Juan A. Godoy Peñas, Ph.D.
Co-director of DEI-SLT. He holds a double Ph.D. from Florida International University and Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He is an Assistant Professor Educator in Spanish at the University of Cincinnati. Previously, he has worked as Teaching Assistant at Harvard University and Visiting Instructor – Coordinator at Qingdao University, China. His research pays attention, on the one hand, to the role of technology in the classroom and the creation of hybrid courses. He is particularly focused on the development of online activities in H5P and the use of Voicethread to foster the development of communicative activities in asynchronous courses.
On the other hand, he is especially interested in the role of the learner´s identity in the process of second language acquisition, as well as in the impact of the incorporation of diversity in the language curriculum. In 2020, in collaboration with the Observatory Cervantes at Harvard University, he organized a series of workshops entitled “Mapping the Minorities in Spanish as Second Language Acquisition”. He has also recently been invited by different institutions to give a workshops, such as “Fostering Diversity in the Spanish Language Classroom: the role of minoritized identities”, “Uniendo Social Justice e Intercultural Communicative Competence en el aula de español como lengua extranjera ”, or “Promoting more Inclusive and Authentic Realities in Spanish for Business Language Classrooms”.
Claudia Quevedo-Webb, Ph.D.
Co-director of DEI-SLT. She has always had a love for Spanish language and its cultures. Because of this passion, she decided to pursue her BA and MA in Spanish Language and Literatures and, finally, in June 2019, she completed her Ph.D. in Linguistics (Complutense University of Madrid). Before starting as an Assistant Instructional Professor in Spanish at University of Chicago in 2020, she started her career as a Second Language Instructor and TA at Harvard University. There, she confirmed that her passion was not only research and study, but teaching.
Her love for language pedagogy pushes her to constantly learn new methodologies and frameworks and implement them in her language and culture classes. Because of that, she decided to co-direct this pedagogy project that aims to create awareness and provide materials for instructors that combine the teaching of language and the topics of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Bringing new technologies into the language classroom is also something that has captivated her attention and, on this front, she is working on the inclusion of VR in the Spanish classroom.
Contributors
Daniela Torres Cirina
Daniela is a graduate student in the Second Language Acquisition and Teaching interdisciplinary graduate program at the University of Arizona. She earned her Master’s in Hispanic Linguistics from the University of Arizona and Bachelor of Arts in Hispanic Philology from the University of Barcelona. Her research interests include multiliteracies, technology-enhanced language learning, and heritage language pedagogy.