Alan Hidalgo Raw Video Series: Community College Instructor and Students on the BTW series

For more information on the Alan Hidalgo Team for educational consulting or to know more about the Between Two Worlds series for ELA and ESL students at the high school and college/university level, please visit our website Alanhidalgo.com or contact the Alan Hidalgo Team directly at alanhidalgocr@gmail.com

In this video, community college EMLS (ESL) instructor, Ms. Kimberly Recinos, and her students, speak about their experience incorporating the BTW series into their classroom for the first time. This series is very unique due to its wide appeal. From high school students to college students, from ESL classes to advanced English courses, and from teenagers to mature adults, students have found the novels in the series incredibly interesting and highly relevant, and the accompanying workbook to have such an academic range of SDAIE [specially designed academic instruction in English] exercises (vocabulary development and reading comprehension to basic essay composition) to HOT [higher order thinking] exercises (reading analysis, Transcendent Path of Argumentation, and advanced essay composition and rhetoric).

Students at the high school (including alternative education) and college level have found the ten novels that comprise the Between Two Worlds: A Multicultural and Multilingual Anthology to have had a deep and lasting positive impact on their lives. This is due to the life skills taught via the many high interest themes found in each novel (difficult family upbringing, navigating relationships as a young adult, gang violence, drugs, personal identity, MMA, culture, immigration, bullying, etc.) as well as the diverse cast of characters found in each novel (with settings ranging from California to Massachusetts to New Mexico to Texas to Indiana and origins ranging from immigration to the United States from Italy to Brazil and the Philippines to Nigeria and Mexico to Argentina and South Korea to Puerto Rico) and South America to the Middle East.

Students have also found the BTW Student Workbook to have greatly impacted their education as they have improved their ELA skills; namely, their ability to think critically and enter into higher order thinking, to apply moral reasoning, to cognitively analyze literature, and to write strong academic essay responses. This, in turn, naturally leads to improved grades in the classroom and increased test scores on standardized assessments. The Between Two Worlds series (BTW Anthology, Student Workbooks, and Instructor Manual, are found at Amazon and Barnes & Nobles.