The Center for Language Study will host its fifth and final colloquium for the year on Wednesday, May 9, 2018, at 3pm, featuring Paloma Moscardó Vallés, lecturer in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese. An abstract is below.

How can you prepare future doctors for the cultural and linguistic challenges they might encounter when treating Latinx patients? Can we combine global health, Spanish instruction, and service into one course? In this talk, Paloma Moscardó Vallés will describe how she built the curriculum of Spanish for a Medical Mission in Ecuador (SPA 204). The first half of the semester prepared the students for the service mission, leading up to the spring break, when they traveled to Riobamba, Ecuador to conduct eye screenings at five different schools in the Andes. Moscardó Vallés will describe how she partnered with a local organization in Riobamba and a team of ophthalmologists in Pennsylvania to make the mission fruitful. She will discuss how she secured funding, gathered information about the healthcare system of Ecuador, built a corpus of relevant medical vocabulary in Ecuadorian Spanish, and then folded the service trip component into her design for the course.