Teaching and Learning at SECOLAS

Thanks to the generous support of CETL, supplemented by personal funds, I was able to attend and present at the 56th Annual Meeting of the Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies (SECOLAS) in New Orleans, Louisiana, on April 16-18, 2009. For a long time, I have been active in this organization, which brings together a wonderfully collegial group of scholars from the Southeast, provides a venue for a broad range of presentations, and is notable for nurturing both graduate and undergraduate student professional development. In the past, there have been one or two panels in which established and senior faculty share their best practices and materials for teaching Latin American and Caribbean Studies. There are also usually professional development panels on, for example, managing study abroad. This year, whereas there were panels on study abroad and publishing (which I attended), there was no pedagogical session as such. The panel on which I was placed and was asked to chair was titled “Teaching and Learning about Race in Latin America.” The panel presentations were three: “The Construction of Racial Categories in Latin America,” by Ivan Valverde, PhD candidate at the University of Florida; “The True Color of Crisis: Representations of Race in Veja Magazine, 1976 – 2000,” by Nicolette Wilhide, PhD candidate at Vanderbilt University; and my own, “Sharing the Riches of Afro-Brazilian History and Culture at HBCUs and Beyond.”

Mr. Valverde’s presentation was a very useful synthesis of the outcomes of “race” formation and racial projects in Spanish America, and his Power Point show would be usable and accessible in an undergraduate course. Ms. Wilhide’s presentation was from her promising work on representations of Brazilians of African descent in Brazil’s most widely read news weekly. This is difficult ground to tread because, in the last two decades, media representation and presence of Afro-Brazilians has received excellent attention from Brazilian and some non-Brazilian scholars. Yet, Ms. Wilhide stands to make useful contributions to the debate. For one student and, I think, for both, this was the first conference presentation, so this actually turned into a mentoring experience for me. Both were professional in every way, and it was a privilege to assist in their “maiden voyage.”

My presentation drew on my experience over about seventeen years, including here at WSSU in the teaching of Afro-Brazilian studies. My goal is to update the 2002 work of my colleague John D. French, whose “Sharing the Riches of Afro-Brazilian History and Culture: Undergraduate and Graduate Teaching Syllabi and Handouts” responded to growing curricular demands that paralleled, though lagged behind, the explosion of scholarship on Afro-Brazilian studies published in English since about 1993. That year, there were two crucial conferences on the topic in the United States at the University of Florida and the University of Texas. Then, in 1997, the V Congresso Afro-Brasileiro took place in Salvador, Brazil. The international scope of these meetings helped set the transnational terms of debate and the research agendas for the coming years. My presentation recapped the fruit of this scholarship up to the present, showed how one can map that content onto several sorts of Brazilian and Diasporic studies courses (on course mapping, see http://academics.georgiasouthern.edu/cet/workshops/mapping/index.htm), demonstrated how to align those courses with institutional goals, and, finally, ended with some perspectives on where the field is headed: There is ongoing binational federal support for program development. We hope that the FIPSE/CAPES US-Brazil Higher Education Consortia Program continues with US Department of Education funding. There is also a new initiative taking shape, with is the Joint Action Plan between the Government of the Federative Republic of Brazil and the Government of the United States of America to Eliminate Racial and Ethnic Discrimination and Promote Equality (JAPER). The plan’s MOU was signed in March 2008 between the US State Department and SEPPIR, the Brazilian federal antidiscrimination secretariat. By creating a civil society committee operating parallel to the government agency committee, the plan seeks to foster academic and NGO activity. We will see if (a) autonomy of the civil society committee can be maintained, (b) what the nature of collaboration among academic and activist/service organizations will look like, and (c) what scholarly and training activity, among other outcomes, grows out of the plan.

My presentation also discussed my Web-based project to build a community of and for teachers of Afro-Brazilian Studies. I had delayed posting this blog entry because I had hoped to populate and publicize this online community, and announce details here. However, I am only now having time to meet with Dr. Galvis at CETL for how to make the best use of Ning as an academic networking site. Soon, I expect to post all of my materials on Afro-Brazilian studies not published elsewhere and invite colleagues in the filed to so the same. I will announce the launch on this blog later.

A lively discussion with the audience ensued, including definitions and references of terms. Parenthetically, the term “Afro-Brazilian” is used in this field as a translation of the Portuguese afro-brasileiro for a range of reasons. “African Brazilian” does not resonate and is not used by either scholars or activists. Indeed, africano brasileiro or brasileiro africano would have other denotations in Portuguese. Alternate terms used by academics, activists, and the press include "African-descended / African descendent" (afrodescendente) or "Black" (negro).

From the other sessions that I attended, I got some good activity ideas from a short-term art history course in Mexico (“Study Abroad and Service Learning: Christopher Newport University and Mexico City,” Dr Elizabeth Morán, CNU). The ideas, which included basically a scavenger hunt and scrap book, are well suited for culture courses or academically-oriented tours in-country. This is an idea that can be incorporated into the Brazil exchange if we are fortunate enough to get another cycle of FIPSE funding. Since the theme of the conference was “Crisis and Recovery in the Americas,” so it was appropriate that there was a panel on post-Katrina recovery. The whole panel was excellent, but the pedagogical “take-away” from the panel was information about service-learning opportunities coordinated by Tulane but open to students everywhere. Information is available at Tulane’s Center for Public Service, http://tulane.edu/cps/ (“Post-Katrina Migration to New Orleans and Service-Learning Initiatives at Tulane,” Dr. Jimmy Huck, Tulane University).

Finally, I always feel that the local arrangements chair and staff deserve thanks for putting on any conference that I attend because it is exceedingly hard work. In this case, Dr. Jimmy Huck of Tulane and his team of staff and students deserve hearty praise. The SECOLAS Web site is http://www.southalabama.edu/secolas/.

Understanding how speakers use language

I attended the Annual African Conference on African Linguistics (ACAL) between April 8th and 12th. This is a conference that brings together scholars who focus on African linguistics including the teaching and the acquisition of African languages. I presented two papers: the first paper which was co-presented with colleagues from the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign was on phonological borrowing from the English language into Logooli, an African language spoken in East Africa and the other paper was on the languages that the youths use in the rural and urban centers of Kenya. In my first paper I sought to find out what phonological rules the borrowed lexical items follow. Do they adapt to the target language phonological roles or do they impose their rules on the recipient language? The findings show that for the most part the tonal pattern rules of the receiving language takes over. However, there are still other cases which show opposite results.
In my second paper I examined language use among the youths in both urban and rural areas of Kenya arguing that language use among the youths is very dynamic. I showed that speakers’ perceptions on language use do not necessarily mirror the true language use. However, in order to fully understand the discrepancies one needs to examine other variables such as the topic, relationship between the speakers and other extra linguistic factors through a mixed methods approach.
I also attended several other sessions which focused on how students in American classes learn foreign languages. One paper by a participant from Michigan State University discussed how students whose first language uses the grammatical gender system have a problem learning foreign languages which use the noun class system. This was an important paper for me because it focused on Swahili which I teach at WSSU.