CCCFLC is proud to introduce...

Dr. Alejandro Lee is Professor of Spanish at Santa Monica College. A heritage speaker of Chinese, Dr. Lee left his native Panamá to continue his education in Taiwan and the United States, where, as a first-generation college student, he graduated with honors from Pitzer College with a Bachelor of Arts in French and Spanish. He followed this with a Master of Arts and Doctorate in Hispanic Languages and Literatures, as well as a Master’s in Library and Information Science, from UCLA. He taught at UCLA, the University of Southern California, and Scripps College (part of the Claremont Colleges), as well as in the Pacific Northwest.

In 2016 Dr. Lee joined the Santa Monica College faculty, where he teaches Spanish for heritage learners, and intermediate courses. Dr. Lee is a member of the Student Instructional Support Committee and a liaison for the Modern Language Tutoring Center. He regularly advises several campus clubs, including the Spanish Club and is proud to support students in Hombre a Hombre and Men of Color Mentoring.

Dr. Lee is a summer faculty mentor for the Heritage Teacher Workshop hosted by the National Heritage Language Resource Center. He is also the co-founder of Heritage Language Exchange and is the Community College representative for the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese (AATSP). Additionally, he serves as the Chair of the College Board’s CLEP Spanish Test Development Committee and is an editorial committee member for History and Perspectives, the journal for the Chinese Historical Society of America and Plurilingual & Pluriculturales: A Newsletter on Critical Language Education.

Dr. Cristina Moon is Professor of Spanish at Chabot College. She joined the college in 2006. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in Spanish from UC Berkeley, and a Master of Arts and Doctorate in Hispanic Languages and Literatures from UCLA. Dr. Moon taught at UCLA, Scripps College, Western University of Health Sciences (Pomona), and San Jose State University. She has developed online courses for first and second-year Spanish and has been teaching online since 2008.

Currently, Dr. Moon is the Spanish Lead, H5P Lead, and the OER Liaison for the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges Open Educational Resources Initiative (ASCCC OERI). At Chabot College, she is the OER/ZTC Coordinator and World Languages Coordinator. She is the recipient of the Chabot Las Positas District Chancellor’s Award 2021.

Dr. Moon speaks several languages and is a proud heritage speaker of Korean. She straddles several worlds, having grown up in Guam, Buenos Aires, Glendale and San José.

Professor Nancy Meléndez-Ballesteros was born in New Jersey and is a first-generation college student. When she was three, her family moved to Carolina, Puerto Rico where she lived until the age of ten.

Professor Meléndez-Ballesteros holds a Bachelor of Arts in Spanish from Montclair University in New Jersey, and a Master of Arts in Spanish Linguistics from the University of California, Los Angeles. In 2015, she was conferred the degree of Candidate in Philosophy in Hispanic Languages and Literature at UCLA, where she co-founded the Centro de Estudios del Español de los Estados Unidos (CEEEUS).

Professor Meléndez-Ballesteros is currently working on her dissertation in Second Language Acquisition, focusing on Adult Learners’ Acquisition of Second Language Phonology. She has extensive experience teaching online and wholeheartedly implements technology in her face-to-face classes. Her academic interests include Second Language Acquisition, Neurolinguistics, Articulatory Phonetics, and Technology in the Foreign Language Classroom. She is a Spanish instructor at College of the Canyons and Santa Monica College, and Assistant Professor at Mount Saint Mary's University, Los Angeles, where she served as Interim Chair for the Language and Culture Department (2019).

Professor Meléndez-Ballesteros has taught online since 2004 and developed a variety of courses such as first and second-year Spanish, Spanish courses for professions, Introduction to Linguistics, Sociolinguistics, Phonetics, and Applied Linguistics. Moreover, she has given numerous workshops on online teaching and done interdisciplinary work on Project Based Learning (PBL).