Classes

Georgetown University (2015 – 2019)

As a graduate student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, I was the instructor of record for 12 classes over the course of four years. These included all levels of Spanish (beginning, intermediate, and advanced), as well as two introductory linguistics classes for undergraduates, also taught in Spanish.

My years teaching at Georgetown were punctuated most notably in 2016 by a unique opportunity I was given to develop a new class for the Department of French and Francophone Studies called French for Spanish Speakers. Over the course of four consecutive semesters I gained invaluable experience teaching Spanish-English bilinguals a third language, which went on to not only inform my doctoral research, but also provide an additional source of participants for my dissertation study.

In 2017, a colleague of mine began offering a Spanish for French Speakers course at the same time as my L3 French class. By syncing our teaching and curricula, we were able to host joint language-learning activities for our students during class time, and then pair them up as conversation partners outside of class. I commemorated some of these efforts during the Spring 2018 semester on a GU WordPress blog.

Emory University (2020 – 2023)

During my three years as visiting faculty teaching three classes a semester at Emory, the course I most often taught was an advanced Spanish class called Introduction to Hispanic Texts and Contexts. At varying points in time I also taught the two-semester sequence of both introductory and intermediate Spanish classes offered by the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.

In addition to language classes, I had the opportunity to create and teach two upper-level linguistics classes, also in Spanish. The first was a 400-level seminar during the Spring 2021 semester called Teaching a Third Language. As a final project, my students interviewed three professors with deep experience teaching L3 classes: Alba Girons Masot (Catalan), Daniela Zappador Guerra (Italian), and Viviane Gontijo (Portuguese). Included here for posterity, this impressive original scholarship on the part of my students was originally showcased on a public-facing Emory University website that I created.

The second class that I designed was a more general 300-level survey course called Introduction to L3 Acquisition. My innovation that semester was to build into the syllabus an L3 practicum in which each student selected a language to spend time learning on their own. This included various benchmarks to ensure that students were making progress, as well as regular journal entries in which they were asked to reflect on the L3 learning process, including all positive and negative interactions with prior-learned languages.

Davidson College (2023 – 2025)

In my former job within Davidson’s Department of Hispanic Studies, I led multiple sections of Intermediate Spanish throughout the two years I was there. During my second semester there I also created and taught a 300-level linguistics class titled Dialectal Variation in the Spanish-Speaking World. To synthesize what my students had learned by the end of the semester, I asked them to interview a native Spanish speaker and identify 10 portions of the interview in which they found evidence for distinctive lexical, morphosyntactic, and phonological features, corroborating at least five of them with prior linguistic research.

Throughout the 2024-2025 academic year, I also taught a second-semester Elementary Spanish class, as well as a new class called Learning a Third Language: French (for Spanish Speakers). This hybrid language / linguistics course was conceived as an alternative way of teaching an L3 as an upper-level course for majors, minors, and anyone else with advanced proficiency in a pivot language (in this case Spanish).

University at Albany, SUNY (2025 – present)

My current position in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cutures at the University at Albany, SUNY saw me teach five different classes during my first year there: Elementary Spanish I, Spanish for Health Professions, Basic Spanish for Heritage Speakers and two combined graduate / undergraduate linguistics classes: History of the Spanish Language and Spanish Second Language Acquisition.

During the Fall 2026 semester, I will teach Spanish for Health Professions once again, as well as Spanish Syntax and Morphology, and Spanish Teaching Methodology, both to groups that combine graduate students and advanced undergraduates.