We, the undersigned graduate students and teaching assistants in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at UCLA, want to express our deep concern regarding the imminent “hybridization” of the department’s lower-division language program, which will take effect during the fall 2014 quarter. This initiative comes at a moment when the university’s lack of sufficient physical classroom space and overcrowded classes are reaching a critical juncture and beginning to negatively impact the Bruin undergraduate experience. But using hybridization as a solution to that problem will also have a negative impact on student learning.
This hybridization will not only affect the first-year sequence of Spanish and Portuguese classes (Spanish 1-3: “Elementary Spanish,” and Portuguese 11A and 11B: “Intensive Portuguese”), but also intermediate Spanish classes (Spanish 4-5). In all of these courses, the amount of time students spend in the classroom will be significantly reduced and inadequately replaced with an expanded online component.
In the case of Spanish 1-3, our most popular courses, students will attend class twice a week for a total of two hours and 40 minutes. Currently students attend 50-minute class sessions five days a week. In the first-year sequence of Spanish, these changes will reduce the amount of time that students spend in the classroom by 36 percent, substituting online exercises for face-to-face instructional time with TAs and their peers. Pearson, the company whose textbooks will be used in these lower-division courses, hosted a workshop on the technical aspects of the change. But there has been no comprehensive explanation from faculty about how the change will affect student learning. It is irresponsible to move forward with hybridization without considering how it could affect students’ ability to effectively participate in upper-division language, literature and culture courses.
The faculty of the Spanish and Portuguese department has unilaterally decided to move forward with these controversial changes without public debate or the implementation of a pilot program to test the efficacy of hybridization. Furthermore, the department has not adjusted for the reduced amount of class time by limiting the number of students in our already-overcrowded classrooms. Spanish 1-3 classes will continue to have about 25 students, 66 percent over the 15-person maximum recommended by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. We graduate student-workers will remain burdened with overcrowded classrooms on top of being expected to teach our students a foreign language in classes that meet only twice a week. Undergraduates and their parents, who are paying significant tuition dollars, should be concerned about this method of foreign language instruction as well. We believe these changes will be detrimental to the education that we offer our Bruin undergraduates.
It should be noted that our language classes already include a significant online component, but this complements rather than replaces vital face-to-face time in the classroom. The time we spend in the classroom is essential to properly teaching students how to communicate in a foreign language. The methods we employ, such as using only Spanish and Portuguese with our students and incorporating different kinds of functional, “real-life” activities and situations, are impossible to replicate in an online platform. In communicative classrooms like ours, students work together in small groups and the teacher serves as a facilitator of student learning. Hybridization will limit students’ time in the classroom, thereby diminishing the time they spend immersed in the language and culture. These changes will impair our ability to teach at the highest levels of our profession. Collectively, we all deserve better from UCLA. We wonder if the administration and our professors would want their own children taught a foreign language in this highly dilutive and impersonal manner.
Unless Bruin undergraduates make their voices heard to Chancellor Gene Block and department Chair Randal Johnson, hybridization will become an improvised solution for the longer-term problem of insufficient physical classroom space. As a leading public university, UCLA has an important role to play in the transformation of higher education. For this reason, intradepartmental decisions that affect the student body at large should be decided on and implemented in a transparent, constructive and pedagogically congruous way. Unilateralism should not be a way to promote change at UCLA. This is why we, the undersigned, feel the need to insist on dialogue, transparency and collegiality as the methods to discuss the pedagogical implications of hybridization of foreign language instruction. We invite you to express your concern by writing to Chancellor Gene Block (chancellor@ucla.edu), Department of Spanish and Portuguese Chair Randal Johnson (randalj@humnet.ucla.edu) and Department Vice Chair for Undergraduate Studies José Luiz Passos (jl.passos@ucla.edu).
Ezekiel Trautenberg
Willivaldo Delgadillo
Julio Puente García
Michelle Medrado
Daniel Cooper
Andrew Block
Isabel Gómez
Daniel Whitesell
The signatories are graduate students and teaching assistants in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.
As a doctoral student in educational leadership at the University of Pennsylvania’s GSE, I applaud the voice of these graduate students who feel so passionately about the subjects they not only study but teach. For students who attend such an elite educational institution as UCLA, now that they are better informed, these undergraduates must now take an active stance in how they wish to be taught. The unilateral action by the Spanish and Portuguese faculty to impose an un-piloted and un-vetted system seems counter to standard academic integrity. If this is merely a repair strategy because of the lack of classrooms rather than a bona fide improvement strategy, then UCLA as an institution needs to take a hard look at its immediate and future capital plans. Any thing less harms both the institution and the undergraduates and graduate students it deems to serve.
Zeke is such a cutie pie.