A magazine advertisement for the School of Visual Arts Division of Continuing Education's ¿Hablas Diseño? program, in which courses are taught in Spanish..
photo courtesy of SVA |
CE Units Expand Offerings to Non-English Speaking Learners
From the January 2008 Issue of InFocus (PDF)
Responding to the demands of the workforce is a core mission of continuing education, and institutions regularly meet these needs by offering programming for industries in which they have expertise. But what happens when needs are present among a non-English speaking workforce? Two CE units are taking different approaches to engaging Hispanic learners in a pair of widely different fields. The initiatives are dually rewarding, benefiting both the institutions and the industries they serve.
SVA Asks, ¿Hablas Diseño?
In New York City, a large media market caters to and targets the Hispanic community.
The mission at the School of Visual Arts
is to educate students who aspire to become professional artists, and the Division of Continuing Education is taking a proactive approach toward supporting this market.
“We thought, wouldn’t it be great if SVA cultivated a talent pool of non-traditional, Spanish speaking artists for this industry?” says Joseph Cipri, Executive Director of the Division of Continuing Education. “We are not creating an industry, we are providing for its needs, which is no different than what we do with our traditional programming.”
Beginning this month, the Division will offer 10 introductory and intermediate design courses taught entirely in Spanish; the 10-session courses run through April and meet on evenings and weekends. The flexibility of the Division of Continuing Education was integral to the launch of the initiative, says Cipri.
“The Continuing Education program is non-credit. We don’t have to conform to an academic calendar, or other requirements in terms of scheduling, so we have that flexibility,” he notes. “Because of that, we can address these needs and respond to them in a very rapid manner—the turnaround time is virtually overnight if the concept is sound.”
The ¿Hablas Diseño? concept has been embraced by the Division’s bilingual faculty who will constitute the primary instructional corps for the program, supplemented by a few outside adjuncts brought in to cover certain topics. To market the program, SVA ran print newspaper and magazine ads to promote the program. Also, SVA faculty were featured on the Spanish-language television network, Univision. Course enrollments are limited to 20 students, and are expected to fill. Topics include color, basic graphic design, digital layout and desktop publishing, branding, and editorial design.
The courses are held to the same standards as all SVA offerings. From the outset, every effort has been made to ensure that the language barrier would not compromise the level of instruction being offered. “The only difference about this program is that it is taught in Spanish,” says Cipri. “As far as the quality of education and the courses themselves, it is on par with the other courses we are offering to the general continuing education audience.”
GW Offers Political Expertise in Latin America
Latin American countries that have only relatively recently adopted democratic systems of governance often encounter bumps along the way due to an overall lack of political sophistication at the local level. Some eight years ago, the Corporación Andina de Fomento—Andean Development Corporation—approached
The George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management (GSPM) in search of the grass-roots organizing and political communication expertise the GSPM offers its U.S. clients. In response, George Washington’s GSPM Spanish-speaking adjunct faculty worked with subject matter experts to develop intensive seminars in partnership with sister universities in each of the five Andean countries, and supported by the Andean Development Corporation.
The partnership has been mutually rewarding as it has grown. “It illuminates some of the unspoken assumptions we have in the U.S. about politics and public policy,” says Charles Cushman, Associate Dean for Academic Excellence in the College of Professional Studies and Associate Dean for Academics within the GSPM, who teaches an introduction to public policy course in the program. “We complain so much about the horrible things in politics that we all hate, but when you visit another country where, in terms of the maturation of their political system they are a century behind us, you realize that we do some really neat things—that our system is better than we think it is.”
Ten to twelve adjunct professors participate in the program each year, traveling to Andean countries up to three times, usually for a long weekend to deliver a seminar worked into the curriculum of the sister university. All course materials are produced in Spanish, and where possible, faculty teach in Spanish. Those who cannot use simultaneous translators from partner institutions for assistance with presentations and question-and-answer sessions when needed. In the near future, GW is looking to leverage videoconferencing as a way to further expand its involvement in the program. And from time to time, the University holds seminars in Washington that are attended by faculty and media from Latin America.
The program has been a success by two measures, Cushman says. First, Latin American institutions are heavily basing some of their own master’s degree programs on the ones offered by the GSPM, translated for political and cultural differences. “They’re building programs to replicate our training at their home universities—and that’s a huge sign on the institutional side that the message is translating nicely,” he says.
And second, when Latin American students graduate, they are surveyed as to whether the programming met expectations; the satisfaction rate last year was 93 percent. This is a particularly impressive figure given that students in the program tend to be adult learners who in some ways very closely mirror their American counterparts.
“One thing we’ve learned about adult learners here in the United States is that they’re very hungry for knowledge, and they have very clear expectations about what they want,” says Cushman. “It’s the same way there.” The intensive seminars are equally rewarding and exhausting to teach. “You know you’re going to talk for several hours, and you know that they usually leave the last hour open for questions,” he says. “I’ve never stopped at an hour.”
—Doug Davala |
