¡Vamos a Guatemala with Ms. Hassiak!

World Languages teacher Ashley Hassiak always knew she wanted to spend significant time in a Spanish-speaking culture. Not only would the immersive experience improve her skills, but she felt the cultural experience would enrich her classes and give her new ideas for  how to engage students in studying Spanish. Fortunately, Ms. Hassiak was this year’s recipient of the John A. “Jack” McCabe Faculty Professional Development Award, which allowed her to travel to Guatemala for more than a month this summer. She says the experience has already changed her classroom approach.

Four days a week at the Pop Wuj Spanish School in the city of Quetzaltenango (also called by its Mayan name, Xela), Ms. Hassiak had one-on-one lessons to deepen her mastery of the language. “Because I already spoke Spanish, what I told my teacher was that I wanted to practice conversational Spanish, especially the tenses I don’t really have an opportunity to practice here in the United States,” she explains.

When she wasn’t in class—on Wednesdays and weekends—Ms. Hassiak was able to explore the region. She attended a local soccer championship with her host family, hiked, and visited the city of Salcajá, which included a trip to the Church of San Jacinto, the oldest in Central America. She also had the opportunity to learn about Mayan culture, which remains vibrant and very important to the people of Xela. “There’s a large Mayan population in Guatemala overall, but particularly where I was staying,” she says. “The culture is very important to the people there. Some people don’t know how to speak Spanish; they only speak K’iche’.”

She also had the opportunity to give back with her fellow Pop Wuj students.

“The outskirts of the city are really impoverished,” she explains. “The people often live in makeshift houses without foundations: just plywood, plastic, maybe some scrap metal pushed together, and dirt floors.”

Needless to say, a gas or electric stove is out of the question in such homes, leading people to tend to open flames in their highly flammable houses out of necessity. Pop Wuj students build energy-efficient stoves for these families. Not only does the appliance contain the flame, but it vents out smoke and allows food to be cooked more quickly.

“It’s a safer and healthier way of living,” she explains, noting that constructing the stoves takes a full month. “It’s hard work. I had to cut cinder blocks with a machete!”

And throughout her travels, she was always on the lookout for new materials to bring back to her classroom. 

“My teacher helped me find a lot of first-hand, authentic resources I could use in my classes,” she says. “Newspapers, books, even something like advertisements are useful, because you can kind of visualize what it would say if it were in English.” 

Her favorite acquisitions, she says, are children’s books with 365 days of familiar fairy tales.

“They include stories like Aladdin or Cinderella in Spanish. Stories that we all know. So if I were to read them to students, even though they don’t know how to say ‘glass slipper’ in Spanish, they can look at the picture, follow along with me, and probably connect dots, even if they don’t quite understand every word,” she says. “This is going to help me get my entry-level students reading in Spanish, pronouncing in Spanish, and understanding grammar and vocabulary.”

More importantly, she says this trip opened her eyes to the possibility of new ways to engage students, get them excited about learning a new language, and help them understand how doing so is useful in a real-world context.

“This trip really helped me readjust how I want to teach this year,” she says. “Over the past two years, I have not included too much cultural emphasis in my classes … but this year I’m really placing a focus on the cultures of Spanish-speaking countries. There’s so much they have to offer.”