PErCOLATE (Modules for Multiliteracies Teaching)

Projects Directors: Drs. Heather Allen (University of Wisconsin, Madison) and Beatrice Dupuy (U Arizona) [In collaboration with CLAS, CMES, and CALPER].

Description:The long-standing collegiate FL teacher training paradigm with its short-term focus on methodologies and techniques for teaching lower-level language courses has been viewed–particularly by Language Program Directors (LPDs)–as woefully inadequate for preparing  tomorrow’s professoriate to teach in increasingly diverse programmatic contexts. Further, given the 2007 MLA Report calling for a more coherent curriculum in which “language, literature, and culture are taught as a continuous whole” (p. 3), shifts in the content of FL graduate students’ professional development as teachers are overdue.

As a response to the shortcomings previously noted, this project has developed a set of modules for professional development of teaching assistants (TAs) in several languages that supplement the model of professional development already in place by adding flexible materials and activities that focus on language teaching at higher levels and provide an alternative structure for professional development in programs where there is either a Language Program Director (LPD) with no applied linguistics background or no LPD at all (the norm in most LCTL language programs).

The approach to FL teaching and learning foregrounded in these modules is based on multiliteracies (Kern, 2000; The New London Group, 1996). Lesson study, a self-directed, collaborative, inquiry-based learning approach will provide a framework to guide FL TAs’ reflective examination of their instructional practices and students’ learning as they work through a module.