Sam Sharpe Teachers’ College students benefit from Spanish exchange scholarship

WESTERN BUREAU:

Four students, who are studying modern languages at the Sam Sharpe Teachers’ College (SSTC) in Montego Bay, St James, will be spending this semester in Spain at the Universidad de Jaén in Andalusia on a student exchange scholarship programme between both institutions.

Three of the students, Brittany Brown, Ramona Vernon, and Arianna Buchanan, accompanied by lecturer Kimberley Watt, are now in Spain, having departed the island last week. The fourth student, Elanie James, will be joining them soon.

The exchange scholarship came after Malbis Morris, a former lecturer, introduced SSTC to a European Union student exchange programme called Erasmus (European Community Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students), which is offering schemes for education, training, youth, and sport.

The scholarship exchange programme is geared towards helping students to master Spanish over the next three months, after which they will return home to prepare for their third year of teaching practice.

Outside of Spain, SSTC is also involved in a similar agreement with Universidad de Panamá, where students have been doing their six-week immersion programme.

“Their major is Spanish and as part of the Spanish programme, they have to do at least six weeks of study in a Spanish-speaking country,” explained Merlene Blake, head of the Department of Modern Languages at SSTC.

The agreement for the exchange scholarship programme, from which the students are now benefiting, was inked in 2020, but the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic forced a delay.

The original benefactors have since graduated, paving the way for the current beneficiaries, who are mandated to study either Spanish, French or English.

The students now in Spain have described their new learning environment as an old but beautiful city, which they are looking forward to enjoying as much as possible.