Program Overview

The Spanish for Health Care and Human Services Certificate aims at developing students’ linguistic proficiency and cultural competency in Spanish so that they can operate professionally in a medical and human services setting with native speakers of the language.  The courses in the certificate are designed to familiarize students with the intricacies of the language (especially false cognates) to make them effective translators and interpreters. The projects for all their certificate courses will be focused on a comprehensive understanding of health care and human services, including topics as diverse as the analysis of preventive campaigns, historical representations of different diseases or debates on race and ethnicity.  The objectives of this multi-pronged approach are to endow students with the capacity to overcome linguistic barriers and gain an understanding of cultural competency that would allow for building patient-practitioner relationship.

Learning Outcomes

• Become familiar with vocabulary applicable to medical or human services settings.
• Develop communication skills necessary to compile a medical history or do a human services assessment.
• Demonstrate oral proficiency to handle patient’s or client’s complaints or concerns
• Develop effective preventive or social awareness campaigns
• Analyze and question representations of diseases in international media (zika, AIDS…), paying special attention at the social and political dimensions of these representations.
• “Demonstrate cultural competence required for negotiating a diverse global society, including intercultural understanding, dynamics of power and privilege, identifying and moving beyond the ethnocentric views we receive from our culture”
• Prepare students to take the Bilingual Communicative Ability Test (BICAT) administered by the State of New Jersey Civil Service Commission.