Our English Department is an academic service department within the University of Puerto Rico at Bayamón. Thus we strive to respond to the three fundamental suppositions of the College mission:
As an academic service department, we are concerned with role of English in the technological university education of students who fall somewhere along a continuum from monolingual/monocultural [Spanish or very rarely English] to bilingual/bicultural or even multilingual/multicultural. The term academic implies far more than dedication to providing our student clientele with a carefully conceived and coordinated program in English as an additional language. Based on the most contemporary additional-language theories, methodologies, and the faculty's accumulated wisdom, experience, and reflection, it also implies dedication to the following:
As a service department, we are concerned with roles of English in the technological university education of our students while they are here at UPR-B. As part of their university studies, English plays an important role in the students' humanistic studies. English must also be seen as a tool for expressing complex thoughts, as a language worthy of study in and of itself, as the language of expression of the literatures of English-speaking cultures, as well as a passport to the world of employment. We cannot/must not neglect the role of English in those fields in which UPR-B offers degrees. Nor can we minimize the role of English in the education of students in transfer programs. In order to meet our responsibilities, we need to carefully evaluate the immediate and long range needs of the students in all these programs.
Being an academic service department in a technological university college implies that in addition to helping our clientele to develop basic interpersonal communication competence in English as an additional language, our department also has the mission of assuring students' development of specialized academic and professional skills in using the English language in the technologies, especially in computer sciences, electronics, business administration, office systems, preschool education, physical education, and materials management.
The use of the term university further defines our role as we are an academic service department in a technological university college. A university is a special place in which a society's highest values are defined and refined, in which a society's noblest efforts germinate before being put into service for the wider community. The UPR-B English Department faculty is dedicated to providing unswerving examples of these values and noble efforts.
The university takes its students from the particular to the universal--to knowledge, understanding and appreciation of all human intellectual and aesthetic products across the ages. Thus our English Department should offer access to significant and representative fruits of thought and literary expression throughout the diverse world of English and English-as-an-additional-language users, including Puerto Rico's English-speaking Caribbean neighbors.
The universalism of a university implies an awareness that every local community is part of an expanding series of ever more inclusive communities, extending finally to the community formed by all living creatures. Part of our university's mission is to develop in its students a sense of responsibility and service toward these multiple community entities and toward terrestrial life in general. Among thematic areas covered as content in its curriculum, our English Department will assure the inclusion of reading, thinking, and writing materials which inculcate this awareness of universal responsibility and the value of community service.
By the same token, our English Department rejects divisive and exclusionist identities based on racism, sexism, religious fanaticism, or chauvinism. Materials used by our department will be free of racist or sexist language and any kind of derogatory stereotyping of any social group. Materials and themes will encourage a message of the fundamental unity of all life forms within a framework of respect for diversity.
Language is an extremely important dimension of culture, and control of more than one language offers access to the peoples and world views of multiple cultures. A multicultural perspective is also part of the universalizing mission of a university. Our English Department sees as one aspect of its mission the encouragement of cross-cultural communication and the development of both linguistic and non-linguistic skills for cross-cultural sensitivity and understanding. To this end, we provide for activities and experiences both in Puerto Rico and abroad, which allow students to develop and practice the use of English as one tool in achieving cross-cultural communication.
We also recognize that intimately intertwined with language and culture is thought, and oral and written languages are traces of the thinking process as well as end products in the process. The university and the method of inquiry it pursues are founded on the fair minded, critical, and conscious application of a set of clearly defined thinking processes. Thus, our English Department, in the learning and communication tasks it assigns to students, encourages the explicit application of thinking processes and norms of critical thinking to analyzing, evaluating, problem solving, and decision-making. We help our students to learn to apply these processes to interpretations of their readings in English and in their development of formal oral and written expositions in this language.
Given that the basic processes of thought and communication are human universals, our English Department also seeks collaboration and coordination with the UPR-B Spanish Department so that we can both complement and reinforce our efforts to develop our students' thinking and communication abilities in two distinct linguistic and cultural codes.
Finally, an important part of our institution's mission is to prepare our students to be creative life-long learners after their university years have ended. In accordance with this goal, our English Department also strives to impart to our students the skills, techniques, and materials necessary to become self-directed learners of English for general life and professional needs. This includes the incorporation of the theory and practice of language learning strategies into our curriculum. Only a small part of any language is learned within the walls of a classroom. Control of a language of necessity includes much personal work outside of formal learning contexts. Through imparting the necessary strategies and reference materials to our learners, as well as reinforcing their self-confidence, we hope to enable them to continue developing their mastery of English throughout their lives.
And, as in the College mission statement, what we want for our English Department is not a mission achieved but a mission in the process of being achieved.