The Latin American Studies Program at Cornell University uses an integrative approach to strengthen transcultural aspects of its curriculum. This action responds to a US higher education imperative, clearly voiced also by our students: the need to better understand other cultures and their languages.

The core of this initiative is an experiential one featuring interdisciplinary studies in multiethnic Chiapas, Mexico. A keystone package of interdisciplinary and cultural studies with optional credit-bearing discussion modules in Spanish for qualified students is formed around this core. It constitutes a pioneering enterprise in North American higher education and Cornell’s first-ever systematic effort to insert Spanish across its curriculum. Advanced Spanish learners expand competencies through summer instruction in the Tzotzil (Maya) language. Credit-bearing mechanisms are also being established to integrate language (Spanish or Tzotzil), cultural and disciplinary studies with Mexican professionals, leaders and institutions.

A two-course core sequence featuring Chiapas’ rich and diverse cultural environment in a two-week field study brings together students (and faculty) from diverse disciplines and colleges. This holistic experience fosters dialogue—among our own multiethnic students, with faculty and with Chiapas hosts—and helps forge departmental alliances across the university.

Upon reflection, newfound understandings are shared via peer teaching and student performances with the student body and the public. A succeeding summer field course further builds language skills and cultural understanding, while supporting other disciplinary studies.

Experience Latin America picks up where the existing language instruction program leaves off by providing field learning opportunities that build language skills. Consequently, students and faculty alike learn about the global cultural context surrounding—often permeating—professional endeavor. All are expected to become more ethnically sensitive and more at home in a global community.

Experience Latin America: A Curriculum Keystone Bridging Cultures and Colleges was proposed by LASP (see abstract) to the US Department of Education´s program on Undergraduate International Studies and Foreign Languages in November 2007.

The course structure of this program is illustrated in the Experience Latin America poster (click here- tabloid size) (click here- letter size).