Dr. Jill Castek and Dr. Janice McGregor are the recipients of the 2022 CERCLL Faculty Fellowships.
CERCLL Faculty Research Fellows:
Jill Castek, Associate Professor, Department of Teaching, Learning, and Sociocultural Studies, College of Education
Professional Learning for Language Teachers: Customizing Materials for Language Teachers’ Design of Virtual Field Experiences
This project will refine and customize a suite of training materials and tutorials that has been developed across two cohort cycles of Worlds of Experience offered in 2021-2022, including language teachers who teach Hebrew, French, Spanish, and Mandarin. The materials are Virtual Field Experiences (VFEs), informal learning experiences that get students out into the world, exploring the world and students’ interests using foreign language in context. VFEs feature international locations in a culturally sustaining and language-centered way. They illustrate that learning, life, and cultural exploration happens outside the classroom, too. During virtual field experiences, learners discover new things and learn language in authentic environments, placing language learning in new contexts.
Four language teachers who have designed VFEs, will review the re-designed learning materials to be used in the training, provide feedback on assessments used as pre/post measures of growth, and offer suggestions for VFE language teacher curriculum integration. The revamped professional learning series will be retooled and implemented in 2022-2023, with a new cohort of teachers who will learn to design VFEs.
(See also a presentation on this topic that was made at the 2022 Intercultural Competence Conference.)
➤ See the Worlds of Experience website created from this project, with Virtual FIeld Experiences created by educators who participated in the cohorts funded through the fellowship awarded to Dr. Castek, and subsequent development.
Janice McGregor, Assistant Professor of German Studies and Second Language Acquisition & Teaching (SLAT)
Examining Un(grading) Approaches in Language Learning Contexts
“Ungrading”—the purposeful act of going gradeless—has received a lot of attention outside of language education (Blum, 2020). Language educators interested in examining their own biases and moving away from antagonistic student-teacher relationships that grades and grading hierarchies can often generate thus have limited field-specific resources to help them bring alternative grading approaches to bear in their classrooms, study abroad programs, and curricula. To question “grades as systemic practice” (Stommel, 2021) in language education and engage trust-centered ways of evaluating learning, this survey project will examine language educators’ (un)grading practices. An analysis of respondents’ contributions will scrutinize common emergent themes around grading, including how notions of language, learning, and assessment are jointly constructed (Wernicke & Talmy, 2018). Implications for language pedagogy and program articulation will be used in a larger-scale project in the coming years.
For further details about these programs and links to previous projects that they funded, click here.
With gratitude to the funders of the CERCLL Fellows programs, including the University of Arizona’s College of Humanities, and the Office for Research and Partnerships.