Ernest J. Lunsford, associate professor of Spanish, has been invited to join an interdisciplinary team at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to create a multimedia program to teach Spanish to health-care professionals. The work will assist health-care professionals in providing services to Spanish-speaking residents. As envisioned, the program, named “A Su Salud!” (“To Your Health!”), will be centered around a DVD-based video series with accompanying DVD- and Web-based interactive exercises and a print workbook.
The series will follow a family that migrates from Latin America to the United States in search of a better life, but encounters language, cultural and health problems. The aim of the project is to create a beginning Spanish language program with a focus on health-care issues and the cultural background of the immigrant Hispanic population in the U.S. The program will be available on the Internet across the U.S. so colleges and universities can offer A Su Salud! to health-care professionals through distance learning, in a traditional classroom setting or using a combination of both. Wray Media of Columbia, S.C., will be the production company for the DVD series, and the course materials will be published by Yale University Press. Lunsford’s role in the project will be to design the Spanish language teaching program and supporting materials and to coordinate them with the DVD series, which will have professional scriptwriters and professional actors and actresses playing the main roles.
Lunsford will join the project design team, which includes personnel from the UNC School of Public Health, School of Nursing, School of Social Work, Office of Information Technology Services and the William Friday Center for Continuing Education, in February. The project is expected to take two to three years to complete. At that time, Elon University is to receive a site license for the program so that this course can be offered at Elon to health-care professionals in Burlington and the surrounding area as well as to regular Elon students.