Under the coordination of SPS faculty member Clara Sotelo, Entre nos has offered faculty, graduate students, and the university at large the opportunity to learn about and discuss the intellectual endeavors of SPS. Presenters from within SPS, as well as special guests, have shared with us their current research, pedagogical innovations, and creative work, and we have also used these sessions to prepare students for conference presentations and job interviews. The diversity of topics covered and the overall professionalism of the presentations showcases the incredible talent and great minds that make up who we are in SPS, and highlights our diverse interests in research, teaching methodologies, service learning, and much more.
Nothing compares to the adventure of learning and seeing others learn, and Entre Nos is where we can observe this. We have seen our speakers use their talks to carry out a playful recreation of the literary pen as seen by the critics, to take us through the corners of time and space, to bring us the excitement, the speculation, and the observations of the literary text. The paradigmatic, ideological and/or contextual (dis)connections among the work of art, the author, and the society and times of its production are observed from many angles. On the linguistics side, the sharp calculation of the scientific mind, in the form of observations of language formation, history, contact, use and change, among others, shed light on the functioning of the human mind, and the processes it undergoes when it deals with the linguistic realm and its many realizations. Second Language Acquisition, from the perspectives of both teaching and learning, has not been absent in our sessions, and neither has how to prepare students for uncomfortable cultural encounters. Creative and artistic veins have run through our rooms, practical matters for graduate students have been discussed, and we have been visited by three special guests from the Latina Women’s League of Gainesville.