Dr. Nina Garrett visits the TMC to discuss connecting the liberal arts curriculum
On Thursday, Feb 18, Dr. Nina Garrett (Director of Center for Language Study (emerita), Yale University) led a workshop for local language teachers entitled CALL to Connect the Curriculum: Language, Literature, Culture, and the Liberal Arts. The workshop was part of the FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHERS WORKSHOP SERIES, 2009-2010. Taking place at the Tucker Multimedia Center for foreign languages on the campus of Washington and Lee University, the workshop was a great success, with over 30 teachers and students in attendance.
If you would like to watch the workshop on DVD, feel free to ask the TMC staff for a copy.
A short summary of what was discussed:
The four-year curriculum of most language-literature departments is not a seamless continuum of linguistic, cultural, or intellectual development. One famous counterexample is that of the German Department at Georgetown, which has revised its curriculum to emphasize both the development of language and the development of literary and cultural awareness throughout all four years. Now the MLA Report on ”Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World” has strongly urged that all language-literature departments take the goal of a unified curriculum seriously. However, neither the Georgetown initiative nor the MLA Report recognizes the essential role of technology in doing so.
In this workshop, Dr. Nina Garrett sketched out some of the ways in which she sees technology as the catalyst – not just as contributing to but as fundamental to the reformation of postsecondary language learning. However, she wants to go a great deal further than the MLA Report or Georgetown: she wants to assert the need to broaden the vision of a unified curriculum for foreign language study to include virtually every discipline in the university. Anecdotal evidence suggests that fewer students are now interested in the traditional literature major while many more are now seriously interested in attaining an advanced level of linguistic and cultural competence in the context of a major in another discipline, or in an interdisciplinary major. Today’s language education absolutely has to aim for making today’s students internationally competent leaders in every field: economics majors will be better and more successful economists if they can handle their profession in another language, and the same is true for environmental engineers, historians, and political scientists — and not only in the “major” languages (in both senses) but in a whole range of less commonly taught languages. The study of how another language represents all domains of knowledge, and how it structures their places in another society – surely this is the study of “culture”! The idea of creating curricula to implement this broader vision may sound like – but is not – an impossibly ambitious vision; we already have the technology that makes it possible.
