Languages & Cultures in Mexico: Community-based Learning

Catalog description

This course builds on the work done in CI 240 (offered before departure abroad). It features a three-week study abroad experience and is open to students at all campuses, schools, and fields of study. Through partnerships with a foreign university and community-based organizations, the course develops equity-minded and social justice dispositions, language, and ethnographic research skills through classroom and experiential learning. Students experience multilingual and multicultural life residing and sharing daily meals in host family homes and receive instruction in either Spanish or a local indigenous language. They participate in class sessions, collaborative projects, and language exchange with student peers from the local university. The course also features travel in the local region for day and overnight experiential learning and ethnographic inquiry excursions in local and indigenous communities. No Spanish proficiency is required to participate in the program; however, learning and exposure to Spanish is recommended before departure and students engage in a language class and translingual practices with host family and local partners while abroad. Students are guided to examine assumptions about language, privilege, race, and culture and how these constructs relate to one's identities and worldviews. We explore border/migration issues, new ideas and movements in cultural, linguistic and biological sustainability and decolonial thinking. Students select a question of inquiry related to their field of study and are supported in developing an individualized project relying on observations, interviews, and interactions while abroad as well as library research.