Teaching Latino Students: Perspectives on Culture and Learning
Pre-conference Workshop
March 28, 2007
2:30-5:30pm
The University of Texas at San Antonio, Downtown Campus
Durango Building 1.124, Southwest Room
(transportation provided from conference hotel)
Overview
As part of Innovative Educators conference, Latino Students: Promoting Access and Success, Excelencia in Education is pleased to offer this special afternoon workshop to professionals interested in working with faculty members to accelerate Latino student success on their campuses.
The workshop will be held on the downtown campus of The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), one of the country’s over 230 colleges and universities known as Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs). HSIs enroll almost 50% of all Latino college students and serve as important learning environments for all professionals who are interested in improving academic success.
The workshop will begin with Deborah Santiago, Excelencia’s Vice President for Policy and Research summarizing the key findings from, Inventing Hispanic Serving Institutions: The Basics. Workshop participants will receive a copy of the brief as part of their registration. HSIs provide the context for a faculty panel presentation which will follow and will address Teaching Writing with Latino/a Students: Lessons Learned at Hispanic-Serving Institutions, a forthcoming book from SUNY Press, (Summer 2007). The English and Composition faculty members who served as editors and contributors to this groundbreaking book will share their perspectives on teaching and learning at campuses where the Latino/a community has grown over the last decade.
Closing the workshop will be Norma E. Cantú, professor of English at UTSA and nationally renowned editor, poet and author of the award-winning CanículaSnapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera. Dr. Cantú will discuss the role of culture in learning and her experiences teaching English at several institutions. She will conclude her comments by reading from Canicula. Copies will be available for sale and signing at the close of the workshop.
Speakers
Opening Speaker
Deborah A. Santiago, PhD., is the Vice President for Policy and Research at Excelencia in Education. Dr. Santiago has extensive experience in education policy and research. She has served as an analyst at the U.S. Department of Education, as Deputy Director of the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanic Americans, as Vice President for Data and Policy Analysis at the Los Angeles County Alliance for Student Achievement, and Irvine Fellow at the Rossier School of Education, University of Southern California. Recently, she has focused her work on accountability, higher education policy, institutional practices, and Latinos in higher education. Among her recent publications is the policy report, “How Latinos Pay for College” and the upcoming publication, “Inventing Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs): The Basics.”
Dr. Santiago has a bachelor’s degree in economics, a master’s degree in urban affairs, and a doctorate degree in education policy.
Faculty Panel
Isabel Baca is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Texas-El Paso. For ten years, she taught writing courses at El Paso Community College, where she also served as an English Discipline coordinator and a Service Learning Program coordinator. Her teaching and research focuses on workplace communication, basic writing, bilingualism, intercultural communication, community writing, and discourse analysis.
Diana Cárdenas, Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, teaches first year composition, technical writing, history of rhetoric, and teacher education. Politically active, she combines issues of race, literacy, and power into her pedagogy be engaging students in service learning projects in low income areas in Corpus Christi.
Cristina C. Kirklighter is an Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M- Corpus Christi, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in composition and literature. She has published Voices and Visions: Refiguring Ethnography in Composition (Boynton-Cook 1997) and Traversing the Democratic Borders of the Essay (SUNY Press 2002), along with publishing several articles and chapters. Her latest book, Teaching Writing with Latino/a Students: Lessons Learned at Hispanic Serving Institutions, co-edited with Diana Cárdenas and Susan Wolff-Murphy is forthcoming with SUNY Press (August 2007)..
Beatrice Méndez Newman, Professor of English at The University of Texas-Pan American, is Assessment Coordinator for the College of Arts and Humanities and has been Writing Center Director, Coordinator of Freshman English and Developmental English, and Coordinator of English Teacher Certification. Her articles, focused on student learning strategies and effective pedagogy, have appeared in The Writing Center Journal, The Writing Lab Newsletter, The Journal of College Reading and Learning, English in Texas, and Perspectives on Practice in Developmental Education. Her book, English Teacher Certification in Texas (Allyn and Bacon, 2006) is designed to promote student success in preparing for the Texas Examination of Educator Standards (TExES).
Susan Wolff Murphy is an Assistant Professor of English at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. Since 2003 she has inhabited the “dual citizenship” role of Director of the First-Year Learning Communities Program and Coordinator of the First-Year Writing Program. She is co-PI on a five-year National Science Foundation grant for a learning community linking biology, chemistry, English, seminar, and math intended to support student success in the sciences and math. With Cristina Kirklighter and Diana Cardenas, she co-edited Teaching Writing With Latino/a Students, which is forthcoming in August 2007 with SUNY Press.
Special Guest
Norma Elia Cantú currently serves as Professor of English at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She is the editor of a book series, Rio Grande/Rio Bravo: Borderlands Culture and Tradition, and is a member of the Board of Trustees of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress and of Gemini Ink . Author of the award-winning Canícula Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera, editor of Flor y Ciencia: Chicanas in Mathematics, Science and Engineering and co-editor of Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change and Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios, she is working on two novels , Cabañuelas and Champú, or Hair Matters . A life-long resident of the area, Dr. Cantú has published widely on Chicana/o culture and traditions along the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.
