What is Teleplaza?
Teleplaza facilitates telecollaborative connections among heritage Spanish and Latino Studies courses at the college level within the United States. You can use Teleplaza to find a project posted by another school, or to post your own project. Teleplaza projects can be integrated into language or content courses to support a variety of learning goals, such as development of proficiency, development of literacy, and exploration of specific content. Projects may range from short collaborations to semester-long partnerships. Instructors can select different modalities for communication for their projects (i.e., synchronous, asynchronous).
By partnering with a heritage Spanish or Latino Studies course at a different college, instructors create a learning environment where communities with different experiences learn together and from each other. For example, in its pilot projects Teleplaza connected Latino students attending a community college on the East Coast with a heritage Spanish class at a private, 4-year school on the West Coast to discuss interpretations of the “American Dream” in the context of issues of unequal access to education. Another pilot connected Latino students of Caribbean descent with Latino students of Mexican descent, who together explored issues of language and identity.
