning.” The theme of the conference was “Building Bridges to the Future: Innovation, Technology, Advocacy.”
Her presentation was about the different conflicts that arise in the formal classroom between non-native speakers and their understanding of meaningful conversation and discussion. With her speech, Lorenzen displayed how to create a classroom that still has funds of knowledge, but also incorporates the understanding of culture and language to ensure that non-native speakers can understand and learn.
“It’s important to recognize that language learners can learn as much from one another and from native speakers as they can from a textbook, but the teacher is the one who has to create an environment that will foster such learning, and then guide the participants toward that learning,” Lorenzen said.
Before presenting at the conference, Lorenzen began to gain interest in the subject matter by observing how much her own students were learning from the native speakers they were interacting with and from each other. She started to read professional literature to see if there were people who made the same observation as her.
“I read the literature, developed research questions and then took field notes and undertook a systematic discourse analysis on my students’ journal entries to find evidence of such learning,” Lorenzen said. With this new knowledge, Lorenzen took her findings to the next level to present on “Advocating for Equality: a Funds of Knowledge Approach to Service Learning.”
Lorenzen stressed how this real-world learning situation is important to the world, and shared her information with many different teachers at the AATSP conference. Not only does she share her presentations and publications on service-learning and recognizing undervalued resources in education, but she applies it to her own classroom as well. The students in her Spanish Service Learning class are learning a second language, so she uses different learning experiences to help them better understand the culture and language.
One thing they do is communicate with native Spanish-speakers in different classroom settings.
The 2013 AATSP conference was the 95th annual conference, which has grown to have hundreds of attendees and presenters coming from all over the world.
There are also many pre-convention workshops and post-convention committee meetings that take place. The teachers who attend learn Second Language Acquisition Theory and how to apply it in practice. The different theories include how people and students should be taught a second language. Vendors also attend the conference to provide and showcase new material, books and more.
Overall, Lorenzen shows her service learning tips of incorporating culture within the classroom to different teachers, so they too can show their students how to gain an equal balance of culture and language.
