Robert Davis, a professor of Spanish at the University of Oregon, is hoping to help expand the opportunities for communication between instructors and students at the UO.
Students are accustomed to an assumed schedule: In class, the professor is there to educate, and students generally leave a quickly as possible when the session is over. The only opportunities for face-to-face discussion between students and their teachers is during office hours or other scheduled appointments.
But Davis was asked last year if he would accept an offer to become the university’s first scholar-in-residence. Davis, a UO professor since 1991, accepted and started another leg of his career last fall – something of an immersion program in faculty-student communication.
Davis graduated from the University of Southern Mississippi with a bachelor’s degree in Spanish literature in 1983. He continued his education for the next eight years, receiving his master’s degree in linguistics in 1987 and his doctorate in linguistics in 1991, both from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The end of his education translated to the beginning of his professional career, as he received an offer from the UO immediately after receiving his doctorate.
“I’d never lived in Oregon before,” Davis recalled. “It was my first job out of grad school and it turned out to be a really good fit. I have really great colleagues in the romance languages here.”
Davis worked as an assistant professor from 1991 to 1997 and as an associate professor from 1997 to 2012, when he became the scholar-in-residence at the new Global Scholars Hall. Davis calls it an honor, and a position that offers a new perspective on teaching.
“Since I live here, I have a much more flexible schedule in terms of presence and visibility with students,” he said. “We have meetings here at 8 or 9 in the evening, for example, when “normal” professors are at home.”
The job also allows for a stronger connection between Davis and students.
“It’s easier to cross paths with students and help them in incidental ways, just because of proximity," he says. "I’m still learning how to create more interactions and enrich students’ experience here, so I expect things to be even better next year.”
Davis has been able to meet colleagues at UO – both professors and staff in housing – that he hadn’t yet crossed paths with during his two-plus decades at UO.
“I don’t think most of my colleagues have any idea about how many talented people work behind the scenes to make UO a top-notch university, so this has been one of the most eye-opening and rewarding aspects of the job.”
His position as the first scholar-in-residence at UO, while significant, simply builds on his established portfolio of work in language learning. After discovering languages at an early age, the subject became a passion for Davis. He focused his work on Spanish and French, and has spent a year living in France and has gone to Spain on a number of occasions starting the mid-1990s.
“Now I’m learning Catalan and Portuguese, so this job here is just one more angle, one more thing I can do that circles around this idea of language learning.”
Language learning is Davis’ primary area of study. He serves on the AP national committee, and is helping design the new AP Spanish exam and an accompanying course. Davis’ trips to Spain in the spring have been accompanied by trips to Vermont in the summer, where he teaches at the Middlebury Language Schools. In the summers, Davis says, the college has the best immersion schools anywhere in the country.
“I worked five years in Vermont in the summers, and then they asked me to start a satellite program in California, so I’ve been working on that for the past four years along with teaching,” Davis said. “I was working on a project for Middlebury Interactive Languages, which is an offshoot of the language schools. It’s an online learning program and so we did a 3D world with an avatar for the person learning Spanish or French. We designed this cool little village and you go around and interact with various people in the town.”
Davis says that his work with the immersion programs at Middlebury helped secure his new position in the Global Scholars Hall.
“The people who planned this building wanted to have immersion communities, and since I do immersion they asked me to work in here," Davis said. "Of all the professors who could have done this, they thought I’d be a good person to start.”
When he has time to spare outside of work, Davis enjoys cycling and fine-tuning his skill at a unique Spanish dance, though doesn’t defend the latter ability.
“I wouldn’t call myself a good dancer," he said. "I’m a cyclist. I love living here because the cycling is so good. Dancing, well, I’m not very good at it but I do try. When I lived in Spain I learned this dance, and we always do a workshop in the summers at Middlebury where we teach people to do it. I’m not good enough to teach people here; there we have a professional teacher.”
In April, Davis will once again make the trip to Spain, this time to teach a course called “Nuevas perspectivas teóricas y prácticas en la enseñanza de lenguas (New theoretical and practical perspectives in second language teaching).” It will be co-taught with María Losada, an associate professor of English philology and part of the Universidad de Huelva’s Masters program in European literature and language teaching.
- by Taylor Robertson, UO Office of Strategic Communications intern