Spanish and Portuguese
Profesor Allan received his doctorate from Kent State University in 2018 in Curriculum & Instruction with a focus in Teaching Studies. His dissertation was a naturalistic and phenomenological study of how the pivotal lived experiences of experienced secondary and university teachers affect and interact with their critical decision-making in the full spectrum of all teaching (instruction, interaction, community, assessing learning etc.) as well as the role of reflective practice in the teaching world. He holds a Master of Education in Languages/second language acquisition and Spanish, a BA in Spanish and Education, and two teaching credentials in Spanish with gifted and talented endorsement since 1995. His teaching career began as a FLES/FLEX language teacher in French, German, Latin, and Spanish for grades 5th-8th before moving to secondary education, where he taught all levels of Spanish and AP Spanish Language and Culture in the private and public-school setting from 1996-2010. From 2010-2016, he was a university instructor of Elementary and Intermediate Spanish and served as University Supervisor and Evaluator for student teachers in world languages. From 2016-2018 he taught adolescent development at Temple University in the College of Education. His area of expertise is the instruction and the evaluation of language learning in the early and intermediate stages of second language acquisition and believes that the language classroom should be a safe, communicative, inclusive, and dynamic teaching space that prepares each learner for communication inside and outside of the classroom by forming positive and useful knowledge of the Spanish-speaking world, and creating an engaging and communicative classroom environment so that all unique individual levels and abilities are fostered and built upon for proficiency in interpretive, interpersonal and presentational skills for authentic language experiences. In 2021, Dr. Allan received the Certificate in Excellence in Teaching from the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2024, he received an SAS Teacher Innovation Grant from the Penn Language Center.