Education Commons^™

Exposure: Making Changes In American Public Education, Katharine Mcallister

Katharine McAllister

During the 2008-2009 school year I volunteered through the Mentor/Tutor Internship program at the East Bay Met School in Newport, RI. I formed solid relationships with many of the students and the staff and discovered unexpectedly how much I enjoyed being in a school setting. In the fall of 2009 I obtained permission from the principal and the advisors to experiment with a syllabus I created for my Senior Honors Project- a 10 week course on Hispanic language and culture called Exposure. In late September I found myself playing the part of teacher in front of a group of 12 …

Teachers As Language-Policy Actors: Contending With The Erasure Of Lesser-Used Languages In Schools, Kara Brown

Kara D. Brown

On the basis of an ethnographic study of the Võro-language revitalization in Estonia, this article explores the way teachers function as policy actors in the broader context of the school. As policy actors, the language teachers' appropriation of regional–language policy helps simultaneously to reproduce and challenge existing ideologies in the school environment. I explore the teachers' understandings of their power and freedom to inform their navigation of the circumscribed choices offered in a post-Soviet educational system. [language, anthropology of policy, teachers, Baltic]

A Multi-Platform Application Suite For Enhancing South Asian Language Pedagogy, Tao Bai, Christopher K. Chung, Konstantin Läufer, Daisy Rockwell, George K. Thiruvathukal

Konstantin Läufer

This interdisciplinary project explores the potential for handheld/wireless (H/W) technology in the context of language education within and beyond the classroom. Specifically, we have designed and implemented a suite of multi-platform (desktop/laptop, handheld, and browser) applications to enhance the teaching of South Asian languages such as Hindi-Urdu. Such languages are very difficult to learn, let alone write, and H/W devices (with their handwriting/drawing capabilities) can play a significant role in overcoming the learning curve. The initial application suite includes a character/word tracer, a word splitter/joiner, a smart flashcard with audio, contextual augmented stories for reading comprehension, and a poetic metronome. …

Continued Professional Development Of Teachers To Facilitate Language Used In Numeracy And Mathematics, Brenda Louw

Brenda Louw