Spanish as a Vehicle for Cultural Mediation and Social Inclusion: My Experience in the Teacher Training Course<

Spanish as a Vehicle for Cultural Mediation and Social Inclusion: My Experience in the Teacher Training Course

Hello everyone,

My name is Lara Herbosa Albuquerque, and I am delighted to greet you here. As in your case, the vocation for teaching has been a leitmotif throughout my life, which is why I am here today dedicating these words to you.

Currently, I am an academic counselor and a teacher specializing in Communication, History, and Geography. I have been working in the education and communication sectors for over 17 years, but one could say I have always felt a devotion to education and cultural mediation.

I was born in Madrid, where I studied a Bachelor's Degree in Audiovisual Communication and a Research Master's in Media Communication. During my university studies, I worked as a support teacher for secondary education students and as a volunteer in educational projects aimed at minors at risk of social exclusion, thanks to which I confirmed my predilection for pedagogy.

My inclination towards education was always joined by my interest in social and cultural anthropology, as the curiosity to meet people with other beliefs, customs, and expressions of life has pivoted my personal and professional trajectory. I come from a plural family where cultural nuances combine, given that my mother is Portuguese, my stepfather Austrian, my cousins Angolan, and my best friends (my chosen family) Mexican and Colombian.

In this starting scenario, my ear soon understood that the nature of a language transcends sound and that the authentic clue to understanding a person is more cultural than sonic. In my eagerness to understand and make intelligible both my own and foreign cultures, I found in audiovisual communication an inexhaustible source of resources, since the essential aspects of any language are present in its various expressions (cinema, music, radio, media, design, etc.). Therefore, I decided to specialize in audiovisual didactics and semiotics and inspire students to understand cinema as a pedagogical tool that expresses the morphological, syntactic, semantic, and aesthetic elements of a culture through the analysis of its images and sounds.

Unfortunately, economic difficulties prevented me from completing the Doctorate that would have allowed me to teach at the University, so I opted to hold professional positions dedicated to institutional, corporate, and business Communication. At the age of 30, I decided to resume my purpose of working as a teacher and collaborated again as a volunteer in an educational project by the Tomillo Foundation, where I had the opportunity to teach Vocational Training to foreign minors at risk of social exclusion.

Of all the experiences I have had, this was undoubtedly the most revealing, as the people I met (teachers, students, families) helped me reaffirm that my vocation was education. However, education not understood solely as teaching, but in its maximum expression: education as an integral framework for academic guidance, cultural mediation, social inclusion, linguistic immersion, communication, the development of any competence, and personal growth.

Following that new conception of education, I found work as an Academic Counselor at CEV, a Higher School of Audiovisual Communication, where I was able to guide Vocational Training students in choosing their academic path, accompany them in their training, advise them on the preparation of their portfolios, and guide them in their job insertion as professionals.

Determined to get involved in all spheres of education, I waited to gather the necessary budget and enrolled in the Master's in Teacher Training for Compulsory Secondary Education, Baccalaureate, and Vocational Training at the International University of Villanueva, where I specialized in Didactics of Visual Arts. During the training internship period, I developed an applied classroom project in which Baccalaureate Design students designed urban benches inspired by the cultural and natural heritage of various non-Western regions (Colombia, Iraq, Nigeria, India, and Tahiti). Furthermore, in 2024 I became qualified at the International University of Valencia as a Secondary Education teacher of History and Geography.

Since then, I have alternated various jobs as a teacher, both for educational support of Secondary students with learning difficulties (SLD), and for Design, Audiovisual Culture, and History and Geography. It could be said that part of my dream of becoming a teacher has been resolved, but my fixation on cultural mediation and communication has led me to broaden the teaching spectrum to involve myself in the teaching of that vehicle that makes the understanding of cultures and people possible: language.

Given my academic and professional background, I trust I can contribute the best of myself so that all kinds of students learn Spanish and manage to make their way wherever they want personally, academically, or professionally. What better way to reconcile my passions (education, communication, and culture) than to become a host of this language that is so alive, welcoming, and pleasant.

That is why I decided to take this course, and now I could not be more satisfied with the result. In the Memory, I had the opportunity to propose a Spanish course for immigrant students seeking employment and to explore the possibilities offered by the design of didactic units oriented towards specific purposes—in this case, labor-related ones—with creativity and flexibility.

The Communicative Method has constituted a backbone in the creation of adapted practical and audiovisual activities, as its methodological approach facilitates active participation and the students' acquisition of useful communicative skills in real, meaningful, and daily contexts. The tasks proposed in each didactic session have pivoted on the functional communication of language, streamlining the integral development of the students' linguistic and sociocultural competences.

This new experience as a student and teacher of Spanish didactics has reminded me of the importance of designing learning situations and materials adapted to specific needs that foster autonomy, confidence, and effective communication for all kinds of students, adapting to their motivation and needs. Having the tutorials offered by the course has been key, as the contributions and suggestions of the Hemingway Institute teachers always bet on a communicative and practical approach that enriches learning as future teachers.

After this training, I would love to become a Spanish teacher soon, and I am already considering professional alternatives to teach classes, whether in centers or platforms. Therefore, I have created a website to start searching for students. I would still like to retouch the design and incorporate sections and translations into several languages to make my way among international students, but I share the link to the web in case it is useful to anyone here:

I encourage anyone interested to enroll in this course and, like me, bet on becoming a guide and host of this language that unites and contributes so much to us.