Recovering Foreign Language Study for the Humanities Through Curricular Thinking: Reflections on Challenges, Principles, and Opportunities
Heidi Byrnes, George M. Roth Distinguished Professor of German and Georgetown University
Collegiate foreign language programs are challenged to assure that their learners acquire sophisticated literary-cultural knowledge regarding their cultural areas; they are asked to assure that learners acquire non-native languages to professional levels of ability; they are encouraged to make room in their language teaching and learning for the hybridity and multiple literacies of a globalized world. … And they are expected to do all of this in a remarkably short period of time!
Professor Byrnes considers comprehensive curricular thinking that integrates language and content in a principled fashion a viable response to these imperatives of college foreign language education. An added benefit of this approach is that the creation of genre-based, well articulated curricula can recover foreign language study for the humanistic educational goals of higher education, thus assuring the intellectual viability of collegiate language study.
Sponsored by the Ermal Garinger Academic Resource Center, the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, the Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures, the Department of French & Italian, the Department of Spanish & Portuguese, the Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures, European Studies, the Department of East Asian Languages & Cultures, and the Department of African and African-American Studies.
Thursday, October 25, 2012 | 4:00 PM | 120 Snow Hall | University of Kansas
