By the end of this course, successful students will be able to:
Greet others, introduce themselves, describe things, narrate basic events, discuss their preferences, daily habits and routines, and express desires and wishes in the present tense.
Produce and comprehend Spanish speech and text using basic vocabulary to discuss and/or compare: clothing, colors, physical and character attributes of people (including nationality), birthdays and holidays, classroom objects, weather and seasons, family, personal information, food, and emotions. Students will gain a very basic understanding of various countries and Hispanic cultures. They will demonstrate an awareness of some of their customs and geography and will begin to make connections between these Hispanic cultures and their own.
In addition, we will focus on acquiring the following areas from the SUU Essential Learning Outcomes:
Communication: Gain intellectual and practical skills, particularly in written and oral communication.
Intercultural Knowledge and Competence: Demonstrate that they possess a set of cognitive and behavioral skills and characteristics that support effective and appropriate interaction in a variety of cultural contexts.
Digital Literacy: Students strategically and responsibly employ appropriate technologies to explore,
create, collaborate, and organize in a digital context.
General Education Designation: Humanities
This course fulfills the General Education Humanities requirement. Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:
2.2.1. Examine: Examine how humanities artifacts (such as oral narratives, literature, philosophy, media, and artworks) express the human condition.
This course meets this outcome through the study of authentic cultural and linguistic artifacts in Spanish, including social media profiles (Los perfiles sociales), conversational texts, and cultural readings embedded in each unit. Students examine how everyday communicative practices — greetings, self-descriptions, expressions of preference, and narrations of daily life — reflect how individuals and communities construct and express identity, relationships, and social experience in the Spanish-speaking world.
2.2.2. Explain: Explain how humanities artifacts take on meaning within networks or systems (such as languages, cultures, values, and worldviews) that account for the complexities and uncertainties of the human condition.
This outcome is addressed through the course's sustained attention to Spanish as a meaning-making system embedded in diverse cultural contexts. Students explain how the same language functions differently across communities for example, through the cultural exploration "El tuteo en el mundo hispano" (Unit 2), which examines how forms of address encode social hierarchies, values, and relationships. Vocabulary and grammar instruction consistently contextualizes linguistic forms within the cultural networks that give them meaning.
2.2.3. Analyze: Analyze humanities artifacts according to humanities methodologies, such as a close analysis, questioning, reasoning, interpretation, and critical thinking.
Students develop analytical skills through close engagement with authentic texts in each unit, including readings, listening passages, and cultural media. Partner conversation activities (Conversar) and reading comprehension components of exams require students to interpret meaning, reason about context, and draw inferences from language in use. The Exploración cultural sections in Units 2 and 3 guide students through questioning and interpreting cultural phenomena rather than simply cataloguing facts.
2.2.4. Compare and Contrast: Compare and contrast diverse humanistic perspectives across cultures, communities, and/or time periods to explain how people make meaning of their lives.
This outcome is central to the course's design. Each unit introduces students to cultural content from multiple Spanish-speaking countries, and course materials explicitly invite comparison between Hispanic cultures and students' own backgrounds. Unit 5 ("¿A quién admiro?") asks students to examine personal qualities and public admiration across cultural contexts, prompting reflection on how different communities construct notions of value, achievement, and social recognition.
2.2.5. Apply: Using humanities perspectives, reflect on big questions related to aesthetics, values, meaning, and ethics and how those apply to their own lives.
Throughout the semester, students are asked not only to study Hispanic cultures but to position themselves in relation to them. Projects such as Mi descripción (Unit 1), Mi horario (Unit 3), and Mi universidad (Unit 4) require students to reflect on their own identity, routines, and values using the expressive tools of a new language and cultural framework. The final oral interview via Zoom serves as a culminating exercise in this applied humanistic reflection, requiring students to articulate who they are and what matters to them across a cultural and linguistic boundary.