Public Humanities in Spanish Teaching and Learning

Public Humanities in Spanish Teaching and Learning:Community Engagement and Agents of Change Jennifer Brady Ten years ago, Hispania published a special focus issue on the scholarship of community engagement. That issue, published in June 2013 and guest edited by Josef Hellebrandt and Ethel Jorge, brought together 14 articles from teacher-scholars of Spanish. Some of the articles offered guidance on the best practices of establishing and developing collaborations between university and community members. Others presented case studies of service-learning collaborations that had been productive and effective for teaching and learning in Spanish classrooms, for creating meaningful and lasting partnerships with community members, and for bridging the gaps between higher education and the communities in which the institutions reside. In the introduction to the Special Focus Issue, Hellebrandt and Jorge (2013) trace the history of community-engaged learning from "the philosophical roots" of John Dewey and Paulo Freire (203), to ACTFL's "Communities" and "Connections" designations of standards in world language learning (204), to the development of AATSP's first special interest group, which was devoted to community engagement in 2012 (204), and, finally, to Ernest L. Boyer, who, as the former leader of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, "broadened and reenvisioned scholarly work" (205) in two seminal texts, Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate (1990) and "The Scholarship of Engagement" (1996). It is Boyer who situates publications on community-engaged teaching and learning as legitimate types of work that may—and should—count toward promotion and tenure and serve as archives of impact, influence, and collaboration that enhance the greater good of the community, its citizens and its students It is precisely from this point—the greater good—that I wish to situate this current collection of essays. The three essays included here offer evidence that, ten years after Hispania's Special Focus Issue, community-engaged learning is still essential and continuing to yield significant outcomes. In this current special section, you will see three in-depth examples of how far community-engaged learning has come in world language classes, with an emphasis on undergraduate Spanish courses. In their essay, Ellen Mayock and Jayne Reino present the evolution of community engagement at their institution and highlight the positive impact that academic and civic partnerships bring to all. Next, Palmar Álvarez-Blanco and Steven L. Torres offer an encyclopedic set of best practices in community engagement in case studies from their institutions. Finally, Meredith L. Jeffers concludes the feature with poignant thoughts on the humanity of community engagement and describes the community work Spanish students do at her institution. The essays included here were accepted as part of the session sponsored by the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese (AATSP) at the Modern Language Association (MLA) Convention in San Francisco, California in January 2023. That session, titled Public [End Page 529] Humanities and Agents of Change in Luso-Hispanic Cultural Studies, was a natural outcome of these past few years that we have been living. Many teachers and researchers felt the need to pursue more collaborations, and to think and act in a participatory and horizontal fashion in their contributions to community building. This approach to teaching and research ultimately enhances community well-being and bolsters an authentic sense of the common good. The relevancy and urgency of well-being, justice, community, and collaboration align with the inherently interdisciplinary field of Luso-Hispanic Cultural Studies and offer creative ways to address complex social issues through public humanities scholarship and practice, all while providing relevant and significant opportunities for students to advance as learners and as humans. After all, as Álvarez-Blanco and Torres mention in their essay, "hoy en día son muchas las oportunidades para aplicarnos colectivamente al cultivo de habilidades con las que cerrar la brecha entre los mundos sociales, las aulas, las disciplinas, las comunidades y el mundo más allá." In the contributions to this special feature, you will read about how carefully cultivated community-engaged learning collaborations break the antiquated power barriers between students and instructors in higher education and the citizens of the community and have the immense potential to create greater good. In an essay published in

Community engagement · Higher education · Library science · Pedagogy · Political science · Politics · Promotion (chess) · Public engagement · Public relations · Scholarship · Scholarship of Teaching and Learning · Service-learning · Sociology · Teaching and learning center · Teaching method · Educational Technology in Learning · Higher Education and Sustainability · Law · Service-Learning and Community Engagement