Workforce Language Services

With a fellowship from the University of Illinois Academy of Entrepreneurial Leadership, a Spanish teacher at Parkland College will help her students with their Spanish skills while providing computer skills training to Latinos. 

Oliveras-Heras saw how computer-savvy her students were, and got the idea of teaching local Latinos computer skills. She contacted Shadowwood, which has a large number of Latino residents, and she is working with one of them in developing the project.

Oliveras-Heras said her students will teach word processing, e-mail skills and how to do research on the Internet. She said residents need to be able to access and complete the online applications that many employers require.

She said technology, while a great tool, can also create a divide between those with access to it and those without.

“I want instead to create a bridge,” Oliveras-Heras said, by using the project to introduce Parkland and what it has to offer to Latino residents.

She also plans to build in an assessment of her students’ knowledge and perceptions of Latino culture.  By paying attention to cultural competency and sensitivity, Oliveras-Heras will be able to create lessons that go beyond language acquisition.

Click here for the entire article.

How cool is that?  Just when I was lamenting the fact that there is such a high demand for qualified translators and interpreters, but very few places to study for these fields, I find an article describing elective courses in translation and interpretation.  Three of the students in the program have already passed the Department for Social and Human Services certification test and are planning to take the test for court certification next spring.

It’s exciting to see that youth who’ve grown up bilingual are able to get the training necessary to capitalize on that as early as high school:

Sergio Jara has spent his youth interpreting for his Spanish-speaking parents during trips to the store or translating letters in the mail.

It’s just something you do to help your parents, said the first-generation American.

Even though he already spoke the language, he studied Spanish in middle school and during his freshman and sophomore years at Pasco High School. He knew there were “slight differences” in the Spanish he learned at home and the proper language taught in the classroom.

“I want to perfect it,” he said.

In planning his junior year curriculum, Jara’s counselor recommended he take English/Spanish translation and interpretation.

The two-year elective program is offered at Pasco High and New Horizons High School in Pasco. It is geared at helping students develop interpreting skills so they can get a job in the medical, legal or social services fields.

Given his upbringing, Jara expected it to be effortless but soon found he was wrong.

“It was easy because I know both languages but that is only part of it because you have to create these skills with these languages to help you,” he said.

Click here to read the entire article.

Any Spanish speaker, native or non-native, knows that certain words in the language mean very different things depending on the country one is from.  Someting that is used in every day speech in Mexico might deeply offend someone from the Dominican Republic and vice verse. 

An article in the Yuma Sun describes one such incident that riled people up at a high school soccer game:

This case here, coach is yelling out to his players, players are hearing it left and right, nothing is done about it because it’s in Spanish. That’s a huge issue and an issue I want to speak up about.”

Nicewander said the injury was the turning point in the game. It happened at the 6:23 mark with his team up 2-0. Exactly two minutes later, Yuma High had its first goal, and with 1:46 left the Criminals tied the game.

“When you have a coach on the sidelines yelling ‘break them,’ ‘chocalo,’ smash into them, then you see a player go down an get carted off in an ambulance, it’s natural for a player to say ‘Wow, I’m not being protected, so if I come in on this guy, and he throws an elbow at me and I get hurt, what’s going to come out of it?’” Nicewander said.

This is a good example of people being overly sensitive to language use and looking for an offense where there was just a misunderstanding.  Rather than make it about lack of sportsmanship, it could have been about increasing understanding about word connotations and being more careful. 

To read the article, click here.

An article in the Medill Report-Chicago touched on many of the salient issues in creating a culturally competent health care workforce.  An interview with Dr. David Baker, an internist whose career goal is to close health disparities, appears in the sidebar.  The article speaks to many of the barriers that make cultural competency training necessary, such as immigration status, language, and customs. 

It also includes an interesting perspective on melding traditional and non-traditional medicine so as to provide the most effective, inclusive health care:

Elizabeth Heinz, who has a degree in Oriental Medicine and works at “Well Spring: Acupuncture and Chinese Herbology” in Evanston, said Chinese medicine also gives a holistic approach toward curing the patient.

“A patient comes in and the diagnosis lasts about an hour,” she said. “You talk about the problem and also about everything else, like how do you sleep and do you get headaches. We get a good picture about what’s going on because everything hangs together.”

Heinz said the most effective treatments derive from a combined use of Chinese medicine and Western medicine. She said that in China the two healing methods can be found in the same facility and the patients are directed to one or the other according to their needs.

To read this comprehensive article and the interview, click here.

In this dismal economic climate, working in workforce development has been frustrating, especially in a state with high unemployment.  Obama’s new secretary of labor will hopefully get the Department of Labor back on track and invest in policies that create jobs, train the underserved for those jobs, and protect workers.

Hilda Solis has an impressive track record of supporting the working class, immigrant populations, and labor unions:

“From the streets of Los Angeles where she marched with the janitors who were fighting for jobs with dignity that can support a family through SEIU’s Justice for Janitors campaigns, to the halls of Congress where she has been an outspoken supporter of health care rights for all, a livable minimum wage, and workers’ right to come together for a voice on the job, Hilda Solis has never backed down from the good fight to make the American Dream available to all,” SEIU president Andy Stern said in a statement.

Solis won a Profile in Courage Award from the John F. Kennedy Library in 2000 for her work on environmental justice and minority, worker and women’s rights. She earned her undergraduate degree from Cal Poly Pomona and a master’s degree from the University of Southern California.

To read the entire article from Workforce Management, click here.