By the end of this course, successful students will be able to:
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. Talk about fashion, personal style, and physical appearance, using direct and indirect object pronouns to discuss
clothing choices and make recommendations.
4. Describe places, past experiences, and environmental contexts using the imperfect tense, and make comparisons of
equality and inequality in Spanish.
5. Narrate events and tell stories in the past, distinguishing between the preterite and the imperfect to convey
background description versus completed action.
6. Describe and analyze works of art, narrate sequences of historical events, and use hace + time expressions to situate
events in time.
7. Read and discuss literary texts in Spanish using basic tools of literary analysis such as identifying narrative structure,
irony, and historical context.
8. Use the perfect tenses to connect past actions to the present and to sequence events that occurred prior to other
past events.
9. Demonstrate an awareness of Hispanic cultures across a range of contexts — from fashion and the environment to
immigration, visual art, and literature — and begin to reflect on connections between those cultures and their own.
In addition, we will focus on acquiring the following areas from the SUU Essential Learning Outcomes:
1. Communication: Gain intellectual and practical skills, particularly in written and oral communication.
2. 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.
3. Digital Literacy: Students strategically and responsibly employ appropriate technologies to explore,
create, collaborate, and organize in a digital context.
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.
Students engage with a range of humanities artifacts in their original Spanish-language contexts. In Unit 13 they read an
adaptation from the graphic novel Finita la Gringa, which uses illustrated narrative to explore immigration and cultural
dislocation. Unit 14 centers on the history of Buenos Aires's Museo de Arte Moderno and how visual art reflects social and
historical conditions. Unit 15 focuses on Augusto Monterroso's microstory El eclipse, a compressed, ironic meditation on
colonialism and power. Each text gives students a concrete example of how the Spanish-speaking world articulates shared
and contested experiences of identity, history, and belonging.
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.
Each unit's cultural exploration section situates texts within the broader systems that give them meaning. In Unit 11, readings
on the body positive movement and Bolivia's cholita fashion connect clothing to networks of identity, class, and indigenous
cultural value. Unit 12 examines environmental challenges — including tourism pressure on the Galápagos — as a tangle of
cultural, economic, and ecological values. Unit 13 approaches immigration as a transnational phenomenon shaped by history,
policy, and lived experience, examined through authentic video and reading sources.
2.2.3. Analyze: Analyze humanities artifacts according to humanities methodologies, such as a close analysis, questioning,
reasoning, interpretation, and critical thinking.
Analytical work is most explicit in Units 14 and 15. In Unit 14, students learn vocabulary for describing and analyzing works
of art and apply it to the MAMBA text and the Museo Ixchel del Traje Indígena website. In Unit 15, a dedicated set of
literary analysis terms prepares students to read El eclipse as a literary object — attending to narrative structure, irony, and
historical allusion. Conversation and written expansion activities across the semester ask students to build interpretations and
support them with evidence from the texts.
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.
Comparison is woven into the course from the start. Cultural collaborators from more than a dozen Spanish-speaking
countries offer firsthand perspectives that students set alongside each other and their own experience. Unit 12 compares
cultural responses to environmental crisis; Unit 13 examines immigration from multiple national vantage points; Unit 14 uses
past-tense narration to situate works of art within their historical moment and compare them across time. Unit 15's reading
of El eclipse invites students to consider how the same historical encounter looks entirely different depending on whose
perspective anchors the story.
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.
The two unit projects ask students to move from analysis to personal reflection. The Unit 12 eco-tourism project invites
students to consider their own relationship to the natural world and the ethics of travel. Unit 14's "A Museum of You" asks
students to curate and narrate an artistic account of their own life, applying the vocabulary of art analysis and historical
narration to self-reflection. Written expansion activities across Units 13 and 15 — including a written account of immigration
in the student's own family and close engagement with Monterroso's El eclipse — further push students to connect the
course's humanistic themes to their own values and experience.