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I'm Raquel Medina, I'm a Senior Lecturer in Spanish at the School of Languages and Social Sciences
and my field of expertise is contemporary Spanish literature and culture.
So what I have been doing research on is poetry - Spanish poetry, contemporary Spanish poetry,
Spanish contemporary film and also women writers.
Currently I'm focusing more on the representations of Alzheimer's Disease in Spanish culture, mainly poetry, film and narrative.
Teaching is about having fun and being passionate about teaching.
Teaching is about communicating your knowledge
and trying to make your students be fascinated
with the knowledge that you are transferring to them.
I mean, what I like about teaching is that I'm able to have
daily activities and daily communications or relations with my students, with younger people
In which is - for both of us - a teaching and a learning process.
There is... always every day I learn something from my students. Not only transferring
knowledge to them but they are also transferring knowledge to me
so i think that that's what really keeps me into teaching so much, because it makes me feel alive.
When I finished my BA in Spain,
I took a break of two years to be a radio broadcaster
and then went to the US - two years later - to do my Masters and my PhD
and then I started as an academic and a lecturer in Spanish.
I think what I like is to communicate with others. And that's my passion.
What they told me...I mean these role models that I've had, these two teachers that I've had, told me or taught me that
we need to be passionate about it. If we cannot be passionate and we cannot motivate students
then we cannot be teachers, so I'm trying to follow their path but I have to say that I have - you know -
changed toughness - you know - with fun. And also motivation.
I like discussions. My classes are very active,
I find that lecturing sometimes can be very boring
so I like interactive classes based on discussion. Because what I want to...
I want them to do is to try to develop their analytical and critical skills
so it becomes more like a dialogue between the teacher -
or the lecturer and the students, the whole class.
Depends on what I teach. I use quite a lot of audio-visual
materials in the classroom as well, because I know that nowadays...
I mean, that's what is over there.
I use Facebook in the language module skills as a way to keep in contact with them
outside the classroom and when they are in the year abroad, so that we...
I follow them from the first year to the final year, you see.
After twenty five years teaching, some of my undergraduate students back in the US and here in the UK
and my postgraduate research students are now teachers of Spanish
and academics in American universities, so I feel that that's the most rewarding thing for me, you know -
being able to see that they have achieved a goal which is at the same level as my goal.
I think that the teaching at Aston is excellent and we have great teachers here, great lecturers,
very passionate, which are working very hard
and whose main target are making the students better and having an excellent
learning experience and environment. So I think that we are giving our 200%
here - you know - to make sure that the students get what they deserve, which is learning quite a lot of things.