Professional Associations as "Canon" for Graduate Education

As a card-carrying member of the Modern Language Association (MLA), the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese (AATSP), the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL), and a number of other regional language and literature associations, I observe growing pressure on professional associations to offer relevant training and learning opportunities to future professors of Spanish at undergraduate institutions. In the future, professional associations need to go much further than simply preparing graduate students for the academic job search (or the alternate job search).¹ Professional associations must offer a wide array of professional education opportunities for neophyte graduate students who are eager to learn about our discipline and find a niche that aligns with their interests and employment goals.

The role of professional associations as part of "the canon" in pre-professional education will become even more necessary as university resources dwindle. In the future, universities will not be able to provide the same individualized support to the next generation of professors as they have in the past. Moreover, 2011 MLA President Russell A. Berman pointed out the need for more fast-track doctoral programs in languages in his column titled "Reforming Doctoral Programs: The Sooner, the Better" (2-3). Given the implications of abbreviated doctoral education, professional associations can fill in gaps by providing tools and practical information and also by offering a comprehensive view of the language profession to graduate students. Providing them with timely and succinct information about our profession helps remedy the perennial problem: graduate students in languages often do not know what they need to about our changing discipline and employment prospects until they reach the end of their graduate studies.

Given the ongoing transformation of our field, graduate students should have significant interface, both online and face-to-face, with professional associations in languages for a variety reasons. I will consider two issues.

In the first place, professional associations are in a unique position to offer the broadest view of the state of the languages field at undergraduate institutions. Because of curricular expansion during the last several decades, it is impossible for any graduate program, no matter how large, to house information on all of the options and variations on undergraduate degrees, certificates, and teaching trends in our field. Consider the impact on the traditional field of foreign language and literature of such relative newcomers as applied linguistics, cognitive approaches to language acquisition and literary study, pragmatics, translation, Spanish for specific purposes, service learning, cultural studies, comparative literatures, and interdisciplinary approaches to language learning, to name just a few. Concurrently, I challenge you to find the graduate-level pedagogy course (or courses) that prepare future professors to deal with the wide array of courses that they are likely to be asked to deliver. Graduate programs offer scant preparation conceptually, theoretically, or practically for our increasingly broad teaching needs. Alongside a wide variety of in-service faculty affiliated with professional associations, graduate students will gain a more comprehensive exposure to newer pedagogies, refocused content, and curricular trends.

So, why is a broad view indispensable for today's graduate student? It will enable current students to cross-train in traditional and non-traditional subfields in languages and literatures. The multi-focus approach responds to the curricular changes advocated by the MLA in a report from the Ad Hoc Committee on Foreign Languages, titled "Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World," published in 2007. The report promoted an integrative approach with multiple paths to the foreign language major (4). Therefore, breadth of knowledge is crucial to prospective faculty members. Graduate students need to develop a suite of skills and scholarly interests that offer an institution a diverse set of competencies and help the next generation of scholar-teachers successfully navigate a discipline in transition. I already see evidence of evolution in my role as journal editor, where I regularly receive submissions from the same junior scholar (and there are many of these individuals) in subfields as diverse as service learning and Afro-Hispanic literature. High-quality graduate education with an eye toward breadth through interdisciplinarity...