By Ryan O’Connell
Associate Editor
Under bright fluorescent lights in the Henry Whittemore Library’s lower mezzanine, the six classmates are all able to fit around one table.
On Nov. 26, with only two weeks left in the semester, they are all hard at work. They lean over each other, looking at each other’s laptops, pointing out mistakes and aesthetic changes to make. None of them knew exactly what would be in store for them when they began the course 13 weeks ago.
Their professor stands beside them, orbiting the table. “Should we move this?” she asks, pointing to an element of their page layout, built in Microsoft Word, before another one of them calls her over to the other side.
It’s 8:30 in the morning on a Tuesday, but everyone is wide awake.
For most business students, building a theoretical business is enough for a final project. Without the trouble of actually creating one, they can still demonstrate all they’ve learned about the organizational, operational, and marketing requirements of a business.
But the students taking Business Communications in Spanish (SPAN 225) have spent the semester building - and learning to market - something more than theoretical - a 12-page issue of a Spanish-language newspaper they’ve all contributed to.
Its name - “La FRAMilia.”
Marlee Griffin, a senior liberal studies major with a concentration in communication arts and English and Spanish minor, said she wrote an article on a new exhibit at the Danforth Art Museum for the newspaper.
Griffin said she works at the Danforth, which is how she heard about the exhibit, titled “My Dear Americans, It’s Not Enough,” by Ileana Doble Hernandez.
She added as an employee she also got to speak with Hernandez about her process and creating the exhibition.
The article, Griffin said, is her review of the collection, which is available for viewing at the Danforth until January.
“It’s a really cool, really powerful show, and is definitely tackling a tough topic, gun violence in America, especially regarding children since gun violence is the leading cause of death of children in the United States,” she said.
“As a mother and an immigrant coming to the U.S., that was really shocking to her, and she wanted to confront it head on,” she added.
“It’s very inspiring, and I thought it’d be a great addition to the paper,” Griffin said.
She added it wasn’t too difficult to write, either, due to the one-on-one discussion she had with the artist and her previous experience working in the art scene.
“I worked at an art gallery this past summer so I got accustomed to writing about art for their social media, so it was kind of a little easier,” she said.
“But writing in Spanish and writing a good article that is eloquent and doesn’t use the same words the whole time, that’s hard,” she added.
Making the article read naturally and being able to connect cross-culturally was also difficult, she said, but was part of what she was learning in the Business Communications in Spanish course and important to the quality of their product.
Griffin said she’s “been deemed the networking person” in her class, as she’s done a lot of outreach in order to have other FSU students who are not in the class contribute to the publication.
She said she reached out to two people about writing articles - one of whom was her Zumba instructor - and is working with another student in order to have a comic finished in time.
Griffin added there have been some hold-ups with certain pieces, such as the comic, because all the contributors are very busy - including the students enrolled in the class - but she really hopes everything can be included in time.
“It's really great to have people contribute even though they’re not in the class, and just talk to friends, talk to Jamie, who I’ve taken other classes with - and she wrote a cool article about the new president of Mexico, La Presidente,” she said.
She said she’s also helping with the online version of the paper, as she has some experience with web design.
Griffin said even though putting the newspaper together was difficult, she’s happy to be working on it.
“People are really excited about this. And I think it’s a really good opportunity to uplift the growing Spanish-speaking community in Framingham and celebrate how multicultural we are as an institution,” she said.
“It’s been really rewarding too, and I’m really excited about the reception,” she added.
Griffin said working on the newspaper made her appreciate print news.
“It’s really cool to have a physical copy of something to separate yourself from how everything is online these days,” she said. “Apps and headlines are made to grab your attention and keep your attention. … So it’s good to have something outside of that.”
She added brainstorming and working with her classmates has been her favorite part.
“They’re all really cool and good people, and it’s been really fun,” she said.
Mark Foley, a senior American Sign Language major and Spanish minor, said he wrote an article on three upcoming Spanish-speaking cultural events in Massachusetts.
The events include a Spanish-speaking cultural event in Worcester Dec. 13, a Puerto Rican cultural event in South Boston Dec. 14, and a recurring event series, a Spanish-speaking story hour, at the Framingham Public Library, which has two more installments in the month of December, he said.
Foley said the Worcester event is huge, and sells both individual tickets and entire tables to families. The event, he added, includes food, dancing, and live music, and is put on by a Latino advancement group in Worcester.
They’ll also be presenting the Latino Of The Year award, he added.
Foley said aside from writing articles, the class does most of the work collaboratively.
“We all participate in the group editing and feedback process of the article writing, which has been pretty cool. It’s nice to see what other students have written about,” he said.
Foley said the design work is also done collaboratively, although in smaller groups.
He added, “We talked about building the client portfolio, who we were trying to appeal to, and that’s something that we break into groups and discuss in both the assignments and again, as a group.”
He said their target demographic is mostly Spanish-speaking students, but also the faculty members of FSU and the campus community at large.
Foley said he thinks the newspaper is a great way of applying the skills learned in their business class.
“The goal of any business class is having a marketable product. In this case, it’s a newspaper,” he said. The skill is market research, he added - “Who are we trying to reach? What makes sense for our product?”
Foley said the class used The Gatepost as a model of a successful newspaper marketed to students. He said even with the model, for most of them it was their first time putting something like this together, which made the experience challenging.
“It’s been a good exercise in exploring these kinds of things,” he added.
Foley said the most difficult part has been the open-endedness of the project, especially when it comes to design. Since there’s no existing style guide, collaborating on a coherent design strategy has been hard. It’s also something they feel equipped to do from their assignments, he said. “It’s been cool learning about this, [but] challenging, for a grand overarching project like this throughout the semester, because again we learn about the different principles of business - in Spanish - which I think is another challenge,” he said. Foley said he most enjoyed peer editing, and found it interesting to see what his classmates and the outside contributors had written. “We had a couple guest articles written by students outside the class, some of whom were maybe, I think, native Spanish speakers,” he said. Foley added, “And so it’s one thing to have articles written in Spanish and then peer-reviewed and proofread, but to also get an article written in Spanish by a native Spanish speaker has been informational and just cool. “It’s important I think to get the voice of a native Spanish speaker, as opposed to just a student learner - both are still good - but I think you get a little more insight, or more authenticity, perhaps.” Foley said he remembered one specific article the class reviewed that stuck out to him. “It’s [on] an expression in Spanish, I’m blanking on the term now, but it was pretty much an analysis of the expression ‘his bark is worse than his bite.’ But in Spanish, it was more like, ‘the dog that barks doesn’t bite,’ and then it broke down that expression and what it means, and how you’d use it,” he said. “So it was cool to learn something specifically new while also seeing that cultural element added to the paper,” he said. Joelie Casiano, a senior criminology major and Spanish minor, wrote an article titled “Abrir caminos,” which translates to “breaking ground,” for the newspaper. The article is about two athletes, Casiano said - Christian Gonzalez, a football player for the New England Patriots, and Jasmine Camacho-Quinn, an Olympic track athlete - and the two youth programs they have built. Gonzalez’s program, he said, is for middle-school students, and Camacho’s is for high-school students. The two programs, he added, help young people with Hispanic heritage to continue playing sports in the face of financial difficulty. Casiano said it was challenging to research and write the article. “I had to get details of the program, what they were doing, and try to get numbers on how many youths they helped,” he said. He added, “Jasmine’s program, she gave grants to four people, so I had to find their names and then how much money they got, which was I think about $6,200 or so. “And then I got quotes from Christian’s youth program, the parents of the youths saying ‘Thank you Christian for making this program, we’re super grateful having you play with our kids and teaching them football.’” Casiano said he thought his Spanish writing skills really improved through writing the article, and they’ve “definitely come a long way” since he began the course. He added now that the article is written and edited, all that’s left is to design the paper and finally put it all together. Working with his peers, he added, has been easy. “A lot of the classmates in the class, I’ve taken courses with them before. It was nice, you know what I mean? All the feedback they gave me, it was all friendly - it was really nice,” he said. Casiano said business skills he learned in the course included résumé building, promotional and sales techniques, and networking, and he definitely thinks he’ll be using them in the future. He also said he’s learned how difficult it is to produce news articles after working on the paper. Especially when you’re publishing something, he said, “you want everything to look and be written perfectly - because people are going to read it. “[And] make sure to read our news articles, coming in December!” Arianna Moore, a junior fashion merchandising major and Spanish minor, wrote about a Latina fashion designer and her brand, “ESCVDO.” Moore said the brand, which started in 2013, is gaining popularity and has already won awards at fashion weeks. The designer, she added, is from Peru, and the brand focuses heavily on Peruvian culture and weaving, which is very prominent in the country’s dress. “I thought it was cool to relate fashion to Spanish culture and heritage,” she said. Moore said she also worked on group editing, and assisted with market research for the newspaper. “We wanted to figure out who our target market is, and it’s going to be people from FSU - and friends and family - who speak Spanish, and want to be involved in the Spanish-speaking community of Framingham and Framingham State,” she said. “We kind of want it to be not just for students, but for everyone, pretty much,” Moore added. “But it is going to have an undertone of being for students, because it’s written by us, and we want to make it interesting for students. “We kind of just wanted to make something new that hasn’t really been done before.” Moore said the logistics of the semester-long plan to print a newspaper have been difficult, but still enjoyable and informational. She added she most enjoyed writing her article due to the freedom of choice they were given. It was fascinating to see what her peers chose to write about, and how it combined their interests and Spanish-speaking culture, she said. Writing her article also helped her practice writing for a professional setting, and the classroom helped her practice group collaboration, she added. Moore added the small class size also worked to their advantage. “It definitely made it easier, because we were able to say our opinions without having to think about a bunch of people. And I think it made it easy for all of us to contribute equally - and communication was a lot easier,” she said. Moore said she wasn’t expecting to have to do so much research on their paper’s competitors going into the class. “We had to … figure out who our direct competitors are,” she said. “We were looking at the MetroWest Daily News, and there’s Framingham SOURCE, and I didn’t really expect to have to do a lot of research about those. “But that was definitely helpful for us to figure out how we were going to differentiate ourselves from them,” she said. Moore said she really enjoyed the class, and was thankful for her professor, Inés Vañó García, for the learning opportunity. “It was really cool for our professor to put this all together, because it is her first [semester] teaching here, and I think it was a really cool way to set up the semester and actually create something,” she said. She added, “She is possibly making it an internship to continue the newspaper, and let people keep making issues - so that’s pretty cool.” Professor of Spanish and Linguistics Inés Vañó García, the course instructor, has worked just as hard as her six students - and the many other outside contributors - to finish the first issue of “La FRAMilia” in time for the end of the semester. Vañó García has only been at Framingham State for one semester, but said she is already loving it. “I did my grad school at a public university,” she said. “And before coming here I was working at a private institution, so I was missing the public-institution feel, with all that it entails. “So I kind of have this feeling of coming back home, even if it’s my first time here.” She said she’s done projects at a similar scale before, but never made a newspaper with a class. “I was lucky enough to have a really rewarding interdisciplinary experience during grad school, where I was able to complete a digital humanities certificate and rethink all my pedagogy through that certificate and my studies,” she added. Vañó García said this led her to working with open pedagogy - the practice of helping students to create information, not just absorb it - experiential learning, and to rethink the projects students do and their purposes. “It seems to be the tendency that [knowledge learned from these projects] stays in the classroom where only other students and classmates have access to it,” she added. This led to the opportunity with the Business Communications in Spanish class, she said. “Students could have created a small business, a fake business that nobody was going to know about, and this was a way to put everything that we have learned into an artifact, a newspaper that is going to have a life after the class is over,” she said. Vañó García added, “The students are going to be able to showcase the work that they have been doing, outside the class.” She said the hope is to have the paper printed in December, before the semester is out, although next January is also a possible date for publication. All of the writing and editing has been finished, she added, and design is the last piece being worked on. Vañó García said her students have done a great job writing and reaching out to other students for contribution, and have received articles by students majoring or minoring in Spanish, and students just part of the FSU community. She added one of the class’s goals was to have the paper run and designed by students, but also for it to involve the whole campus community. “Sometimes I feel like faculty have their own thing, students have their own thing, and employees have their own thing, so [we want] to try to reach those barriers,” she said. Vañó García said the small class size has been both beneficial and challenging for them. Challenging, because fewer students means more individual work, she said, but all of the students were aware of the expectations and have been willing to do the hard work. Beneficial, because since there were fewer students, everyone was able to write about what interested them most, which made it a more pleasurable experience for the students, she added. Vañó García said she also wrote an article for the first edition. “I don’t know if I would say my writing - I did an interview,” she said. “It’s my first semester here, so I’m learning about the community and learning about the institution, but the ESL [English as a Second Language] program at Framingham State looks to be really powerful,” she added. “And I feel like sometimes they are disconnected from the undergraduate students,” Vañó García said. “So I did meet a couple of students, and I did interview them. I wanted their stories and experiences as members of the community who are Latino.” She added the two interviewees, both from Colombia, are here studying English. One of them, Felipe, has since decided to stay and begin his MBA at Framingham State, and the other, Isabel, has decided to study medicine here in America instead of in Colombia, Vañó García said. Vañó García said the learning goals for the course were to create a business, in this case one in the communications field, and build a minimum viable product - basically a “pilot” of a product with only the absolutely necessary bits. She added the class modeled the situation - in this case, the University - and how the Latino student body of Framingham State is increasing, but how this “sometimes isn’t as visible as it should be,” by the class’s perception, and how they could rectify that. “Beside those learning goals … to create a product that fulfills the necessity for a specific group of people, critical thinking skills are obviously going to be on top of that, and problem solving,” she said. Resourcefulness, digital skills, and, of course, language skills have also been thoroughly built, Vañó García added. Vañó García said she feels really proud of the class’s progress. “In 13 weeks, we have done a lot. At the beginning you question if this is going to be possible or not, and we’re at the end. We have the pieces,” she said. She added, “There’s a lot of things that haven’t worked the way we wanted, but as a group, we came together and tried to look for solutions. … And just because of that, I’m really proud. “I’d just like to thank the students for getting involved, getting into this crazy project. “They were onboard since day one.”