A resourceful teacher
Vanessa Del Giudice has been an innovative Spanish teacher at Barrington High School in Rhode Island for 18 years. She uses a broad array of teaching methods and activities to extend student learning beyond textbook Spanish. From discussing daily dispatches from the Basque separatist campaign to reading Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges or holding a discussion forum with native speakers from Puerto Rico, Vanessa takes her language class further. Her class becomes a dynamic study of Spanish-speaking cultures across place and time. Obviously a resourceful teacher, Vanessa recently began using technology to support instruction as she addresses the 5 C’s of foreign language: communication, culture, connection, comparison, and community.

El Misterio de los Mayas
Vanessa was inspired to teach about the long and varied history of the Maya people when she read a personal account of the struggle of modern-day Mayans, I, Rigoberta Menchú. An Indian Woman in Guatemala (Verso Books, 1984). The Intel® Teach Program afforded her the opportunity to develop her teaching plan, “El Misterio de los Mayas (Maya Mystery).” “Going into the Intel course, my ideas for teaching culture and history were clear,” Vanessa recalls, “but determining how to use technology to support a project was a challenge. The course offered me a chance to refine my thinking. I liked having an opportunity to think deeply, and my struggles with the technology piece actually made me slow down and develop my thoughts carefully.” After some deep cogitation, Vanessa settled on a complement of Curriculum-Framing Questions that drive student learning in this unit, including: What happened to the Mayan civilization of the classical period, and what is life like for the Maya of today? and How can we understand ourselves better by studying people of the past? As they study the Maya from the classical period to the modern age, students find that trade, warfare, government, class systems, and cultural traditions change over time, but have persistent parallels in modern society.

Technology supports project learning and higher goals
Vanessa is looking forward to using her project with her advanced Spanish class. “We move from individual skills work to collaborative work in level 5. Group projects are a good vehicle for developing language because collaborative effort requires careful and effective communication. I want students to really interact and work together in a big project with many stages. They will have to learn to make decisions together, like how to divide up the effort and be responsible to the larger group to teach what they’ve learned. “I’m looking forward to seeing what they make of this,” Vanessa says. “We have it as a stated goal that we want kids to be responsible for their own learning, and I think this project supports that aim. At the end of the year our seniors do a final independent project that involves research, fieldwork, and communication. Doing this project early in the year as a group will help students master the learning processes, the idea of a project cycle, so they can go through it independently when they do their own projects.”

Looking ahead
When asked what’s next in terms of planning new instruction, Vanessa is quick to answer.: “The first encounter between the Europeans and the Aztecs. That really deserves our attention.”

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