It’s been a year filled with recognition for Florencia Henshaw, director of advanced Spanish and interim co-director of the Foreign Language Teacher Education (FLTE) program.
Shortly after receiving the Campus Award for Excellence in Online & Distance Teaching, Henshaw was named the recipient of the Chancellor’s Academic Professional Excellence (CAPE) Award. This award is designed to recognize demonstrated excellence by academic professional staff at UIUC. Nominees are judged on three criteria: work, personal, and professional contributions.
Henshaw’s colleagues say this latest award is a testament to the quality of teaching and service she brings to the Spanish & Portuguese department and campus at large. We recently caught up with Henshaw and asked her about her work.
Can you describe your work within the school?
Since Fall 2013, I have served as the director of advanced Spanish within the Department of Spanish & Portuguese. I coordinate four of the foundational courses for all Spanish majors and minors: SPAN 200, 204, 208, and 228 (with a total annual enrollment of 600 to 1,000 students). In this capacity, I set up and maintain multiple course management systems and online platforms, I develop and revise existing curricula and course materials, and I supervise an average of 15 graduate teaching assistants per semester. I also review transfer course evaluations and supervise James Scholars Honors projects in those courses.
This year, I have also served as interim co-director of the Foreign Language Teacher Education (FLTE) program within SLCL, along with Jude Krushnowski. The FLTE program is a teaching licensure program open to students interested in teaching French, German, Latin, and Spanish.
What impact do you hope to have on your units and your field?
Overall, I hope to inspire others! Whether it is something as small as trying out a new activity in class or something as big as re-thinking assessment practices or conducting new research, it gives me great satisfaction to know something I said or did served as inspiration for it.
More specifically, within my unit, I hope to have an impact in terms of expanding course format options for students and eliminating the stigma commonly associated with online language courses: they can indeed be meaningful and interactive.
What do you enjoy most about teaching?
I love it when students make the language or content their own. All of my favorite assignments involve students expressing their creativity. In the teaching methods course, it may involve creating a new activity. In my Spanish courses, it may involve creating a movie poster based on a reading.
What’s your proudest achievement?
It is difficult to pick only one! I am very proud of my new book “Common Ground: Second Language Acquisition Theory Goes to the Classroom,” which I co-authored with a K-12 Spanish teacher. It has been very well-received by both in-service and pre-service educators.
I am equally proud of the five awards I received this past year: two competitive campus awards, and three awards granted by national and international professional organizations.
What’s next for you?
I plan to continue expanding my YouTube channel and podcast called “Unpacking Language Pedagogy,” where I summarize and discuss research articles, activities, terms, and various topics related to language teaching.
I am also working with University of Illinois Chicago professor Kim Potowski on a co-edited volume to be published this fall, called, “Honing our Craft: World Language Teaching in the US.”
Dania De La Hoya Rojas