BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – Carolyn Nadeau of Illinois Wesleyan University has received a $71,500 Open Educational Resources (OER) grant to create a free online textbook for Spanish learners and aspiring health professionals.
Nadeau, the Byron S. Tucci Professor of Spanish, World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, applied for and received the Illinois State Library grant through the Consortium for Academic Research Libraries in Illinois (CARLI). The grant will fund the creation of a free PDF textbook for IWU’s Spanish 203 course, “Medical Spanish and Cultural Competence for Health Care,” which Nadeau teaches. She plans to publish the textbook through the OER platform LibreText.
Nadeau’s overall goal for the textbook is to make the course’s educational value freely available to all academic institutions and “to make the finished product look like a polished, high-quality online academic textbook,” she said.
The course and textbook are aimed at students who want to enter the healthcare industry and develop both cultural competence and language skills for working with Spanish-speaking communities. In general, this is “the ability to understand and respect values, attitudes and beliefs that differ across cultures.” and relevant Spanish vocabularyexplained Nadeau.
“In this course, we look at data comparing Latinos to other ethnic and racial groups, and also data showing differences between different Latino groups,” she said. “Other considerations include the importance of family dynamics and who is involved in the health care decision-making process, understanding the gap in health care access between Latinos and non-Hispanic white Americans… and concepts such as respect, personal warmth, trust between patient and physician, and the role of the interpreter in these dynamics.”
Nadeau believes the book’s greatest benefit is its ability to transform the course’s experiences into an educational resource.
“What’s special about this course at IWU is the combination of classroom instruction and hands-on experience (in a clinical setting),” she said. “Students experience firsthand in the clinic what we learn in class, and also take day trips to the Health Department and Western Avenue Community Center to get a more comprehensive picture of some of the more holistic issues facing the Latino community here in Blo-No. So many times I’ve read in student magazines how exciting it is for them to experience the connection between class and clinic. I love providing this type of connected learning—the connection between language, culture, and lived experiences—to our students, and I hope that through this OER others can provide these opportunities to students at other institutions.”
After a lengthy academic review process, Nadeau hopes the finished book will be available as a free download by the fall semester of 2025.
