Heather Knorr teaches Spanish for engagement

Heather Knorr leading a Spanish class at UNC-Chapel Hill. She's holding a book past students wrote in a prior year's class. — A Carolina educator since 2010, Knorr enjoys the service-learning component of teaching at Carolina. “A lot of our Tar Heels, they go on to live in communities where they want to make an impact,” she says. (Jon Gardiner/UNC-Chapel Hill)

Heather Knorr discovered her passion for the Spanish language thanks to a childhood neighbor. A Spanish teacher who had lived in Spain, the neighbor also hosted study abroad students in her home each summer.

“I started to meet students who spoke Spanish, and I just really wanted to be able to communicate with them,” Knorr said.

Those multicultural experiences in her neighborhood stuck with Knorr. She studied Spanish in college, including at UNC-Chapel Hill as a graduate student, and worked in Nicaragua, Puerto Rico, Spain and Ecuador.

Since 2010, she’s been teaching Spanish at Carolina, where she is now a teaching associate professor in the College of Arts and Sciences’ Romance studies department.

“I was drawn to the service-learning component,” says Knorr ’06 (MA).

No class better embodies Knorr’s love for Spanish and service learning than SPAN 329: Spanish for Professional and Community Engagement.

A capstone course for students minoring in Spanish for the professions, the class prepares scholars to use their language skills professionally, whether it be in the legal, health or financial fields.

“In a couple of years, they’re going to have to either do a presentation or have to communicate with a Latino member of the community, whether it be an adult or a child,” Knorr says. “They’re going to need to use clear, concise, kind and welcoming language to connect with their patients and clients.”

The course’s trademark project — writing children’s books in Spanish and English — is great practice and an example of Knorr’s willingness to get others involved. Their bilingual stories are published digitally and printed at the UNC Print Stop and given to children to read.

The origin of the assignment dates back to Knorr’s daughter taking dual-language classes in Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools. Knorr says the books her daughter brought home were mostly “just bad Spanish translations” of commonly read stories without diverse characters.

Knorr told her Carolina students they could write better books themselves. “They took that as a challenge,” she says.

That challenge blossomed into a popular project with a new twist each year. Students earn APPLES Service-Learning credit for writing and, in some cases, illustrating the books.

Overhead angle of six books sitting on a desk.

Past books written by students in Knorr’s class include stories about Latin America’s version of the tooth fairy, a day-in-the-life of a dentist at Carolina and an Afro-Cuban Olympian. (Jon Gardiner/UNC-Chapel Hill)

The first time, students wrote books on topics local teachers suggested and delivered them to classrooms. Another year, the class collaborated with the UNC Adams School of Dentistry on books covering dental topics.

The collaborations are now international. Using Collaborative Online International Learning funding, Knorr’s class is teaming up with professor Álex Loeza Zaldívar and his advanced literature students from Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán in Mexico on books about topics of interest to children there. Knorr will deliver the books when she visits Mexico later this month.

“We kind of went into it like, ‘OK, this is just another class project,’” says Daniel Gulisano, a senior business administration major in SPAN 329. But as the semester and his book have progressed, “it’s been really neat” to regularly Zoom and work on the project with his counterpart in Yucatan, he says.

Gulisano’s book focuses on Hanal Pixán, a Mayan-rooted holiday popular in Yucatan that’s like the Day of the Dead. Among the other topics covered by Knorr’s students: a mouse named Pérez, Latin America’s version of the tooth fairy.

Beyond the books, Gulisano says the course will open doors for him. “When you have that Spanish know-how, you can understand the culture better, and all sorts of opportunities arise,” he says.

That’s an outcome Knorr hopes for in a class that she calls “una colaboración internacional con nuestros vecinos Latinos.”

Or, in English, “an international collaboration with our Latino neighbors.”

Heather Knorr talking with Daniel Gulisano at the end of class.

Daniel Gulisano has enjoyed forming what he calls a “cross-border connection” with students from Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán in Mexico. (Jon Gardiner/UNC-Chapel Hill)