About me

I'm Anita Saalfeld (aka Profe), and I've been teaching Spanish 1-4 at Fort Calhoun since 2017.  I've been teaching Spanish since 1999, when as a clueless new grad student in a Spanish literature master's degree program at UNL, I was thrown into a Spanish 1 classroom with a book, a syllabus, and a couple days of teacher training.  I loved the opportunity to share my enthusiasm for Spanish, but recognized that I lacked a lot of experience and expertise in language teaching.  When I finished my master's degree, I decided I wanted to pursue additional study in applied linguistics so that I would understand how people learn languages, and how we can best facilitate that through our teaching.  I went to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and in conjunction with my doctorate in Hispanic linguistics, I pursued a graduate certificate in Second Language Acquisition and Teacher Education.  I finally finished my doctorate in 2009, 15 years after I started college.  Along the way, I've taught a number of different Spanish courses at various colleges and universities (if you're interested, you can see the full list of courses I've taught here, and you can see my educational credentials here). 

Why travel?

I'm interested in providing students with travel opportunities because my own experience traveling was a life-changing part of my education.

I spent a semester studying abroad in Heredia, Costa Rica, in 1998 as part of my Spanish major at UNL. That experience gave me the opportunity to become a fluent Spanish speaker, meet new people, experience another culture firsthand, and develop the confidence to navigate unfamiliar places and situations in another language.

I want students to have opportunities to discover some of those things for themselves. A 10-day tour obviously isn't the same experience as a semester abroad, but it can be a first step: an opportunity to see another part of the world, experience other cultures, try new things, and discover that traveling internationally is something they can do.

In 2023, after several years of planning and delays, I had the opportunity to lead our first group of Fort Calhoun travelers to Spain and France. It was incredibly rewarding to finally see students experiencing places we'd talked about in the classroom and use their Spanish to do things like order ice cream! 🍦

My hope is that these trips give students wonderful experiences now and encourage some of them to pursue longer study-abroad opportunities after high school.