Teachers Honored for Unusual Focus in Spanish Classes

Maria Leinenweber teaches Spanish at a Glendale high school. Paula Hirsch offers it to students at a private secondary school on the Westside. Last summer, the two teachers--with 37 years in the classroom between them--joined forces to fashion an unconventional approach to teaching the language.

Instead of emphasizing grammar and vocabulary, the teachers focused on the politics, culture and history of two South American countries. Instead of lecturing, they let their students watch films, act out roles, keep journals and debate sensitive issues.

Rather than talking about customs of Spanish-speaking people, they had their students cook international foods and listen to music sung in Spanish.

That method, which was developed into a comparative unit on dictators in Chile and Argentina, won honors this week for taking an interdisciplinary, global approach to teaching Spanish.

As part of a ceremony kicking off a weeklong series of international relations seminars at UCLA, the Immaculate Heart College Center on Monday awarded $250 each to Leinenweber, who teaches at Crescenta Valley High School, and Hirsch, who teaches at Windward School in Mar Vista.

“It’s important to make students aware of what’s happening in the countries that are speaking the language,” said Leinenweber, whose parents are from Mexico and whose husband is from Chile. “This award has reaffirmed my belief that you can incorporate global awareness in anything you teach.”

The center, a nonprofit, nonpartisan facility whose directors split from the Catholic Church, is a member of the Western International Studies Consortium, a co-sponsor of the UCLA seminars.

Immaculate Heart developed its Global Teaching Award in 1986 to encourage multicultural, international strategies in teaching and implement revised state guidelines that stressed the same approach, center officials said.

Leinenweber and Hirsch, whose unit is called “Dictators and Democracy: A Chilean and Argentine Perspective,” and three other teachers beat out nearly 50 other entries from Southern California teachers in four areas--language arts, foreign language, social science and architecture, said Teresa Hudock, the center’s coordinator of teacher in-service education.

The two teachers met as members of a foreign language teachers’ group and discovered that they shared the goal of promoting global education. Hirsch already required her students to read books about Argentina; Leinenweber for years had taught classes about global awareness and diverse cultures.

Last summer, they began what would be six weeks of planning how to teach Spanish by incorporating history, politics, social studies and international relations. Hirsch designed course work on Argentina while Leinenweber fashioned studies on Chile. Then the two met several times to develop their work into a well-structured unit.

It was unusual teamwork for teachers from distinctly different schools.

Leinenweber’s classes at Crescenta Valley High are a melting pot of students from Latin and Central America, Asia and Europe. Hirsch’s private-school classes are smaller and more homogeneous, with mostly white, California-bred students.

“It’s important that these kids who live in their own little nucleus in West Los Angeles learn about their neighbors to the south,” Hirsch said.

Said Leinenweber: “Once they realized I was encouraging them to talk, my immigrant students opened up and shared a lot of their experiences.”

Their unit takes four to six weeks, with time divided between Chile and Argentina, Leinenweber and Hirsch said. It can be implemented during a regular class for students in their third or fourth year of Spanish, typically high school juniors or seniors.

The teachers introduced the unit in their classes last year. Students worked on maps and lists that showed the countries’ allies and adversaries. They watched “Missing,” a movie that depicted the United States taking a covert role in the 1973 takeover of President Salvador Allende Gossens and his government, and “The Official Story,” which told how Argentina’s ruling military in the mid-1970s murdered thousands of suspected subversives and put their children up for adoption.

Later, students wrote about their thoughts in journals every day. They acted out roles and conducted interviews with the characters. They read newspaper and magazine articles and debated issues such as the human-rights records of Chile and Argentina. The teachers purposely ended the unit on a lighter note, with students trying out recipes and Spanish songs.

Virtually all the work--oral and written--was done in Spanish, Leinenweber and Hirsch said.

Political terminology and usage--as well as the complex nature of issues such as human rights and foreign intervention--make the unit challenging, even for older students in higher-level Spanish classes, they said.

But the subject matter isn’t always easy for the teachers, either. Because the issues are often highly politicized, it can be tricky to teach them in an objective and balanced way. The teachers are confronting the same challenge in designing a new unit on El Salvador and Nicaragua, they said.

“Whether the U.S. role was right or wrong in Latin America, I got them questioning,” said Hirsch, recalling her students’ reactions to “Missing.” “They’re future voters, and that’s what they should be doing.”