Maria Datel Wins Teaching Award
Maria Datel, Senior Lecturer in Spanish, has won a Frank and Lynn Wisneski Award for Excellence in Teaching. Congratulations, Maria!
The citation that accompanies the award praises in particular Datel’s integration of larger global issues into her classroom experience. “What is particularly exciting about Datel’s Spanish courses is that she sees them as opportunities both to teach a foreign language and to think critically about current events in a global context. Through creative pedagogy and sophisticated course design, Datel encourages her students towards intercultural literacy.”
Datel has also initiated some important conversations in the College of Arts & Sciences. For example, she helped to develop a pedagogical workshop on Teaching Students with Learning Disabilities. Datel often encourages her fellow faculty to think more critically about questions of diversity, inclusion and equality in the language classroom.
One of Datel’s students says of her: “She made sure that the topics we discussed in class were not only relevant to learning but to things going on in the news around the world.”
Datel studied Literature, with a focus on Argentine and Latin American literature, at the University of Buenos Aires. She taught Semiotics, Latin American Literature and Spanish Grammar in Argentina. She wrote for a literary magazine, ran a radio program, and was part of a literacy campaign in Paraguay. Datel came to Boston in 1999 and since then she has being teaching Spanish at Boston University.
[This article was originally posted at the Romance Studies website]