Abstract:

The e-Classroom experience is a practice started in the last decade in the unit Women’s and Gender Studies in a southern public university. Scholars Carl (1991), Ellsworth (1995) and Lenoir (1998) defend the benefits of an online learning experience for single or multiple users. Courses are offered in three modalities: in person, mediated and online. Students are encouraged to finish the program online if possible. Most students select to mix and match course modalities as they become available or as they fit their work schedule. Due to the success of past experiences teaching online, the COVID-19 crisis was quickly subsided by moving all courses from in person to virtual. Faculty and students were familiar and ready to make the move, thus creating less confusion and time wasted. The class WST 3015 Introduction to Women’s Studies is a 3-credit undergraduate core course and also used as a Diversity class. The class serves future minor students in Women’s and Gender Studies as well as any student interested in a foundation to the US Women’s Movement history and current situation. The course is offered in person as well as mediated (some online work) or fully online. For this particular e-Classroom experience, the author selected a fully online version of Introduction to Women’s Studies to convert into a bilingual class.This southern public university is surrounded by counties with high density of Spanish-language speakers of various experiences and levels of Spanish. Furthermore, the university was given a Hispanic Serving Institution denomination in the last three years giving this project yet another important reason to exist. The notion of having your language (Spanish) as a reference helped the student to feel comfortable while learning. Students felt special and enthusiastic to read and hear the voice of their instructor in Spanish. Scholars Navarro, López Gándara and García Jiménez (2019) speak of the importance of bilingual resources in classrooms of higher education, while researchers Henderson and Romeo (2015) study the importance of digital technologies in the classroom. Digital technologies were indeed the core of this project which took two semesters to finish, while this author worked with designers, web creators, translators, and other university faculty to translate content, learn the latest software available, understand university-wide services and units as well as conference with other faculty on eClassroom best practices. The translation part of the work was arduous. The following were translated for the class—all announcement coming from the teacher, all presentations done by the teacher, all videos were captioned in Spanish, and all Modules introductions and content created by the teacher. Other parts that were not translated included readings, news items, quizzes, and exams. This author also created introduction videos in both Spanish and English to let students know of this bilingual opportunity. One of the best moments during this experience was to see the comments from English language speakers using the Spanish button to help them improve their Spanish language skills. This was an unexpected success of the program. The bilingual e-class project was the only one of its sorts. The objectives of this project were to introduce Spanish to all students taking the class and to translate gender terms accurately.

Keywords:

Online teaching, bilingual education, interdisciplinary.