Department of Global Languages Partners with Spanish for Entities

The Department of Global Languages & Cross-Cultural Studies at the University of Indianapolis recently partnered with Spanish for Entities to sponsor a Spanish short story writing contest, and student Sarinitty Woodruff ’27 (Earth-Space Science) won in the contest’s Adult Spanish Learner category.

Spanish for Entities is an organization that provides Spanish and English as a Second Language (ESL) education opportunities on both an individual and company level. This writing contest was meant to promote creativity within language learning. 

For Woodruff, her submitted short story reflects her complex relationship with the Spanish language.

“I wrote this piece as motivation to dig myself out of long-running creative burnout,” said Woodruff. “It came to me in daily thought, after once again pondering on my deeply complicated relationship with Spanish, my heritage, and my future.”

Winning this competition also reminds Woodruff of the bravery to express herself creatively in Spanish while learning the language.

“Often in Spanish, I struggle with gathering all the words I would like express myself well or the courage to do it without being so hard on myself,” said Woodruff. “Winning an award for a story about that means a lot to me. It’s also a validation of many of those associated efforts and struggles in the actual learning process, and I am never not still learning.”

In addition to the short story contest, Dr. Ana María Ferreira, chair of the Department of Global Languages & Cross-Cultural Studies, is glad that the Spanish for Entities partnership will lead to more educational opportunities for UIndy students and faculty. 

“We are very excited about having more students participate in future events and also to workshop creative pieces in Spanish classes to develop our students’ language and creative skills,” said Dr. Ferreira. “As part of this new cooperative work, the organization also invited me to participate in the panel, ‘Beyond the Classroom: How Multilingualism Builds Future Global Leaders’ at the Indiana Foreign Language Teachers Association conference in November. I’m very excited to talk with our partners, other professors, and members of the community about the intersection between multilingualism and leadership.”