In late Spring, 2018, four projects were awarded funding in the CERCLL Faculty Research Grant competition for work to take place during the summer and Fall:
- Using Design-based Implementation to Study Film School for Future Scientists, Jill Castek, Department of Teaching, Learning, and Sociocultural Studies (College of Education);
- Foreign-Language Curricula and Immigrant Destinations in the US, Christina Diaz, Department of Sociology (College of Social and Behavioral Sciences);
- International Telecollaboration for the Development of Global Citizenship Skills, Carmen King de Ramírez, Department of Spanish and Portuguese (College of Humanities);
- Online and Hybrid Course Portal for Slavic Languages and Literatures, Liudmila Klimanova, Department of Russian and Slavic Studies (College of Humanities);
- Multilingual Academic Corpus of Assignments – Writing and Speech (MACAWS), Shelley Staples, Department of English (College of Social and Behavioral Sciences)
Abstracts follow; webinars and white papers resulting from the research will be online beginning Spring through Fall, 2019.
Using Design-based Implementation to Study Film School for Future Scientists
Jill Castek, Department of Teaching, Learning, and Sociocultural Studies
A two-day Design-Based Implementation Research (DBIR) workshop will take place at the University of Arizona in September, with individual and team participants. Goals include: 1) gaining practice using tools and routines for negotiating the focus of joint work in partnership, 2) learning ways to organize the collaborative design process equitably in local circumstances, 3) analyzing different plans for studying and using implementation evidence, and 4) devising strategies for local capacity building in local educational systems.
Design-Based Implementation Research (DBIR) is a methodology for organizing and conducting collaborative research in partnerships with educators at all levels. It maximizes collective work toward iterative, systematic inquiry, which builds the capacity of systems to engage in continuous improvement to understand dynamics between teaching and learning. Partnerships include work with practitioners in K-12, higher education, and informal settings, and teams with both researchers and practitioners.
Classroom materials and a webinar that aligns with the larger goals of DBIR will be developed as an outcome of this workshop. In addition, design-based principles will be shared with teachers who want to implement aspects of this work in their own context. For more about DBIR see http://learndbir.org/principles.
Foreign-Language Curricula and Immigrant Destinations in the US
Christina Diaz, Department of Sociology
Assimilation scholars traditionally ask how immigrants adapt to American cultural practices and norms. I depart from this tradition by testing whether and how U.S. schools incorporate aspects of immigrant culture in their program. Reframing assimilation theory in this way provides a compelling test of whether ethnic and cultural boundaries are becoming increasingly fluid, and under what conditions such changes are likely to occur. While there are many ways to assess cultural change in schools, I rely on two measures of foreign-language curricula: the availability of immersion programs and Advanced Placement courses. I will leverage quantitative and regression-based techniques to assess the extent to which county-level changes in the Asian and Hispanic immigrant population influence the availability and growth of such curricula. Results will have implications for assimilation theory, race relations, and can shed light on factors that promote or hinder multiculturalism in schools.
International Telecollaboration for the Development of Global Citizenship Skills
Carmen King de Ramírez, Department of Spanish and Portuguese
The ultimate goal of this international telecollaboration project is to guide students through a process of global citizenship skill building activities that transform students’ understanding of local/global consequences of current events. The use of telecollaboartion has been widely cited as a means to help students navigate complex social issues associated with global citizenship in the digital age (Fantini et al., 2001; O’Dowd, 2006). This approach to education is in keeping with 21st century educators’ responsibility to more concretely incorporate critical pedagogies in academic studies (Alim, 2005; Byram, 2011; Letizia, 2017). The international telecollaboration project allows Mexican and U.S. university students to engage in online dialogues regarding issues of importance for both countries. These virtual exchanges are co-designed and taught by professors from students’ respective institutions. Topics presented in the class will require students to critically analyze sociopolitical/sociocultural issues from multiple perspectives. Students must then work with their international partner(s) to create projects that represent differing perspectives on those issues.
Online and Hybrid Course Portal for Slavic Languages and Literatures
Liudmila Klimanova, Department of Russian and Slavic Studies; with Shannon Donnally Spasova, Michigan State University
This project has built a The LLC COMMONS, a web portal prototype for open source materials for online and hybrid use, responding to a national survey of online course offerings nationwide in Russian and Slavic Studies. The portal will feature:
- Searchable library of online authentic materials for teachers of Slavic languages (categorized per linguistic topic and level, including an internal search engine);
- Repository of fully developed interactive online modules\activities\media quests for use in online and hybrid courses (based on several mainstream Russian textbooks for elementary and intermediate levels);
- Interactive digital map of North America showing multimedia updatable information about Slavic departments and online course offerings (designed in Esri – ArcGIS);
- Course registration database for Slavic and East European Languages – a dynamic database for adding information about online course offerings.
Multilingual Academic Corpus of Assignments – Writing and Speech (MACAWS)
Shelley Staples, Department of English
Learner corpora can support exciting new SLA research and applications to language teaching. Although there are numerous learner corpora of English, less commonly taught languages still lack resources of this sort to support delivery of “high-quality, pedagogically sound, and cost effective instruction”. The MACAWS project (Multilingual Academic Corpus of Assignments – Writing and Speech) proposes the creation of a digital resource and eventually an online platform where researchers and instructors will have access to students’ assignments and pedagogical materials from language programs at University of Arizona, starting with Russian and Portuguese. The seed grant will help us jump start essential processes for building the corpus (e.g., data cleaning and processing) and allow us to create an initial set of materials to share with instructors at fall orientation workshops. Graduate students will be mentored by an experienced corpus linguist who will guide the project, which is part of the students’ dissertations.
The MACAWS website now hosts webinars that present and explain pedagogical materials in Portuguese and Russian that were created using MACAWS on the following topics:
- Genre and Register Awareness
- Lexico-grammar
- Culture