SPRING SEMESTER

Courses

Students accepted into the program will enroll in either SPN 303 or SPN 394 during the Spring 2024 semester. See below for more details for each course.

SPN 303
Conversation

Instructor: Ms. Marianella Jara

Prerequisite: SPN 202 with a C or higher by the end of the Fall 2023 semester

This course is an intensive training in spoken Spanish. It will help you build confidence in the target language and speak more fluently. We will focus on topics related to Argentinian culture, history, and current events. We will also study local colloquialisms that will help you feel more at ease while traveling in Argentina.

The course is organized in different themes related to Argentinian culture and the Capital city of Buenos Aires. At the end of the course, you will feel confident carrying out practical tasks such as everyday transactions at local business, getting around the city and talking in detail about Argentina and your own culture. The course will be conducted synchronously entirely in Spanish. Although SPN 303 is not a grammar course, students will practice and polish their ability to narrate and use all major time frames with accuracy (present, past, future, conditional and subjunctive).

SPN 394
Buenos Aires:
Capital of Culture

Instructor: Dr. Ashlee S. Balena

Prerequisite: SPN 303 with a C or higher by the end of the Fall 2023 semester

This course will explore topics related to Argentine culture in history, politics, literature, music, art, and pop culture. The

objective is to improve reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills in Spanish through intensive listening and speaking practice while exploring representative works of twentieth and twenty-first-century Argentine writers, painters, and musicians. We will study the writings of Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Eva Perón, the paintings of Cesáreo Bernaldo de Quirós, Antonio Berni, and Xul Solar, and the music of Argentine folk dance and tango. We will look at common themes in the arts and how these arts reveal the history of the people of Argentina and enrich the culture of its capital city.

We will cover all pre-departure material fully online, which will be divided into 6 learning modules (unidades) in Canvas with the exception of one in-person pre-departure orientation. Next, we will travel to Buenos Aires in the last two weeks of May to experience all that you learned first-hand. This course satisfies University Studies V Explorations Beyond the Classroom and counts toward the major or minor in Spanish.