Álvaro in snowy Madrid (!)
by :: Cate
After teaching for 2 years in the U.K. and 3 in the U.S., Álvaro Mediavilla returned to Madrid, Spain to co-found Bablingua, a company that provides “great videos that really show our country, and that are interesting and understandable for a foreign student.” As a former world language teacher, I know how compelling authentic and up-to-date videos can be for students, so I’d like to help Álvaro and his business partner Laura get the word out about Bablingua. Back in July Álvaro wrote up a School Snapshot and today he’s talking about education in Spain, his experience teaching abroad, and what Bablingua offers Spanish teachers.
Álvaro, please tell us a little about yourself.
I feel very glad of living at the moment in one of the greatest places of Madrid: La Plaza Mayor. I was very lucky to find an apartment here, and I love getting up in the morning facing the famous square.
I’m currently teaching English to adults through different programs: I’m doing some courses for unemployed people, courses in companies and also teaching in what we call Formación profesional, which is an alternative to college.
This is my seventh year teaching. I started in Salamanca (Spain), doing my student teaching in a high school, then I moved to North Carolina (USA), where I stayed for three years. I’ve been teaching here in Madrid since I got back three years ago.
Why did you decide to teach in the U.S.?
Our educational system in Spain is in a very deep crisis. This is not only a personal opinion, many international reports and the main Spanish political parties share this point of view.
Going to the U.S. was a great opportunity for me to learn from another system, to improve my teaching skills and to get new ideas I could later use in my country. Apart from my professional development, there were also personal reasons, such as my love for traveling and knowing other cultures.
Álvaro with students in Madrid
How did living and working in North Carolina change your perspective on Spain? The U.S.?
I don’t think it changed my perspective on Spain. I had already lived in the U.K. for two years and I had the experience of looking at my country from abroad.
My perspective on the U.S. did change dramatically though. All I knew about the U.S. was basically from TV and movies, but there are many things you can’t learn unless you live in a place.
One of them is that the U.S. is a huge country. I know you can see that on a map, but it was when I drove from North Carolina to California (and back) when I truly understood what that implies. I had visited many countries before going to the U.S., but none of them was close to it in size.
The U.S. is so big, and the regional differences so significant, that I don’t dare to generalize about the whole country since I finished that long trip. I know many people here in Spain who might say Americans are…or the U.S. is…, but I don’t think you can finish those sentences with adjectives you can apply in such a generic way.
People from North Carolina are quite different to New Yorkers, and Florida doesn’t look like South Dakota at all. Even the language sounds so different that it’s hard to consider it the same language!
How would you describe education in Spain?
In Spain, the educational system is in a critical moment that requires brave and innovative changes, but it’ll be too hard or impossible to change it because there are too many groups benefiting from the current situation.
And in the U.S.?
In the U.S., at least in the region where I taught, education is not so rigid, principals have more freedom to do their job and it’s easier to take decisions that have a real impact in school life.
I think there were more and better training opportunities for teachers, and all those factors make me be optimistic towards the future of the American educational system.
When you were in the U.S., what did you miss about/from Spain? Now that you’re back in Spain, what do you miss about/from the U.S.?
I think I’m a person who adapts very well to live in a new country, but there’s always something I miss: people. When I was in North Carolina, I missed my family above all, but also my friends, and now that I’m in Spain I miss the friends I made in the U.S.
Apart from that, I really miss American cost of life. Spain is a much more expensive country, and our wages vanish at a surprising speed compare to American’s.
Now tell us about Bablingua…why you decided to start this business?
Laura and I were always shocked by the interest that students, teachers and the members of the community where we lived had about Spain. It didn’t matter who we talked to, from the postman to the person who helped us with our taxes, we were always bombarded with questions about our country, and we loved that.
In school, our culture was constantly linked to teaching the language, but it was difficult for us to present Spain as it is with the resources we had. Pictures were a great help, but there is nothing like videos.
The problem is that the videos we had were too focused on stereotypes: bullfighting, flamenco, Feria de Abril, etc. I think all those are important, but I don’t believe they should be the only thing to show about our country.
We realized students were mainly interested in seeing what ordinary people of their age look like, what clothes they wear, their hair styles, the houses where they live, their schools, cars, etc.
That was the way we started thinking about Bablingua. It was our last year in the U.S., and we decided to fill that gap when returning to Spain, filming regular people in ordinary situations, with some activities to help students to get the most of each video.
How does Bablingua help students learn about other cultural perspectives?
When we were thinking about this project, we came up with the idea of a door as a symbol. Our goal was to help teachers to open a virtual door in their classrooms so they could take their students to Spain at a reasonable price. 21 short videos and a DVD later, we think we have achieved this goal.
Our audiovisual resources, in our opinion, present Spain as it is. Some of our videos are filmed in touristic areas, but many others show the kind of residential places that are usually left behind because they don’t seem interesting enough. We think culture involves extraordinary events and also ordinary ones, and by including examples of both of them we think our materials give a very realistic perspective to students.
How does Bablingua help teachers?
As teachers, Laura and I are perfectly aware of the importance of good resources in a Foreign Language class. We know there are many great textbooks for Spanish language teachers in the U.S., but we also think that overusing textbooks lead to certain problems such as boredom and an excessive repetition of the kind of activities done in class.
We didn’t start this project to compete with the existing resources, but to offer new ideas and additional materials that can spice up Spanish classes. Many teachers have written to us to thank us for offering something different and appealing for students.
We try to help them by covering as many topics as we can, paying a lot of attention to the activities that come with the videos. We want students to be ready to watch them, to understand them, and that’s why we need to provide teachers with some good exercises to introduce the topic in class, including the key vocabulary and the grammatical structures covered in the video.
What’s in store for both you and Bablingua in 2010?
We’re more and more excited about Bablingua as we receive positive feedback from other teachers. Our main satisfaction comes from seeing that almost every teacher who tries one of our materials buys another one in the following weeks. That is something that make us feel very proud of what we’ve done this far, and it’s the reason why we’re going to try to put more time into this project in 2010.
We have many ideas in mind, such as offering online series of short episodes, or visiting other Spanish speaking countries so teachers can take their students to as many places as possible.
Editor’s note: Click here to preview the awesome videos Bablingua offers! If I were teaching Spanish, I’d definitely use them.
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Thanks, Cate, for posting this. I would also use this resource if I were teaching Spanish.
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