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. Our goal is 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:

  1. Post-Secondary Faculty Training Workshops: these focus on communicative language teaching strategies and curricular development designed to better serve Hispanic-Serving and Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) language learners. The workshops’ objectives are to ensure that faculty members possess a deep understanding of the  strengths these students bring to the classroom, and can implement into their teaching practice methods, tasks and tools to best serve these learners.
  2. Educator Toolkit: this supports the development of culturally-appropriate Spanish foreign language instructional materials by MSIs for MSIs.  The materials aim to 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 HSI and HBCU students’ experiences in the language classroom, language-teaching tasks based on their real-world needs, and how to best support the teachers serving these students. Research shows that students who speak two languages and/or multiple linguistic varieties are more efficient at learning a third language. We believe that HBCU and HSI students, therefore, are primed for success in language learning.