This month’s blog post was contributed by Mahrya Burnett, Scholarly Communications Librarian at the University of Iowa.
For this month’s resource highlight, we wanted to feature a newly published open Spanish textbook, Salón de clase, Intermediate Spanish for Education Professionals, by Fernando Castro Ortiz and Giovanni Zimotti. The book is the first of several OER Spanish texts being developed by University of Iowa’s Spanish and Portuguese Department, under the leadership of Dr. Zimotti. The book “aims to explore the role of Spanish language and Spanish speakers in the American education system, as well as to improve student communicative abilities in Spanish.”
Salón de clase provides an excellent example of how interactivity can be built into OER through the Pressbooks platform. It includes H5P activities, video interviews with native Spanish speakers, and other multimedia features throughout the book.
The resource is divided into four units, centered around key topics relating to bilingual education:
- Immigrant students in K-12 education,
- Bilingual education in the U.S.,
- Education systems in Spanish-speaking countries, and
- the school ecosystem.
Within each of these units, students write reflections, watch videos of native Spanish speakers discussing the issue, complete a series of lessons, work through guided discussions, and learn relevant grammar and vocabulary.
Ortiz and Zimotti have also centered diversity and accessibility when developing this resource. Images and interview subjects represent a broad range of backgrounds, and the videos, images, and activities used in the book have all been created with accessibility in mind.
If you teach Spanish for an educational setting, you won’t want to miss this new book!