SPAN 306: Culture/Civilization Spanish Latin America
Course Description Taught in Spanish, presents an historical and cultural overview of Hispanic Latin America from its pre-Columbian origins to the present through works of literature, art, music, and videos. Taught in Spanish. (Prereq: SPAN 202 and SPAN 213)
Course Reflective Narrative SPAN 306: This course allowed me to increase my language proficiency,but mainly literary and cultural knowledge. This course fulfills major learning outcomes 1 and 3. In this course I developed my language proficiency through presentations, readings and class discussions. For this course I was required to do a presentation, I researched about Dominican Republic and its history of independence as well as contemporary events. I had the opportunity to practice my speaking ability in the target language by doing the presentation. My listening ability was also improved in this course, the professor provided videos and the classmates did presentations and that gave me the opportunity to increase my listening ability in the academic field. Furthermore my reading ability also increased during this course. The book we used had interesting chapters about the history of different latin american countries and I developed my vocabulary in that field. My writing skills also improved, to prepare myself for the tests I would do the study guide and that helped my develop my vocabulary. For the tests I was required to present the ideas from the book in my own words. In this course the professor assigned students to read different literary documents, this developed my literary knowledge. This course developed my cultural knowledge about Latin América. Throughout the readings and the book I was able to learn about philosophies, ideas, values and history of different countries from south america. From this course I learned the importance of learning about the history of one country. Being informed about the historic elements of a nation makes it easier to understand their beliefs, ideas, philosophies and more. This course provided me with a lot of information and knowledge that is relevant for my major and for the MLOs mentioned previously. The knowledge gained in this course allowed me to make connections between the spaniards and Latin America, it is crucial to know the history of Latin America and to make connections with the historical elements. I want to keep developing knowledge about the history of all countries of Latin America, there are a lot countries, but they have things in common and there are connections. This course relates to other literature courses I have taken at CSUMB. I have learned that literature and culture most of the times go together, one complements the other. I want to further explore this learning experience by taking courses that include topics about the history of Latin American countries.