She has been learning and practicing Spanish for nearly forty years by either taking college courses, attending conferences or traveling abroad to fine-tune her own personal knowledge of culture and language. Ila is always exploring ways to make learning a world language challenging, exciting and fun in the classroom. Along with her students, she has traveled to Mexico, Puerto Rico, Costa Rica and Spain. She encourages other world language teachers to network in their own local communities with heritage language speakers and regularly attends a monthly rendez-vous with hispanic speakers in her community.