Argelia Andrade's model as a student and teacher is her father, who was born in Jalisco, Mexico, the oldest of 10 children abandoned by their father. Against the odds, he finished high school and some university classes before he brought his own growing family to the United States. Although he worked 14 hours a day, Argelia recalls, he was always reading: "My father always had an answer for everything; he was my personal Discovery Channel." And he eventually got his associate's degree from El Camino College. From him, she got a love of learning, and when it came time to teach, Argelia understood that, like him, she could teach by example.

"I expected that all my students would share my passion for language and language theory," says Argelia, a teaching assistant in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. "I never doubted their potential for language learning, for understanding linguistic theory, and for becoming better writers. How could they not learn to love language as much as I do?"

To nurture their potential, Argelia has adapted her pedagogical strategy to the class she's teaching. Students in language courses tend to be shy about expressing themselves in what is still a "foreign" language to them. Learning that a History-Geography project at UCLA was bringing English language learners to campus, Argelia arranged for their learners to meet her students over lunch. The assignment for her students was to interview the guests in Spanish and write an essay about them. The outcome was an enthusiastic Spanish 2 class and some long-term e-mail relationships. For her composition classes, Argelia creates a sequence of in-class group exercises and homework assignments that together will build a composition. "Before they realize it, they have already done a lot of the prep work necessary to write a composition painlessly," she says.

"Our students' success is limited by our success as educators," says Argelia Andrade, "Our motivation is their motivation." Evidence of her success can be found not only among her students but also among her teaching assistant colleagues. As one says, she "exemplifies what it means to be a good teacher and has shown me what to strive for in the future."

Argelia is also cofounder of the department's Chicano-Latino Interest Group, which supports graduate students who want to further Chicano and Latino studies through their work. Her dissertation is titled, "The Intonational Phonology of Los Angeles Spanish Speakers: Evidence for a Chicano Vernacular."

Published in Winter 2010, Graduate Quarterly