Liv Halaas Detwiler grew up shy, quiet and reserved in the Midwest with a Scandinavian family heritage. She had no idea she would fall in love with a new language that would change the course of her life.
Now a senior lecturer and the Spanish coordinator of the Spanish Department at ETSU, Detwiler said that the Spanish language helped her break out of her shell.
Her passion for the Spanish language started when she was in middle school. She attended Spanish language immersion camps through a non-profit program called the Concordia Language Villages in Minnesota.
Concordia College, where Detwiler’s parents, grandparents and eventually she would attend college, created the camp program. Her grandparents always encouraged her to go, but she was too afraid to go alone. When a friend in middle school asked her if she wanted to go with her, Detwiler decided to venture into the program completely immersed in language and culture.
“You get there, and they only speak Spanish the entire time; and I went knowing nothing whatsoever,” Detwiler said. “My dad taught me how to say, ‘Hola,’ in the car on the way there, and I had the best two weeks of my life.”
Fascinated by the sight of children her own age speaking another language, Detwiler wanted to reach that goal. She went back every summer for five years, and her life began to revolve around the camps.
“It totally pushed me in a specific direction in terms of what I wanted to do in college, which was Spanish education,” Detwiler said.
Attending a middle school that did not offer Spanish classes, the camps provided a way for her to learn the Spanish language.
She went on to work with the program as a counselor, an instructor for study abroad to Argentina, an accredited high school teacher in their one-month summer course, and eventually a director for one of their Spanish camps.
“They took me under their wing and coached me on how to be an effective teacher, an effective leader and effective team member,” Detwiler said. “It was just kind of fascinating how that all worked so organically, and I developed. I very much developed as a person and was permitted in this comforting environment to come out of my shell – both personally and professionally.”
Detwiler attended Concordia College in Minnesota, where she received a bachelor’s degree in Spanish along with her teaching licensure. Shortly after, she moved to Massachusetts, and taught for three years at Needham High School. She went back to school at the University of Massachusetts Amherst to get her master’s degree Hispanic linguistics. While there, she taught at North Hampton High School for one year while her husband finished his doctoral degree.
“I liked Hispanic linguistics because it played off what I was already doing in the foreign language classroom in high school because you can focus on things like second language acquisition,” said Detwiler. “Like how do people learn a second language or a foreign language?”
She also likes how Hispanic Linguistics contains varying fields such as sociolinguistics and dialectology, which she is intrigued by. She said where Spanish is spoken in many different countries across the world, dialect policy maps out different characteristics in vocabulary, grammar trends, conjugation difference and register differences.
“Things like that just sound totally fascinating because Spanish is that one [language], completely mutually intelligible but at the same time totally utterly diverse,” Detwiler said. “Linguistics allowed me to look into that.”
They moved to Kingsport in 2011 when her husband got a job at Eastman. At this time, she worked for one year at ETSU an adjunct professor. She got a full time position the next year
Detwiler assumed the title of Spanish Program Coordinator in the 2017 fall semester. In this position, she advises students interested in pursuing a Spanish major or minor. Her work also includes the management of 1010 through 2020 instructional material to help other professors and maintain consistency in the program.
“I kind of adopted this other cultural identity through the language that I’ve learned and the people that I’ve immersed myself with,” Detwiler said.
She likes that the Spanish language is a completely opposite environment of her personality and that it allows her to communicate in ways that did not think she could. She describes Spanish as “super social and super loud,” as well as colorful, fun and positive.
“You know, contradiction makes life interesting,” Detwiler said.
