Please join El Instituto, the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, the Office of the Dean of Students, and the Department of Educational Leadership for two March events as part of our year-long interdisciplinary series on Latino/a/x Education. Light refreshments will be served. Both talks will be in Gentry 131. RSVP today!
Thursday, March 7th, 5pm Dr. Fany Hannon “Fostering a Sense of Belonging Through Peer Mentoring” | RSVP link
Dra Fany DeJesus Hannon, Interim Dean of Students, will discuss her research on sense of belonging and support received in peer mentoring programs for self-identified Latinx/a/o college students. Dra DeJesus Hannon will discuss her correlational study measuring the relationships between sense of belonging and the three different types of support: emotional and psychological, academic subject knowledge, and career and degree support. Her study encompasses responses received from Latinx/a/o college students in over 18 different peer mentoring programs around the United States.
Dra DeJesus Hannon was the director of PRLACC for 10 years before assuming the deanship of students. She earned her doctorate in Higher Education Administration from New England College in 2023. Her research interests include sense of belonging, cultural wealth and student success.
Thursday, March 21, 5pm Dr. Michele Back “Performing Knowledge and Identity in Native/Heritage Spanish Peer Tutoring Interactions” | RSVP link
Dr. Back offers a retrospective analysis of three previously published works (Back, 2020; Back, 2016a; Back, 2016b) about native/heritage speaker interaction in Spanish peer tutoring contexts. She first examines how knowledge is negotiated and co-constructed in peer tutoring sessions, particularly when gaps in lexical knowledge are evident on the part of the peer tutor. She discusses how these peer tutors draw upon embodied, artifactual, and historical resources, as well as “social others” (Lantolf, 2015) to resolve lexical gaps and position themselves as experts or non-experts. She then moves to an examination of a peer tutoring session in which knowledge of a popular Mexican television personality led to resistance and interactional asynchrony between the tutor and tutee. She outlines possible reasons for this asynchrony, with a focus on the difficulties of negotiating cultural and symbolic knowledge among native/heritage speakers, despite the potential richness that peer tutoring environments could provide for this type of language learning. She concludes with implications for language learning, including the potential the benefits of peer tutoring programs for both native/heritage and L2 Spanish learners, as well as the need for more transformative approaches in language learning for these programs to be truly enriching.
Dr. Michele Back is Associate Professor of World Languages Education at the University of Connecticut’s Neag School of Education, where she works with Spanish, French, Chinese, and ASL language teacher candidates. Dr. Back’s research interests include teacher development and professionalization; cultivating global citizenship; the ethical and equitable use of language learning technology, intersections of race, discourse, and identity; developing a pedagogy of symbolic competence; and the role of translanguaging and multilingual ecology in transforming schools and other communities of practice. She has published articles in the Modern Language Journal, Foreign Language Annals, TESOL Quarterly, and CALICO, as well as the books Transcultural Performance: Negotiating Globalized Indigenous Identities (Palgrave, 2015) and Racialization and Language: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from Peru (co-edited with Virginia Zavala, Routledge, 2019).
For more information, contact: El Instituto at elinstituto@uconn.edu