Accessible entirely online, the L2 Digital Literacies Symposium (L2DL) is a biennial international event offering an array of synchronous and asynchronous sessions that allow academics to make connections across the globe. In 2020, the conference focuses upon the theme of Critical Transnational Dialogue and Virtual Exchange, and explores intersections between international education, digital literacies, and virtual exchange.
Virtual presentations selected from submitted proposals will be available during the week of October 19-24, and attendees are encouraged to participate in synchronous and asynchronous discussion that will take place through October 23; professional development credentials will be provided for presenters and attendees who participate in these activities. The symposium will culminate in livestreamed, invited presentations that will take place on October 23 and 24.
The symposium schedule and presentation details are on the L2DL website. Access all the details and the link to registration there.
Photo Credit: Erin J. Bernard
Webinar presented by Michelle Nicola (Portland Public Schools).
What do we mean when we say that we are social justice educators? What are concrete actions that social justice educators take? What beliefs or mindsets do we adopt? This webinar was created to help educators define what they mean by social justice education, and offer suggestions for how to incorporate self-reflection, relationship building & curriculum design as tools to recognize and interrupt inequitable patterns and practices in our world language classrooms and beyond. Participants also received a few lesson plan ideas that they can build on to meet their own communities’ social justice goals.
This event was one in a three-part webinar series about teaching social justice in the language classroom. The others are presented by LJ Randolph on September 12, and Stacey Margarita Johnson on October 3.
Download the presentation slides (PDF)
Watch the presentation in YouTube
Bio:
Michelle Nicola is a teacher, writer and instructional coach from Portland, Oregon. In 2018, she lived in Xalapa, Mexico as a Fulbright Distinguished Award in Teaching fellow, collecting Afro-Mexican stories that shaped her curriculum once home. Michelle believes in the power of good stories, highlighting joy and justice, and self-reflection as key components of social justice teaching. She is one of the 2014 recipients of Teaching Tolerance’s Excellence in Teaching Award, and has published articles in Rethinking Schools Magazine. On Michelle’s bucket list: Take a dance class in every Spanish speaking country! (She currently spends ample lockdown time planning how to accomplish this feat post-pandemic.) Michelle works for Portland Public Schools and can be reached on Twitter @profe_nicola.
During the registration process, participants can request to receive a certificate of attendance for 1.5 hours of Continuing Education for attending the live event; or participants can request to receive a digital badge after the event.
Participants requiring closed captions at the time of the CERCLL’s events should request this at least a week in advance by emailing CERCLL at cercll@email.arizona.edu.
Webinar presented by Stacey Margarita Johnson (Vanderbilt University).
Instructors building social justice into their language teaching often report that they hope their language classrooms will be sites of transformative learning and personal growth. As teachers, we want our teaching to make the world better and inspire students to become engaged citizens. Although we might hope for transformative learning, we don’t always know how it happens or how to guide our students through the process of transformation. This webinar explored the steps in transformative learning, its connection to critical pedagogy and social justice, and, most importantly, ways language teachers can promote transformative learning through instructional choices that align with research and best practices in second language acquisition.
Download the presentation slides (PDF)
This event was one in a three-part webinar series about teaching social justice in the language classroom. The others were presented by LJ Randolph on September 12, and Michelle Nicola on October 17.
Bio:
Stacey Margarita Johnson is the Assistant Director for Educational Technology at the Center for Teaching, a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and Affiliated Faculty in the Center for Second Language Studies at Vanderbilt University. She is also the editor of Spanish and Portuguese Review and the producer and host of the podcast “We Teach Languages”. She has published books and articleson topics related to postsecondary language classroom practices, hybrid/blended instruction, and adult learning including transformative learning and critical pedagogy. Stacey is currently working on several projects including a monograph about the potential for problem-based learning in the language classroom and an edited collection co-edited with Kelly Davidson and LJ Randolph entitled How We Take Action: Social Justice in K-16 Language Classrooms.
During the registration process, participants can request to receive a certificate of attendance for 1.5 hours of Continuing Education for attending the live event; or participants can request to receive a digital badge after the event.
Participants requiring closed captions at the time of the CERCLL’s events should request this at least a week in advance by emailing CERCLL at cercll@email.arizona.edu.
CERCLL is proud to cosponsor ALTA43: In Between, the American Literary Translators Association Conference.
Translation is neither here nor there. It exists in a space between languages, cultures, texts, authors, and readers. The ALTA43 theme “In Between” invites participants to consider the ways translation and translators function not as mediators between fixed points—“source text,” “original language,” “target culture”—but rather in a constant state of betweenness. Translation as an in-between practice seeks not to cross borders (whether real or artificial) but to transcend and dissolve them, to show how language, cultures, and texts are never singular and always in process. This theme also resonates with the intended conference venue of Tucson, Arizona, ALTA’s current home and a territory that reminds us of the continuous shifting and arbitrariness of borders and the power of the nuances of language.
ALTA43 takes place online this year. See the conference details: https://literarytranslators.org/conference.
This webinar was presented by L. J. Randolph, Ed.D., Associate Professor of Spanish and Education and coordinator of the World Language Teacher Education Program, University of North Carolina, Wilmington, Participants in the webinar discussed the various frameworks that inform social justice in language education and explored ways to connect critical and social justice-oriented pedagogies to language learning goals. The presenter shared authentic resources, lesson ideas, and sample activities for a variety of proficiency levels. The webinar also included a specific emphasis on using technological tools for resource selection, student engagement, assessment, and professional development. Participants gained a better understanding of how social justice learning goals and activities can be effectively embedded into their existing curricula.
See resources shared by attendees during the live event.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=MgTWeV8Xl7c
This event was one in a three-part webinar series about teaching social justice in the language classroom. The others are presented by Stacey Margarita Johnson on October 3 and Michelle Nicola on October 17.
Dr. Randolph’s Bio:
L. J. Randolph Jr., Ed.D., is an Associate Professor of Spanish and Education and coordinator of the World Language Teacher Education Program at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. L.J.’s teaching career has spanned nearly 20 years, including a decade as a Spanish and ESOL teacher at the secondary level. At the university level, he has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in Spanish language, contemporary Latinx cultures, and second language teaching methods. He has also directed study abroad programs in China, Mexico, Spain, and the Dominican Republic for secondary, undergraduate, and graduate students.
L.J.’s research, publications, and professional engagement have focused on a variety of critical issues in language education, including the teaching of Spanish to heritage and native speakers and the incorporation of social justice-oriented pedagogies in the language classroom. He has authored/co-authored several articles and given dozens of scholarly presentations on those topics. In addition, throughout his career he has served in leadership roles in various language organizations, including president of the Foreign Language Association of North Carolina (FLANC), president of the North Carolina Chapter of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese (AATSP), coordinator of the Cape Fear Foreign Language Collaborative (CFFLC), board member for the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL), and founding vice-chair of ACTFL’s special interest group for Critical and Social Justice approaches.
A free webinar presented by Bryan Kirschen, Assistant Professor of Spanish & Linguistics at Binghamton University, State University of New York
Judeo-Spanish, often referred to as Ladino, is a variety of Spanish that continues to be spoken by a limited number of Sephardic Jews today. While classified as an endangered language, Judeo-Spanish is experiencing a resurgence of sorts, one that is particularly advanced by learners of the language. This talk highlights a recent online mini-series of workshops offered in Judeo-Spanish, which generated interest and participation from hundreds of students from around the globe. Additionally, this talk considers the role of the current pandemic and how a community of speakers and learners of a language might exist and be retained even during a time when state and national mandates require its citizens to remain at home.
This event is part of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies‘ Virtual Lessons Learned series, and cosponsored by CERCLL, the Critical Languages Program, and the Arizona Center for Judaic Studies.
A webinar presented by Rebecca Aubrey, 2019 ACTFL Teacher of the Year.
June 17, 10 am – 11 am Arizona (10 am PDT / 1 pm EDT)
About this event:
Learning a language is no longer just about preparing for college, but about preparing all students to live in a globalized world. Thus, every student has a right to study languages and teachers need to meet their diverse needs. We typically add differentiation strategies after a lesson has been developed. This is time-consuming and disrespectful of the diversity of our students. In this webinar, participants will learn to differentiate through backwards design by individualizing proficiency targets within a common theme, empowering students to self-direct how they show their learning, and designing a variety of learning activities.
About the presenter:
Rebecca Aubrey received her B.A. in Human Ecology from College of the Atlantic, M.A. in Political Science from the University of Connecticut, and a Teaching Certification through the Connecticut Alternate Route to Certification. She has over 20 years of teaching experience at the college level, and 10 years of experience teaching Spanish in grades K-8. Rebecca has presented broadly in Connecticut and at the national level on topics like differentiation, positive behavior intervention strategies, and target language use. Rebecca is passionate about exploring the cultural and linguistic diversity of our world, and equally passionate about empowering students to do the same. She is the 2019 ACTFL Teacher of the Year.
During the registration process, participants could request a certificate of attendance for one hour of Continuing Education; they had to attend the live event in order to receive the certificate.
Participants requiring closed captions at the time of the CERCLL’s events should request this at least a week in advance by emailing CERCLL at cercll@email.arizona.edu. Closed captioning can be turned on in the video in YouTube, in the recording above.
Webinar presented by Dr. Mahmoud Azaz, Dr. Wenhao Diao, and Dr. Liudmila Klimanova (University of Arizona).
Access the PPT in single-slide colour format [PDF]
Access the PPT in 2-slide black and white format [PDF]
May 28, 2020, 2 pm – 3 pm Arizona (2 pm PDT / 5 pm EDT)
In recent online discussions about educators’ experiences in the sudden movement to remote learning in which the world has found itself, questions arose about how instructors have managed to bring beginning language classes to students—especially those languages that use non-western scripts. This webinar provided some guidance on best-practices that instructors of Arabic, Chinese and Russian have applied in remote teaching contexts at the University of Arizona. As part of the registration process for this event, participants were asked to share what they had found most challenging about suddenly moving into remote teaching contexts in beginning language classes, and they could request specific topics that they would like to be addressed by the panel. The presenters saw this information in advance of this event, and had the opportunity to address specific concerns of the audience.
PANELISTS:
- Mahmoud Azaz is Associate Professor of Arabic Language, Linguistics, and Pedagogy and Second Language Acquisition and Teaching at the University of Arizona (UA). He is also a Distinguished Fellow at the UA Center for University Education Scholarship and a certified tester of Arabic at ACTFL.
- Wenhao Diao is Associate Professor in the Department of East Asian Studies and the program of Second Language Acquisition and Teaching at the University of Arizona. She is interested in the sociolinguistic and sociocultural aspects of Chinese language learning and teaching, with a particular focus on study abroad.
- Liudmila Klimanova is an Assistant Professor of Second Language Acquisition and Technology, and the Director of the Russian language program at the University of Arizona. Among other topics, her research examines language and cultural identity enactment in physical and digital spaces, and the role of digital experience in cultural learning within the framework of digital humanistic pedagogy. She currently serves as associate chair of CALICO CMC SIG, and executive committee officer and sector head at AAUSC (American Association of University Supervisors, Coordinators, and Directors of Language Programs).
During the registration process, K-12 participants who participated in the live event could request a certificate for one hour of Continuing Education.
This webinar was cosponsored by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Arizona, in conjunction with their Virtual Lessons Learned series.
Presented by Mariana Bertho, Aleksey Novikov, Adriana Picoral, Bruna Sommer-Farias, and Shelley Staples (all University of Arizona).
Download the presentation slides.
Participants in this free, live webinar were introduced to the Multilingual Academic Corpus of Assignments – Writing and Speech (MACAWS), an ongoing project building a corpus of assignments (written texts, spoken discourse, and multimedia products such as blogs) produced by learners in Russian and Portuguese language programs at University of Arizona. This online platform allows teachers and learners to perform searches, and filter results by course level, assignment macro-genre (i.e. description, narration, etc.) and topic (i.e. family, culture), learner L1 background, and more. The MACAWS platform also offers tools for incorporating corpus search results (concordance lines) into language learning materials.
In the webinar, participants were introduced to the interactive Data-driven Learning (iDDL) tool based on the Data-driven Learning (DDL) approach to foreign language teaching. At the core of Data-driven Learning (DDL) is the premise that language is highly patterned, and that it can be taught inductively by guiding learners through the pattern discovery process. In turn, iDDL is a dynamic way of integrating concordance lines into online pedagogical materials using learning management systems (e.g. Moodle, D2L, etc) or any other online platforms that support embedding (e.g. Google sites). Along with a window containing concordance lines, the instructor can add questions to scaffold students’ noticing patterns.
During this webinar, participants learned to:
- navigate MACAWS for linguistic and/or rhetorical features relevant to their teaching context;
- implement Data-driven Learning (DDL) principles for inductive learning;
- develop iDDL pedagogical materials for their instructional contexts.
K-12 participants could request a certificate for one hour of Continuing Education during the registration process.
The MACAWS project is co-sponsored by the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences.
Presented by Gillian Lord, (University of Florida, Professor and Chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies).
Following the Modern Language Association’s (2007) recommendations, and in the face of declining enrollments nationwide, language programs are beginning to undertake some serious self-reflection with respect to our curricula and our pedagogical approaches. This process is all too often revealing an uncomfortable truth: that we cannot continue on the path we have been on, and that our survival may depend on our willingness and our ability to re-envision our approach to teaching languages, literatures and cultures. More specifically, I argue – again, following guidelines offered by the MLA, ACTFL, and others – that we must explore how we can maximize cross-disciplinary collaborations in order to increase enrollments and to better foster “translingual and transcultural competence.” In this presentation, I highlight a selection of successful innovations and collaborations we have undertaken in my department, ranging from individual class development to campus-wide alliances.
See Dr. Lord’s biographical information here.
This presentation is part of the LiLaC series initiated in Fall 2019, and is cosponsored by the Second Language Acquisition and Teaching Program at the University of Arizona.
This event has been postponed; future date TBA.
- CERCLL Summer Workshop Series
- Intercultural Competence Conferences
- Digital Literacies in and beyond the L2 Classroom: A Hybrid Symposium on Research and Practice (October 2014)
- Multilingual, 2.0? (April 13-15, 2012)
General Professional Development and Other Events
Lectures and Cultural Events
CERCLL sponsors and co-sponsors numerous public events throughout the academic year. If you would like to receive announcements about these and other language-related opportunities, join CERCLL’s mailing list here.
CERCLL’s NSF Grant and Related Events
A UA’s Linguistics symposium was about the National Science Foundation grant from the Cyberlearning: Transforming Education program that CERCLL received in 2013. Jon Reinhardt spoke about the digital materials produced by the project in “Augmented Reality Mobile Games for Language Learning and Revitalization”. Access the presentation here. (A closed symposium for Native American educators took place in Fall 2013 and was followed by a workshop on the Fort Mohave reservation on the CA/AZ border in February, 2014, while CERCLL’s June 7th, 2014, workshop also covered some of the topics of this project; there was a presentation in American Indian Language Development Institute (AILDI)’s summer series in both 2014 and 2015 as well.)
Summer Workshop Series and the LATeS Symposium
CERCLL hosts professional development workshops each summer, as well as an annual language teacher symposium (LATeS).
Fall 2013 Workshops
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The first of two workshops presented with the Arabic Flagship program at the University of Arizona took place on December 14, 2013: Innovative Technology in the Language Classroom
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CERCLL began a relationship with the Confucius Institute at the University of Arizona that will bring professional development opportunities to Chinese teachers. The first workshop took place on December 7, 2013: Training Chinese Teachers in Communicative Language Teaching, presented by University of Arizona Assistant Professor Wenhao Diao. See CERCLL’s blog entry about this workshop.
Symposium on Indigenous Knowledge and Digital Literacies
In July 2013, CERCLL was awarded funding from the National Science Foundation through its Cyberlearning: Transforming Education program. The symposium and workshops were conceived as an extension to CERCLL’s Games to Teach Project, bringing digital gaming to a new audience for CERCLL–the Native American community. It is co-led by one of the Games to Teach project directors, Dr. Jonathon Reinhardt, and by Dr. Susan Penfield, who was previously CERCLL’s Research Coordinator. CERCLL is partnering with the University of Arizona’s American Indian Language Development Institute (AILDI) for the first time, and bringing CERCLL’s activities to underserved communities through this program. See CERCLL’s blog entry on the symposium.
U.S. Department of Education Annual Bus Tour
CERCLL was included in the U.S. Department of Education’s 2013 bus tour which was intended to highlight early learning and “teachers as leaders”, among other things. Dr. Brenda Dann-Messier, Assistant Secretary for Vocational and Adult Education and Acting Assistant Secretary of Education, and Dr. Sharon Lee Miller, Director of the Division of Academic and Technical Education, took part in a roundtable at the University of Arizona on September 11, 2013. See CERCLL’s blog entries on the topic.