Faculty Focus features highlight the innovative teaching practices, projects, and accomplishments of faculty across Austin Community College (ACC). Through this initiative, faculty are invited to share experiences ranging from classroom strategies and service-learning projects to research, presentations, and community collaborations.
For this feature, Marcel Pons Ventura, adjunct faculty professor of World Languages and instructional associate for the Honors program, shares how a collaboration between the Puerto Rican Cultural Center in Austin and her classroom inspired community-based learning and meaningful experiences for her students.
Interested in reading more highlights of what faculty are doing across the College? View the previous Faculty Focus blog feature here.
During spring 2026, I taught SPAN 1412 Honors: Ritmos del Caribe—The Music, Slang, and Culture of the Caribbean. The course uses music and other forms of cultural expression to help students explore the language, history, and identities of Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Colombia, Venezuela, and Puerto Rico.
As part of our Puerto Rico unit on bomba and plena, I partnered with the Puerto Rican Cultural Center in Austin to extend students’ learning beyond the classroom. Students visited the Center’s Café, Cultura y Amistad program on May 2 and May 9, 2026. There, they experienced traditional Puerto Rican music and dance in a community setting, observed a dance class accompanied by live drumming, and connected course concepts with the artists and cultural practitioners who preserve these traditions.
This experience demonstrated how community-based learning can make language and culture more immediate and meaningful. For students with connections to Hispanic and Caribbean cultures, the visit offered opportunities to strengthen cultural pride, identity, and belonging. For students from other backgrounds, it promoted cultural awareness, appreciation, and respect.
The visit also opened the door to a broader collaboration among the Puerto Rican Cultural Center, the ACC Honors Program, and the World Languages Department. We are exploring a future workshop for ACC students that would combine Puerto Rican history with participatory music and dance activities. The proposed initiative may also include follow-on scholarships for students interested in continuing their study of Puerto Rican cultural arts and history at the Center. I contributed a letter of support and information about ACC’s programs and students for the Center’s Texas Commission on the Arts grant proposal supporting the project’s research and development.
Faculty can transform a course topic into a meaningful experiential-learning opportunity by connecting with local cultural organizations and community experts. I encourage colleagues—particularly those in World Languages, Honors, History, Music, and Dance—to explore the Puerto Rican Cultural Center’s programs and consider how community partnerships could support their own course outcomes. Faculty interested in contributing to a future interdisciplinary ACC workshop are also encouraged to connect with me.
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Have a teaching strategy, classroom project, collaboration, publication, presentation, or accomplishment you would like to share with colleagues across ACC? The Office of Academic Affairs Communications invites faculty to submit a Faculty Focus feature!
