Description and Objectives

The Trayectos Initiative

Our Open Educational Resources (OER) Trayectos initiative was established in Fall 2017 with three specific objectives:

To develop theoretically-sound digital, open-source instructional material for second language (L2) Spanish teaching;
To investigate the pedagogical, linguistic, and institutional dimensions that can play a role in instructional innovations of this kind; and
To train undergraduate and graduate students as L2 researchers and materials developers.

The project focused on the investigation of issues such as,

The identification of students’ needs (considering personal and institutional expectations);
The development of curricula (the determination of thematic and linguistic content and outcomes);
The search for and selection of appropriate resources, including the assessment of existing ones;
The training and coordination of development teams; and
The design of units, tasks, and assessment tools.

This initiative also constituted a collaborative effort involving the participation of undergraduate and graduate students. The materials produced collaboratively have been compiled in a textbook titled Trayectos.

Trayectos

What does Trayectos offer second language Spanish learners? An open, two-volume digital program that features:

A learner-centered approach based on Learning by Design, a pedagogy inspired by the Multiliteracies movement (Kalantzis et al. 2005; 2016).
Fresh, multimodal content that connects the life worlds of learners with the life worlds of diverse Spanish speakers.
Multimodal texts (e.g., readings, videos, posters) based on a variety of textual genres that contextualize topics about the lives of real university students.
Communicative activities that bind language form to cultural meaning within real-life contexts.
Critical thinking tasks that help learners explore the Spanish-speaking world, including Hispanic/Latinx communities in Texas.
Language awareness activities that feature different varieties of Spanish, including those spoken in the US.
Guided induction activities that help learners discover how to use new Spanish vocabulary and grammar.
Culminating activities that oblige learners to synthesize the linguistic and cultural content of each module into a personal, multimodal text.
Supplementary resources that offer learners the opportunity to practice the content learned through self-correcting activities (Práctica individual) and to use Spanish to broaden their knowledge of and critically analyze issues related to diversity, equity, and inclusion in the Spanish-speaking world (Voces de nuestro mundo).
An open copyright license (Creative Commons license) that gives all users the right to adapt the textbook and to share their new content with others.
How-to sections that guide you in the creation of a personalized version of the textbook to meet the unique needs of your classroom.

To explore Volume 1: Mi vida en la universidad (textbook and workbook [included in textbook chapters as "Práctica individual"]), click here.

To explore Volume 2: Más sobre mí (textbook and workbook [included in textbook chapters as "Práctica individual"]), click here.

To explore the units in Voces de nuestro mundo, click here.

To explore the teacher's manual, click here.