Jenny Nadaner

Jenny Nadaner is a life-long passionate language learner, having studied Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese. Jenny loves teaching and working with students with a wide range of learning styles from diverse backgrounds. She believes that pedagogical strategies need to be compatible with the individual and is committed to the differentiated learning experience of each student.

Jenny’s philosophy of teaching has evolved in the context of her experience of 18 years as an instructor of Spanish at the University of California, Davis, the Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, Mendoza (Argentina), Stanford University Online High School, and independent high schools in the Pacific Northwest. In her teaching, Jenny emphasizes content and task-based instruction that leads to confident, pragmatic communicative competence with real life applications. Through this approach, the experience of Spanish language learning becomes meaningful in ways that contribute to the students’ appreciation and understanding of other cultures, while cultivating their intrinsic motivation to pursue more advanced education.

Jenny’s mission as a Spanish language instructor is to create a community of students who are enthusiastic about learning and become successful leaders in the increasingly interconnected and multicultural world. She believes that students learn best when exposed to primary sources, such as music, literature, history, art, geography, and current events, and are encouraged to see relationships between the language that they are learning and other fields of study of their own interest.

In her free time, Jenny enjoys spending time with her young son and husband. She is an outdoors enthusiast with a passion for rollerblading, hiking, and boogie-boarding. Jenny loves to travel and looks forward to vacations visiting with family in California and Argentina, and can often be seen sipping her preferred tea, yerba maté, from a traditional maté gourd.