In the fall 2023 semester in Reading Environments: Nature, Culture, and Agency (SPAN 230), I designed two assessments that foster creativity and critical engagement with language. The first, called “Human/Non-human Agency: Readers’ Theater,” is inspired by Richard Kern’s integrative language teaching approaches. This project challenged students to think about agency through the medium of performance.
The second assessment, named “Precarious Times: Imagining Sustainable Narratives,” is also a creative project and it challenges students to apply concepts creatively. In this project students engage in a dialogue with the ideas of political philosopher Michel Serres, as well as with Mapuche thinkers Marcelino Collio and Rúben Collio. The goal is to reconsider the social contract, or to propose alternative forms of thinking, being, and living that align with a more symbiotic relation to the Earth. Students crafted poems, short stories, conceptual videos, and wrote speculative fiction.
The outcomes of these assessments will be further explored and discussed in the upcoming spring semester through presentations in the CLS Sharing Group and the Department of Italian Studies’ language teaching series.
Course Pedagogy Bibliography
Blake, Robert. “Vocabulary and the Upper-division Language Curriculum: The Case of Non-native and Heritage Spanish Majors.” L2 Journal, vol. 12, no. 3, 2020, pp. 43-60.
Content-Based Foreign Language Teaching: Curriculum and Pedagogy for Developing Advanced Thinking and Literacy Skills. Ed. Laurent Cammarata. Taylor and Francis, 2016.
Glisan, Eille W., and Richard Donato. Enacting the Work of Language Instruction: High-leverage Teaching Practices. ACTFL, Alexandria, 2017.
Hidi, Suzzane and Valerie Anderson. “Producing Written Summaries: Task Demands, Cognitive Operations, and Implications for Instruction.” Review of Educational Research, vol. 56, no. 4 Winter, 1986, pp. 473-493.
Kern, Richard. Literacy and Language Teaching. Oxford University Press, 2000.
Kramsch, Claire. Context and Culture in Language Teaching. Oxford University Press, 1993.
“Life and death in the Anthropocene: Educating for survival amid climate and ecosystem changes and potential civilisation collapse.” Educational Philosophy and Theory, vol.52, no.13, 2020, pp. 1347–1357.
Paesani, K., Heather W. Allen, and B. Dupuy. A Multiliteracies Framework for Collegiate Foreign Language. Teaching. Boston: Pearson, 2016.
Reading for Meaning: An Integrated Approach to Language Learning. Eds. Jane K. Swaffar, Katherine M. Arens, and Heidi Byrnes. Prentice Hall: New Jersey, 1991.