First Day of Teaching

It really is a great experience to have the opportunity to teach interested students in a foreign country, especialy when those students have gone to great lengths and traveled great distances to get to the classroom. I am enjoying the priveledge of teaching 15 students from West Chester University; we are visitors to the Universidad Nacional in Heredia, Costa Rica. I am also enjoying the chance to team up with my colleage, Prof. Ana Sanchez, also of West Chester University. She and I had our first conversations about offering our joint study abroad experience back in September of 2008. We decided to combine our effort when we realized that we had both brought groups of students to Costa Rica that year and that our trips had a lot in common.

Ana is a native Costa Rican and she is a professor of foreign language. Her courses last year focused on Spanish language and Costa Rican culture. As a professor of environmental health, my course last year focused on global environmental health issues with special emphasis on Costa Rican ecosystems and environmental management. "Why not combine the two?", we asked each other. Almost a year later, here we are. Ana's course is SPA242: Spanish for Professionals and my course is ENV102: Humans and the Environment. She is focusing on language skills for public and environmental health and I am focusing my course on general environmental issues in Costa Rica. I think we work together well!

Each student then is taking both courses and earning six credits; we met daily at WCU for two weeks before our departure for Costa Rica, and we will meet with them six days a week, for the next three weeks, while here in Heredia. Our sessions will include classroom learning (on the UNA campus); service learning activities (to include a visit to a local recycling center, two local schools, a reforestation project and a water treatment plant); and field excursions to visit the Costa Rican white house, the rainforest canopy and the lowland forests of the Pacific coast. We will no doubt be very busy these next few weeks.

Our students are staying with host families who live in the vicinity of the University. Students had a choice of family settings such as English/no English; kids/no kids; pets/no pets etc. Based on their comments in class today, it appears that we have managed to organize some pretty good student-host family matches for them.

The classroom facilities at UNA are wonderful; the classrooms are airy and well-lit and we have wonderful staff support. We have been made very welcome, even though the university is currently closed for a break. Next week, the UNA students and faculty will return and our WCU students will enjoy private language tutoring, mingling with their UNA counterparts and eating in the UNA cafeteria. Even Pat and I are planning to avail ourselves the opportunity to study Spanish one-on-one with native speakers. Tomorrow we'll look at waste management in Costa Rica; Pat jokes that everywhere we go in the world I show her the glamour spots: sewage treatment plants in China, rainwater collection basins in India, a fish market in Peru and now a recycling center in Costa Rica. What could possibly be better than that?

- Chuck