Concept Paper presented to the Five College Deans (c/o Lorna Peterson, Five Colleges)

Thursday, April 23, 2009

Authors: Rick López (Amherst College), Mari Castañeda (UMass), Gloria Bernabe-Ramos (UMass),
Sonia E. Alvarez (UMass), Roberto Márquez (Mount Holyoke College), Rogelio Miñana (Mount
Holyoke College), Dorothy Mosby (Mount Holyoke College); Michelle Bigenho (Hampshire College);
Wilson Valentín-Escobar (Hampshire College)

Proposal:
The Five College Council on Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies (FCLACLS) hopes
to build on existing strengths and develop deeper levels of interdisciplinary and cross-campus
collaboration among Amherst College, Hampshire College, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, and
UMass. Although the Council has worked as a forum for coordination, we have only just begun to tap
into the rich potential of our scholarly community and campuses. We would like to move beyond mere
coordinating efforts and use the Council to strengthen new and existing programs from the ground up by
engaging in more intentional curricular planning and coordination. The moment affords an opportunity to
re-examine our approach to consolidating these overlapping fields. In this effort, we are seeking support
for three endeavors: 1) pooling already existing assets for a Transnational Latin American, Caribbean and
Latino Studies 5C major to be coordinated by FCLACLS; 2) redesigning the FCLACLS certificate to
better meet the changing configurations of our collective resources; and, 3) organizing a FCLACLS
retreat in Fall 2009 that would bring together faculty from all the campuses to discuss strategic planning
and develop a vision for deepening collaborations, especially those aimed at developing new curriculum
and research initiatives on Transnational Latinidades.
These endeavors will utilize our 5C resources more ambitiously while strengthening our
intellectual, research and teaching community in ways that will allow our various campuses to more fully
engage in collaborative efforts and learn and address issues within local, hemispheric, and global,
contexts. We are interested, also, in strengthening our collaborations with colleagues who work on other
world regions and Diaspora communities, such as faculty in African and African American Studies/Black
Studies, Native American Studies, and Asian/Pacific/American Studies. Since we expect to build the
program through sustained coordination of our course offerings and future faculty requests --as well as
cross-campus team teaching --we hope to collaborate more fully with Spanish and Portuguese programs.
This initiative, for example, would require that we negotiate course exchanges that might include Spanish
or Portuguese professors teaching courses in Transnational Latinidades in exchange for other humanities
or social science professors, often from other campuses, offering topical courses in their own fields, but
teaching these in Spanish or Portuguese, or --in the case of large lecture courses --offering one or more
sections in Spanish or Portuguese. The creation of a curriculum around a 5C major will provide the
structure for such borrowing and enable us to better advise on hiring priorities within contributing
departments on the various campuses in the future.
We also look forward to developing dialogue about ways to open our campuses up to the Five
Colleges not just for incidental enrollments, but in terms of collective curricular offerings (by which we
mean, not just the team taught courses, but all the courses across the campuses related to Latin America,
the Caribbean, or US Latinos) on the part of faculty, and required cross-campus registration on the part of
students. By coordinating curricular offerings we also hope to avoid redundancies while building upon
shared interests.
Lastly, the FCLACLS currently supports a cross-campus interdisciplinary capstone course each
year in which we buy out one of the two professors of the course. We hope to retain this program while
supplementing it with more solo or team-taught courses that would rely on inter-campus, inter-
departmental no-cost faculty exchanges. These would contribute to faculty development and offer
innovative courses for students. To make such curricular initiatives workable and sustainable would
require consistent coordination and administrative commitment to allow faculty the flexibility to
participate. We would launch a one-year planning process for this new, intensified stage of 5C
collaboration in Latin American Studies and Transnational Latinidades at the fall 2009 retreat and would
hope to have the first cross-campus course offerings up and running by the 2010-2011 academic year.