Contextos

Michael Sawyer holds a Ph.D. in Spanish from Texas Tech University. He is a Professor of Spanish at the University of Central Missouri, where he has acted as Chairperson of the Department of Government, International Studies, and Languages, and as Coordinator of the Modern Languages Program. He founded and continues to direct the Missouri Foreign Language Consortium, a partnership of the language programs at five Missouri state universities. He currently acts as the Assessment Coordinator for the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at UCM. His research interests include second language pedagogy and Postcolonial literary theory. In addition to lower-division Spanish, he primarily teaches courses in Spanish composition and grammar, and Latin American civilization and literature.

Julie Stephens de Jonge holds a PhD in Spanish from the University of Kansas. She has taught all levels of Spanish language, literature, and civilization courses in undergraduate programs at public universities and at a small liberal arts college. Currently, she is a professor of Spanish at the University of Central Missouri, where she teaches film-based courses in Spanish and English, and is the coordinator of a yearly foreign language film festival for students in middle and high school. She is committed to the scholarship of teaching and learning and is particularly interested in second language acquisition, the pedagogy of critical thinking, and the development of reasoning about ethics through film and literature.