 I'm happy to introduce our first two speakers, Ginny Ceciliano and Lisa Knotman, both from Portland State University, who will be talking to us about their beginning Spanish curriculum. So Ginny and Lisa, the floor is yours. All right, thank you so much. And it's exciting to be here in this community of OER creators. I'm noticing that the group that's presenting after us, we have some of your materials in our book. So it's fantastic to be able to share and build things together. Our program is, we've played with titles for a bit and we are landing on empecemos por aquí and that is, let's start here. And it's not just about the language acquisition approach, but also about keeping it local, keeping the material local and relevant to our students. There we go. So I am Ginny Ceciliano. I'm the coordinator of first year Spanish at Portland State University. And for some context, as far as how we designed this program, Portland State is an urban university. Most of the students who are taking first and second year Spanish with us are doing so in order to complete a graduation requirement. They didn't necessarily think they wanted to take a Spanish class, but we get them and we get them early on in their program. And we are with this program taking a full advantage of that as far as adult developmental perspectives and the types of learning that we can engage our students in to help them become successful throughout their college career. My background is I have an MA in Spanish and then later on I got really excited about education. So my real expertise I would say is in adult education, especially teaching adult learners. And then I'm Lisa Knottman. I'm an adjunct senior instructor of Spanish at PSU. And my background is that I copied Ginny, got an MA in Spanish and then MS in educational leadership and policy this last year. All right. So why consider this program? I would welcome everyone to check it out. It's free, of course. That's one of the exciting things about OER. It is accessible. We've paid a lot of attention to access. It's easy to adapt right now. It's in Google Docs. And we do hope to have it in probably a press book form. And so we're working on the pretty publication by around September of this year. But with the Google Docs format, it's so easy to go in and make changes so that it is relevant to your program. Find everywhere that it says Portland State and change it to your university so that it's really about your students. The vocabulary lists and things, they feature the most common words in the Spanish language. So you won't find a section that is on the months of the year or on the clothing. Instead, it's what are the, we started with a list of 500 most common words in Spanish and then built on from there so that students are really using the language that they're most likely to encounter outside of the classroom. It's also structured around topics that our students would naturally be speaking about. A lot of our students are interested in travel, but travel isn't necessarily the first thing on their mind. We serve a lot of lower income students. People who are generally gonna be speaking about topics that are close to them, things that really matter to them. So we took out the conversations about travel agents that you would have seen in previous textbooks. Much of the material is student generated, making it always relevant to your students. So often the assignment students will do, send them on a task to figure out how to say something that matters to them and then they bring that knowledge to the next class. So we have general topics and Lisa will talk about that in a minute, but within those general themes, students are bringing their own perspective to it, tweaks to it that make it matter to them and relevant to them. It introduces students to the Spanish they will actually hear. We have a lot more authentic recordings and articles. Again, thanks to all of you wonderful OER creators. A lot more authentic recordings than we would have been able to have in previous books. We definitely have some that were created for Spanish learners. So some that slow it down, some that even highlight specific grammar, but most of our materials I would say that are recordings especially are actual native speakers. A lot of them are me also and we're working on switching those out. We're planning on hiring some of our heritage students to make recordings, voice recordings so that people of color can be compensated for their expertise and their labor, but also so that there are fewer voices like mine and more of that variety of diversity of voices that is so important. It also explicitly coaches students on development of interpretive, interpersonal and presentational communication skills. So it's actful friendly for those who are building their programs around actful principles. It encourages students to engage and experiment without fear of making mistakes. It's carefully scaffolded though to set students up for success and coaches students on what success looks like. So we do really drill into students that it's not so much about accuracy, it's about communication. Successful communication can have a lot of mistakes in it. We definitely wanted it to center student voice and it does, but in addition to that, it includes over a hundred OER resources with other voices which have been carefully selected to represent diverse perspectives. And it was simultaneously created and implemented and that was a nightmare when we were doing it, but the result is that we were able to design activities that align really well with our real students. So as we were teaching 101, we're staying a week ahead of our students creating materials for these 101 students and moving forward. There are a lot of language acquisition textbooks out there. So what we wanted to do with this program, what I think makes it unique is that it is more than language acquisition. An elementary level of language proficiency does not prevent us from engaging in meaningful work toward goals of diversity, inclusion, equity and access. Students in our first year program critically reflect on their own intersectional identities, multifaceted communities and cultures. Students share their own beliefs and experiences and learn from their classmates and the program materials. Program materials center student voice as well as authentic voices of underrepresented groups, including women, indigenous peoples, Spanish speakers in the US, heritage speakers especially, Afro-Latinesis, LGBTQ folks and people with disabilities. So voice was key, voice and representation. We felt that was a gap in the current materials that we were able to find. Students develop greater self-awareness, consider social issues through a race and ethnicity lens. And despite the limits of language at these beginning levels. So yes, students are not able to express it using very advanced language, but they're able to engage with these topics. And I think that was a missed opportunity in previous materials. Students explore and discuss the impact of power and inequities on marginalized groups in both historical and contemporary contexts within their own communities and within Spanish-speaking communities, locally, nationally and internationally. Students conceptualize and discuss both systemic and individual change with attention toward racial and social justice. So it was a big goal and we've been teaching with this since fall of 2019 and so far it's going wonderfully. I think Lisa then has some examples. Yeah, so a big part of this program was that we wanted it to be really flexible. We wanted the conversations that we wanted to have with students to drive grammar acquisition and not the other way around with this grammar goal and then really forced conversations to meet that goal. So we tried to create broad topics which meant instructors could be responsive to their unique student group and current events. And here we have the chapter lists. So chapter, we're on quarters. So two chapters per quarter. So we start with la clase de español y las personas y las perspectivas and students are doing a lot about self-identity and community identities in those two chapters. Chapters three and four, we talk a lot about culture where students start examining their own culture and then move on to others and then talk about routines, about how the way that our routines reflect our values, things like that. And these broad contexts, these broad topics really give us flexibility. So whenever our routines totally changed because of COVID, we weren't stuck doing these really repetitive activities that had nothing to do with our students or current student routines. We were able to change the conversations and talk about, well, how has your routine changed since what was going on a month ago? How has your routine changed this year? And then finally in the last quarter, we talk about past experiences. We talk a lot about discrimination and racial issues in this chapter and then move on to changes students want to see for the future, which was super relevant in Portland last year when I was teaching 103 and we had Black Lives Matter protests and all of these things going on. So again, we're giving students the chance to have grown-up conversations that they like and letting grammar acquisition follow the needs for those conversations, which I have some more examples on on the next slide. So a big part of this is that our students, our adults, they have valuable experiences and they have really great insights about the world. And so we wanted to create a textbook that allows them to show off that expertise. So here we have an example from the textbook at the beginning of chapter two, asking students to explore parts of their identity and students are given the chance to self-select what identity markers are important for them and then be able to talk about it in class. So instead of, again, we talk about grown-up topics, really trying to center the student experience and we talk about things like, I just included some lists, but we've got discrimination, gender identity, racism, political activism, environmental justice and more. And so we are trying to have conversations that adults will be interested in and I think they've been more motivated having those kinds of conversations instead of repetitive activities about what's your favorite color? What color is your sweater? What color is your flag? What color is your bedroom? I'm gonna jump in here, Lisa, because there's a really relevant question in the chat and that is what proficiency levels does the material cover for the students? And we expect students proficiency level to be around novice, higher, intermediate, low at the very end. But if you look at this list, for example, students are not being asked to produce this because they can't and it wouldn't be fair and it would not be setting them up for success, but we're giving them these tools so that they can engage in it because we're taking advantage of the cognates. We certainly recognize we couldn't do this in other languages, but with so many cognates, students can talk about really profound topics because these pieces are right in front of them and they're not being asked to produce it out of nowhere. They're just taking what they know, they're recognizing patterns. The creation of the language is at a much lower level than what the students are exposed to in the material. They're exposed to much higher level, but they're not expected to be able to produce at that level. And you can go on into the next slide, Jenny. And then here we have another example. So again, a big part of it is we're trying to center student voice. It helps with motivation and then it also gives us more diverse conversations since if you rely on the instructor to provide all the voice, you end up with one person's story. So here we have another example of just a really subtle shift of vocabulary lists. So instead of giving students a list of vocabulary and saying find which ones are in your family, we give them the start of the list. So they have some ideas and then ask them to finish it. And so then students are bringing in unique vocabulary like foster children, romantic partner, step-grandfather. Interesting things, but it lets them talk about themselves, be their real selves in class and have the kind of conversations that adults have. And again, also building community has been a really interesting part. Students are sharing more about themselves and learning more about their classmates. And it's been interesting seeing that community aspect. And that ties in really well with this next slide, which I know we're running out of time, such short presentation time. Students so far have definitely noted, they love that it's free, of course, but they have identified that they feel better connection with the material and with each other. They appreciate the diversity in the materials, they notice it, they thank us for including readings on Indigenous women. The applicability, they are, because they're focusing on things that matter to them, they're able to immediately apply things outside of class. Instead of finishing a class, feeling like class went great, but I still can't talk to anyone outside of the classroom. And from the instructor's perspective, instructors have also really enjoyed teaching with it. They have noticed increased engagement students. There's a question in the chat whether the classes are online and face-to-face. Right now, they're remote. Generally, we have an online version and we have a face-to-face version. Veronica who commented in there does our online version. So she would say that it also works for online. Students have better self-efficacy. They're reflecting more persistence when they encounter unfamiliar material because they're seeing so much that's unfamiliar and they're learning the strategies for engaging with it. And from an instructor's point of view, feeling proud that we get to work with this material that matters. So we have a link to the Google Docs version, which I believe Lisa did put in the chat already. And you can certainly email me. I did add my contact information to the contact list for this, so please do reach out. And again, we're planning on full publication in September of 2021, this year. Thank you. Thank you so much. We have a minute and a half for questions if anyone wants to type in the chat or unmute. I mean, I can keep talking. It's pretty exciting. It looks great. All right, well, thank you very much. And thank you to the group that's about to talk for your lovely materials that we were able to draw from also. Oh, funding is a question. We did initially get a grant through the Portland State University Library. And you can go into the Google Doc and adopt already. I would say I'm still trying to edit things. So there's a big caveat if you're using the Google Docs now, and that is that Lisa and I are human. You might have noticed. So there are definitely mistakes there. So proofread carefully before you use it, but you can absolutely still use it. When published, it will still be free. Absolutely. That was the very important. You can take any, because it's a Google Doc, you can take any of it and we are publishing it as a, it's not non-derivative. It is gonna be non-commercial. So you can't make a profit from our work, but please do take it and adopt it and adapt it and make it matter for your students. Testing, we do assessments on interpersonal interpretive and we're focusing the testing part on the reading interpretive, not listening at this level. And for the presentational, we focus on the writing and not the speaking. And I didn't put the assessment bank in the, or quiz bank, because there's also grammar pieces with quizzes. I didn't put any of that in the shared Google part, but you can email me and I can share that with you. Okay, thank you so much, Ginny and Lisa. That was a terrific talk and congratulations already on your OER.