From Saint Paul to Concepción: Hamline School of Education Participates in Virtual Exchange

On Monday, October 12, students in ESL 7770: Critical Praxis in TESOL joined students from the Licenciatura en Lengua Inglesa program at Universidad Nacional de Concepción (UNC) in Paraguay for a live virtual exchange. The evening session was co-led by Dr. Michelle Benegas, Associate Professor of TESOL in Hamline's School of Education and Leadership, and Lic. Isabel Cazuriaga, Academic Coordinator at UNC. UNC's Vice Dean opened the evening with a welcome to both groups and spoke about the university's commitment to internationalizing education. Participants then met in small binational groups to talk about English teaching as an international career and how language policy shapes who gets access to English. Instructors from both universities shared pathways for educators interested in working abroad, from Minnesota to South America and back. The exchange took place on October 12, a date with layered meaning in both countries. In Minnesota, it is Indigenous Peoples' Day, honoring the Dakota and Ojibwe nations whose homelands include the land Hamline sits on, and whose languages live on in place names like Minnesota itself, from the Dakota Mní Sóta. Hamline students also learned about Guaraní, which is an official language of Paraguay alongside Spanish and is spoken by most of the population, making it one of the few Indigenous languages in the Americas used by a national majority. The conversation was a reminder that English teaching always happens alongside other languages, and that educators in both countries work in communities shaped by Indigenous languages and histories of colonization. For Hamline students, many of whom are already in the classroom, the evening offered a chance to see their field through the eyes of colleagues teaching English in a multilingual country, and to build connections across borders.