Urban Connections and Outreach
CMLL Urban Connections/Outreach
The Department of Classical & Modern Languages & Literatures has established urban connections mainly through faculty research projects that not only provide a link between undergraduate education at R-N and the various surrunding communities in Northern New Jersey, but that enhance the teaching of courses related to multilingualism, language diversity, oral history and offer opportunities for students to improve their language skills and cultural competency and to participate in research.
CMLL faculty is engaged, for example, in research with visible urban. connections. For example, Dr. Kimberly DaCosta Holton, Associate Professor of Portuguese and also an ethnographer, is conducting research within Portuguese “retornado” population resident in Northern New Jersey, examining serial migration from Africa, to Portugal, to US, and decisions/dynamics motivating this multi-continental trajectory, and astudying within the lusophone community of Northern New Jersey the dynamics of post-colonial conflict and collaboration among Portuguese and Brazilian immigrant communities and ways in which street performances (ethnic parades, religious pilgrimages, civic celebrations) act as public staging ground for afirming discourses of difference. Her project and course on “Ironbound Oral History Project” in Newark, an initiative that started in 2000 and currently contains over 250 interview transcripts and audio recordings with Portuguese-speaking immigrants and their families living in New Jersey, have allowed students to engage in ethnographic research into Portuguese and Brazilian immigrant communities.
Dr. Jennifer Austin, Assistant Professor of Spanish and a linguist, is involeved in a longitudinal investigation of question formation and negation in 20 Hispanic children (mostly Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Ecuatorians and Peruvians) between 5-7 years old who were learning English as a second language in Somerset, NJ (Pine Grive School). Dr. Austin has also collaborated on a series of ongoing experiments on adult and child bilinguals in Newark with Gretchen Van de Walle, an associate professor of Psychology at Rutgers-Newark and with Dr. Cassandra Foursha, to determine the age at which bilingual children begin to show knowledge of separate syntactic systems, they designed a series of experiments that examine grammatical development in 18- to 30-month-old children who are acquiring both Spanish and English. In addition, Dr. Austin is beginning a new longitudinal study of language development in Hispanic children enrolled in the Abbott preschool programs in Union City, NJ that will be done in collaboration with Liliana Sánchez, Gretchen Van de Walle and Sara Michael-Luna from Urban Education.
Faculty involvement extend to leading focus groups in the Portuguese-speaking community for for Greater Newark Health Systems Survey conducted through Joseph C Cornwall Center for Metropolitan Studies to examining different age groups’ experience of urban health care (2006).
Internships in Portuguese and Spanish have served as another way to connect education and the different surrounding communities. For example, students have been able to improve their linguistic proficiency in the language and to examine the workplace when placed at various organizations such as the Ironbound Community Corporation, TransAir Portugal, Portuguese Consulate of Newark, the East Ward Councilman’s Office, the Instituto do Comércio Externo Português and MTVLatino.
Furthermore, the Spanish & Hispanic Civilization Programs do collaborate with the Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana, a New Jersey not for profit cultural organization, in sponsoring annual poetry festivals and serving as judges in poetry contests. Recently, a new collaboration was begun with La Movida (Movimiento Dominicanos en Acción), founded by Rafael Brito, a R-N Spanish major alum in 2006, to offer a basic Spanish course on Saturdays for Newark community leaders.
CMLL’s long history of urban connections dates back to the eighties when it began to play a more active role in promoting cultural events which fostered appreciation for the humanities and the arts, events geared to a broad audience and that contributed to mirror the cultural diversity not only of the student population enrolled, but of the communities it serves in Essex, Hudson and surrounding counties. Examples of said connections and outreach are: the first three-day national conference entitled “Images and Identities: The Puerto Rican in Literature” (April 7-9, 1883), championed by former Governor Kean as “an example of pioneering scholarship” (Star Ledger, April 8, 1983, p. 48); in 1986, in collaboration with Seton Hall and several institutions from the Dominican Republic, Dr. Elpidio & Asela Laguna hosted the First International and Interdisciplinary Conference on the Dominican Republic (April 10-12 ) and offered the first Summer Institute for Secondary High School Teachers interested in Puerto Rican Literature ( sponsored by the NJCH). This was followed by the First International Conference on Portugal & Portuguese-Speaking Literatures, organized by Asela Laguna, during the Spring 1998 and the hosting of Nobel Laureate José Saramago as the host speaker of the second Daniel & Elvira Rodrigues Lecture (2001).
The Spanish & Hispanic Civilization Program and the Portuguese & Lusophone Studies, with the collobaration and support of the Portuguese & the Instituto Camoes, continue the tradition to bring scholars, writers and performers to the campus. All events have been always open to the general public.
Office of the Dean of Faculty of Arts and Sciences,
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