SLLC Faculty awarded funding to “Reimagine Learning”

The University’s Teaching and Learning Transformation Center has awarded funding to over 100 educational projects across campus focused on expanding active and experiential learning.

The University’s Teaching and Learning Transformation Center has awarded funding to over 100 educational projects across campus focused on expanding active and experiential learning. Twenty of those awards are to faculty in the College of Arts and Humanities and six awards to SLLC faculty.

The projects focus on the redesign of a specific course or course section(s) (up to $20,000 per proposal) or include a cluster of courses and/or educational activities (up to $70,000 per proposal). 

“Reimagine learning” is one of four commitments in the new UMD Strategic Plan, describing the vision to move the institution “fearlessly forward in pursuit of excellence and impact for the public good.” 

The SLLC funded projects are as follows:

Language Learning for Multilingual Societies: Experiential Learning and Project Based Curricula

PI: Manel Lacorte (SLLC/SPAN)

Co-PIs: Kira Gor (SLLC/SLA), Elisa Gironzetti (SLLC/SPAP); Lindsay Yotsukura (SLLC/JAPN), Bronson Hui (SLLC/SLA), Ross Lewin (OIA), Mary Ellen Scullen (SLLC/FREN) ($70,000 grant)
 
In response to UMD’s call for solutions to global grand challenges and a new vision for teaching and learning, linguists and language pedagogues in the SLLC, in collaboration with the Office of International Affairs (OIA), will develop experiential learning components to be integrated into new undergraduate and graduate programs based on a project-based curriculum. Our goals are to (1) engage students in community work with the diverse language communities in the Washington metropolitan area and with immigrant populations; (2) provide UMD language and culture students with immersive learning opportunities using best practices of global learning and partnership development; (3) create a collaborative experimental lab to test innovative approaches to language learning and teaching tailored to the needs of specific learners; (4) revitalize and expand community-building activities on Campus, such as the Language House, the Language Partner Program, College Park Scholars, and Global Communities; and (5) contribute to equitable and fair access to learning resources for second language acquisition by engaging students in research activities related to free language apps and their distribution.

SLLC 398A The Art of Dissent: Aesthetics, Politics and Civil Disobedience (team-taught course)

PI: Cynthia Martin (RUSS)

Collaborators: Josh Alvizu (GERS), Andrea Frisch (FREN), Avital Karpman (HEBR/JWST), Thayse Lima (SPAP), Eyda Merediz (SPAP), Matt Miller (PERS), Marjan Moosavi (PERS)

We are developing a new course about the role of artist/writer in the struggle against oppression in multiple cultural traditions: French, German, Hebrew, Persian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. We will be exploring how art (broadly conceived) in these cultural traditions has been used to contest power and oppression and resist tyranny. Students will learn about the complex role art, literature, cinema, and other cultural products play in social and political movement building. The course is intended to be multilingual, i.e., it is intended for students who have intermediate proficiency in at least one of the languages represented, and the course will include common work in English and language-specific work in small break-outs.

Spanish at Work - Internships and experiential learning modules for Spanish in the Professions

PI: Elisa Gironzetti (SPAP)

Co-PIs: Chris Lewis (SPAP), Mehl Penrose (SPAP), José Magro (SPAP)

The Department of Spanish and Portuguese (SPAP) is expanding its internship offerings through SPAN 386, Experiential Learning, to include, for students who successfully complete a course in Spanish for the Professions, the possibility of an internship with local Hispanic associations, companies, and nonprofits in that particular field (e.g., the Greater Washington Hispanic Chamber of Commerce for the course Spanish for Business I). Additionally, to ensure the success of SPAN 386 and prepare students’ for a meaningful internship experience, we plan to integrate at least one experiential learning component into each course of Spanish for the Professions currently offered by SPAP. These will be offered in collaboration with the same associations, companies, and nonprofits that will offer internships through SPAN 386. To do so, SPAP will take advantage of UMD's privileged location in the Greater Washington area, which has one of the fastest growing and most diverse Latino/Latina/Latinx populations in the United States with over 800,000 residents, and partner with embassies, international institutions such as the Inter-American Development Bank, NGOs, local governmental organizations and businesses that are involved in activities that require a knowledge of Spanish language and Latino/Latina/Latinx cultures in the Greater Washington area.

Chinese Language Partnerships for CHIN 101 and CHIN 301

PI: Minglang Zhou

Co-PIs for CHIN 101: Guiling Hu (CHIN), Mei Kong (CHIN), Jungjung Lee-Heitz (CHIN) Co-PIs for CHIN 302: Yuli Wang (CHIN)

The Chinese program won two TLTC grants, one for CHIN101 and one for CHIN301 this summer.
The grants will facilitate the addition of a component of experiential learning, Chinese Language Partnership (CLP), to CHIN101 and CHIN301. In learning a second language, it is not sufficient for students just to learn the linguistic forms of the target language. A language is a culture and a way of living. To become competent speakers, students have to fully develop socio-cultural competence in the target language. However, this is difficult to achieve in a traditional language classroom that lacks authentic Chinese-specific socialization processes. To solve this problem, we will integrate CLP into CHIN101 and CHIN301, based on our pilot in Spring 2022, and start the integration in Fall 2022. We will recruit international students from China on the UMD campus for in-person meetings and students from our collaborating university in Taiwan for online meetings. We will pair each student with a native speaker for a weekly one-hour meeting (a half hour in Chinese and the other half hour in English) during the fall semester, assign the pair a weekly conversational topic covered in class, require our students to submit a weekly report in in Chinese or translanguaging, and organize a cultural event for participants on campus. Updated syllabi of CHIN101 and CHIN301 will include CLP as (a) course activities for grading and (b) components of learning outcomes. Through the implementation this fall, the new syllabi with CLP will be improved and normalized as our reinvention of the second language classroom in the 21st century.

Gender-Inclusion in the Foreign Language Class

PI: Avital Karpman (HEBR/JWST)

Instructor Collaborator: Aliza Sandalon (SLLC)

The stricly gender-binary language of Hebrew makes authentic self-expression difficult for those speakers who are gender nonconforming. This project aims to redevelop HEBR249G (Gender and Identity in Israeli Society) as an experiential learning course in which students will engage with the work and expertise of innovators in this field to research, create and test out new, nonbinary and neutral grammar in real time. The students will develop or add to new grammar formations through a collaborative website, discuss solutions to challenges in the Hebrew classroom that relate to gender, and create recorded teaching modules for students and teachers at UMD and beyond.