 Hi everyone, welcome to our presentation about CEMILIA, Elementary Spanish One, our new free OER textbook. My name is Giovanni Zimotti. I work at the University of Iowa where I teach Spanish linguistics, language acquisition and teaching, and I direct the Spanish Basic Program. Hola, my name is Gabriela Olivares. I work at the Institution University of Northern Iowa. I am a second language acquisition specialist. My areas of research are non-traditional students, learner factors, word language methodologies. And my most recent research endeavor is to work with open educational resources and create textbooks for foreign language or a language education in Spanish. I have been working for over 20 years. I'm a teacher by trade English and Spanish, K through 12, and also I'm a professor at the college level. Thank you. Hello, my name is Rachel Cleaver, and I'm a Spanish lecturer at the University of Iowa. My current interests lie in best practice for flipped and online language classroom. Hi, my name is Eden Jones, and I work in the Office of Teaching, Learning and Technology at the University of Iowa as a course improvement partner. Previously I worked in the Spanish department at the University of Iowa, which is how I met the fine folks who are I'm writing this textbook with. Now I currently work with gateway courses, trying to make those courses more inclusive and inviting for first year students and trying to improve student experience and outcome in those large courses. So it's definitely building on a lot of the work that we're doing in this textbook to try to do the same with our introductory Spanish courses. College University students pay hundreds of dollars each semester. We didn't like that, so we decided to write our own textbook and we called it CEMILIAs. We started designing CEMILIAs with four goals in mind, being affordable, engaging, research-based and accessible to all students. A beta version will be released by the end of this fall, while a full final version, be reviewed, will be released in fall 2023. Making CEMILIAs affordable was easy. We just had to release it under a credit-common license and make it free for our students. To make it engaging during fall of 2021, we surveyed 294 students, all studying Spanish. So, what did we learn from them? Well, we learned that majority of them did not hate anything. They were okay with the majority of topics. We learned that some of them really don't like grammar, and many of them do not like learning about vocabulary that is outdated or it's not relevant to daily life conversations. We also learned that they would like to know more about Latin American and Latinx culture and folklore. We also surveyed 17 teaching-language professionals, and from them we learned about what features and components they would like to see in a textbook, their grammar teaching styles or approaches, and then their opinion about what topics we should include or not include in a textbook. We are also aware that instructional practice cannot overcome the natural process created in the linguistic systems of our students' head. For this reason, we looked at the stages of acquisitions. To determine the order we introduced grammar in our textbook, we looked at various research. We also used our experience to decide what topics include or not to include. A libro semillas, the book semillas, has been aligned with actual proficiency guidelines. The design took into account the development of the proficiency level of the novice learner. In addition, themes or chapters of the book take into account starting from inner knowledge and moving forward to the outer world. Our themes or chapters reflect this condition, and as you can see our first chapter, todos sobre mí, starts very close to the inner world of the learner. Chapter 2, todos sobre mi vivienda, moves a little further out. Chapter 3, todos sobre mi familia. And finally chapter 4, todos sobre mis gustos. So we go from inner knowledge to outer world. The design of the book also took into account the learning benefits for college students while using an open educational resource. So open educational resources have shown that there is an improvement in learning performance for college students. And also there is tendency to have higher grades or course grades and helps with retention, higher retention rates in coursework. On the other hand, OERs are not only beneficial for students but also for instructors. They allow for the integration of different teaching strategies, multimodal approaches. And enhancement of the learning performance and satisfaction through digital media. And one last aspect that we would like to point out and emphasize is the increase in equity and access to high quality learning materials. For our students due to the no cost, the accessibility and the affordability of having this materials with them. And also designed by outstanding faculty at several institutions. Now we would like to talk more about the inclusive content and cultural representation in SEMIA. We designed SEMIA with diversity and inclusion in mind and in fact our team of writers reflects this diversity. We have an Italian, a Chilean, a non-binary person and a native Iowan. We have an even greater diversity of students in our classrooms and we wanted this textbook to resonate with them, to include them and to promote cultural understanding. Traditional commercial textbooks tend to focus on Spanish speaking countries outside of the U.S. Instead we chose to focus on local Latinx figures from the Midwest. Our Midwest centered approach aligns with what Gaby was talking about earlier with the cone shaped progression of starting with the local and the personal and moving outward. We feel that highlighting Latinx figures in our own communities not only includes people who are often left out of traditional textbooks, but it also allows our students to find direct connections between their own experiences and the material in our OER text. So how do we do this? First, we feature our Iowa and Midwest based neighbors, our graduate students who are studying at our own institutions and regional Latinx innovators like Vanessa Espinosa. Vanessa is a young woman who immigrated to Iowa when she is a toddler and is now doing amazing work in Latinx leadership and advocacy and has started her own nonprofit all by the age of 26. We also include cultural stories that hit close to home. For example, we feature the small farming town called Postville, which sits in northeast Iowa just a short drive from our institution. Postville has a meatpacking plant and was the site of a massive government raid several years ago. Samia includes cultural information about the town, the raid and the immigrants affected by it, and we ask our students to understand that immigration and equity issues affect us profoundly, even here in this flyover state. Finally, we include linguistic practice and specific activities that are tied to the Midwest. For example, Samia asks our students to practice talking about distances by referring to this regional map, in which we include non-traditional places like Postville and other Midwestern cities. Again, we do all of this in the hopes of making Samia an open, accessible and inclusive educational resource that centers on the places our students are living and studying. In Spanish, the way you talk to you depends upon the meaning you want to convey, the context of the interaction and the region. As you can see on this map, the second person singular pronoun both is widely used in places like Gabby's home country of Chile, in Argentina, and in several other regions of Latin America. However, it is seldom taught to second language learners and rarely addressed in traditional Spanish textbooks. Anyone who interacts with Latin Americans or who travels will likely encounter the form. We wanted to include all those Spanish speakers who use most in our textbook and also expose our students to more than just the standard linguistic forms found in most commercial textbooks. One way we did this was by having our students listen to and interact with an audio clip of an interview with a very lovely woman from Córdova, Argentina, in which she and her co-author Gabby have a basic get to know you exchange. Patricia, as she would in real life, says, ¿de dónde sos vos? as part of her questions, where are you from? Meaningful exchanges like this help us present a more authentic cultural representation. Anyone who studies Spanish knows that without question, the base form of all words that you find in vocabulary lists is masculine. It is the go-to form. As a committee, we question why this is. Students ultimately need to know more than one form, so why not start with the feminine? Would that help our students who identify as female and are traditionally excluded from the base forms of vocabulary feel more included? We decided that it very likely would. With that in mind, Simeas explains that the feminine ending is one of three possible endings, the feminine ah, the masculine oh, or the non-binary eh. Our vocabulary list presents standard adjectives and nouns, but we list the base form as, for example, la profesora o la estudiante. This is a very small adjustment, but it makes a big impact in terms of the innovative and inclusive nature of this OER text. One of the things that we wanted to make sure to represent in our textbook were non-binary identities in Spanish and the way that, you know, that is an evolving question in Spanish and to present in a way that is respectful of people's identity, and in order to make people feel included in our textbook. The problem with that is that Spanish is highly gendered language. For those of you who might not know, every single noun in Spanish has gender, either male or female. This is true of physical items and also of intangible concepts. You know, on the slide, for example, we can see a desk and a chair and a table, and each of those in Spanish has a gender based on what the word is. The table is feminine. La silla, the chair, is feminine. El escritorio, the desk, is masculine. Now, why is a desk masculine and a table feminine? That is a question involving the evolution of language over the course of 2000 years from Latin to present day Spanish, which we don't have time to talk about, nor is it of interest to our students. This is important that our students understand that every noun is gendered. But that can complicate things for people who maybe do not conform to the gender binary. You know, myself, for example, I'm a non-binary person. I use they, them pronouns in English. And so it was, as I was transitioning, it was a question for me of how do I express myself authentically in Spanish in a language that is so highly gendered. And therefore, it also became a question as we began this project of how do we introduce gender inclusivity in our textbook to such a way that our students can feel seen and that we can expose them to culture and language and the ways in which those things are currently evolving to meet the demands of the 21st century. So what we decided upon is to use the most popular solution, which is the gender neutral pronoun, a gay. There are other solutions that have gained some prominence in certain parts of the Spanish speaking world, but by far the most popular and the most commonly used and understood version of a gender neutral pronoun in Spanish is a J. In relation to L, which is the masculine pronoun and Asia, which is the feminine pronoun, a J then is a gender neutral pronoun which people can use if that is how they choose to identify themselves. And one of the things that we also tried to do as we created our text is to include examples of non-binary people, both real, and those who as we wrote, you know, readings for our students, example activities. For example, solutions to questions that might be asked, we would occasionally use non-binary terminology in order to make sure that students saw and understood that. For example, we have a section where we talk about Leisha Clarendon who was the first non-binary WNBA player. And we also use this language interchangeably with gendered language in order to make it more comfortable and understandable for our students to see this formation, this formation of language, and in order to interact with it on a regular basis. Another thing that was very important to us was making sure that our images and clip art that we use were inclusive as well. We wanted to make sure to present diversity in terms of age, race, gender, ability, all those sorts of things in order to make sure that that we were representing the breadth of the human experience as much as we could. So often in textbooks, the graphics and the examples and the photos and everything are so highly focused on students to the exclusion of people who might not be 19-year-olds who are freshmen on a residential campus. And we wanted to make sure that our book did not reflect that more narrow view of things, but in fact a much wider, much more open view of the world in the way that we presented. Another thing that we worked really hard to do is to make sure that all of our imagery is creative commons or free use in order to make sure that our OER stays free and available for anyone that there are no questions or concerns about the images that we use and that anyone can share and share alike, both our text and the media included therein. Thank you so much for taking the time to watch our presentation. We're going to stop by right at the end of this video for some questions. If you are not watching it live, please feel free to reach out to us with any questions, projects you would like to share with us. Also, another thank you to Gaby, Rachel and Eden for their work and what we've been creating in the last year and a half or two years. Adios!