Two veteran Spanish instructors at Grossmont and Cuyamaca colleges have been picked by their peers as the academic year’s best teachers, honored with top awards recognizing exemplary service to the campuses.

At Grossmont College, receiving the Distinguished Faculty honor for full-time, tenured faculty was Spanish instructor Yolanda Guerrero. At Cuyamaca College, receiving the Outstanding Faculty Award for full-time faculty was Spanish instructor Patricia Santana.

Grossmont College’s Guerrero

A 28-year veteran instructor, Guerrero is the senior faculty member in the World Languages department and has seen much change in the program, not only in growth, but in more diverse offerings and a new approach to teaching foreign languages.

In 1986, she joined the World Language Department, which then consisted of only three full-time faculty teaching Spanish, French and German. Within three years, the San Diego native was chair of the program and was instrumental in the program’s transformation from its traditional language development approach to one that is now based on oral proficiency.

“It isn’t enough to know words and their meanings, you need to be able to converse,” said Guerrero, an alum of the University of California, San Diego, where she earned her bachelor’s and master’s, as well as her doctorate. Under her leadership, the department has added Chinese, Arabic, Japanese and Russian to its curricula, bringing to eight the total number of foreign languages taught at Grossmont College.

Over the years, her awards and recognitions have been numerous: she was accepted into the prestigious Fellowship Program from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and was one of 15 recipients in the United States selected by the foundation to participate in Leadership Development. A full professor, she has served as chair of the World Language Department for more than nine years and has been coordinator of Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, Italian and Russian. She also received a two-year grant funded to improve articulation between San Diego State University and Grossmont and Cuyamaca colleges. She received another grant to develop prerequisite exams for the department and helped develop 32 exams in eight languages that are currently administered to over 300 students.

And while Southwestern College is practically around the corner from her home in Bonita, it is at Grossmont College that she is happily ensconced, delighted to be back in the classroom after her latest stint as department chair.

“People here really make you feel at home,” she said. “In every department, you see such excellent people committed to the success of students. It truly is a great place to work.”

Guerrero said she also relishes the ties she has developed with students, both inside and outside the classroom. She has served as faculty adviser to M.E.Ch.A., a national student organization that promotes higher education, Chicano culture and history, and the Spanish Club, and helped establish the Latin America Student Organization. From her first days at Grossmont, she has helped organize Latino/Mexican cultural events, including the Cinco de Mayo and Mexican Independence Day celebrations in the Main Quad, and the Dia de los Muertos altars and Mexican masks exhibits in the library and tech mall.

Cuyamaca College’s Santana

Even after 35 years of teaching, Associate Professor Patricia Santana still gets butterflies in the pit of her stomach at the start of each semester.

“It is the challenge of getting students to appreciate the benefits and even the fun of learning another language,” said Santana, who was hired at Cuyamaca College as a part-time Spanish instructor in 1981, becoming full-time in 1997. She is currently chair of the World Languages Department.

The Outstanding Faculty Award was presented to Santana because of her active role in college committees and participatory governance. Faculty Senate President Alicia Munoz said Santana “advocated for faculty interest equitably and with integrity, without losing sight of the larger institutional goal.’

The author of two novels, “Motorcycle Ride on the Sea of Tranquility,” (University of New Mexico Press, 2002) and its sequel, “Ghosts of El Grullo,” (University of New Mexico Press, 2008), Santana is widely recognized in the field of Chicano literature, a benefit to the college because of the exposure that Santana’s writings have drawn.

Santana’s debut novel was the first-place winner of the Chicano/Latino Literary Contest, and was selected as a Best Books for Young Adults selection in 2003 by the Young Adult Library Services Association.

Her second novel won the Premio Aztlán Literary Prize, a national award for emerging Chicana and Chicano authors, and the San Diego Book Award for General Fiction. Santana has completed a third, as-yet untitled book, for which she is currently seeking literary representation, and has started her fourth novel, which she calls the third in a trilogy that started with “Motorcycle Ride.”

Santana said that although she relishes summer breaks for the writing time they allow her, she doesn’t envision ever giving up teaching.

“I love the classroom too much and the satisfaction of seeing students progress,” she said. “By the second and third semester of Spanish, light bulbs are turning on as they become more conversant. I will retire when I no longer love to teach and I am nowhere near that.”