Welcome to MI-BRIDGE
Minority Institutions Building Resources to Ignite Development and Growth in Education
FIU’s Latin American and Caribbean Center (LACC) is part of a large, urban, Hispanic-serving institution with a proven track record of excellence in teaching, research, capacity-building, and international exchange. We strongly believe that we are in a unique position to help implement innovative approaches to enhance other Minority Serving Institutions’ (MSIs’) strengths and to positively impact MSI student success. MI-BRIDGE was born out of this belief.
MI-BRIDGE is comprised of two main components:
- Post-Secondary Faculty Training Workshops: these focus on communicative language teaching strategies and curricular development designed to better serve under-resourced, first generation, and/or Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) foreign language learners. The workshops’ objective is to ensure that faculty members possess a deep understanding of the unique challenges and strengths these students bring to the classroom.
- Educator Toolkit: this supports the development of culturally-appropriate Spanish foreign language instructional materials by MSIs for MSIs. The materials will bridge the existing curricular gap to better serve under-resourced learners and support successful foreign language learning for HBCU and other minority students. Ultimately, the toolkit will be expanded to serve educators from levels K-18.
In the future, MI-BRIDGE also aspires to foster collaborative research on minority students’ experiences in the foreign language classroom, language-teaching tasks based on their real-world needs, and how to most positively impact their experience. Please contact Dr. Melissa Baralt (mbaralt@fiu.edu) if you would like be involved!