ACTFL 2022 brought so much new learning, and gave me the chance to synthesize so much of the learning I have been doing mostly online over the past 2.5 years.
I decided to break up my reflections posts by conference day, so Friday’s reflections are linked here if you are interested! Otherwise, here are my reflections from the Saturday sessions, in addition to as many links as I can muster to the presenters and their resources:
Why It Matters: Black Social Justice Movements in Austria and Switzerland (Karin Baumgartner and Amanda Sheffer)
Working with and listening to Ben Tinsley’s presentations reminded me that I want to make conscious efforts to center the lives of Black and brown German speakers in my teaching, so I chose this session to help start filling some of the gaps in my own knowledge.
Dr. Baumgartner’s part of the presentation focused on the M-Köpfe debate in Switzerland. I appreciated how she created a unit around the discourse that gave learners multiple access points to the debate and the thinking behind it, ranging from interviews with business owners, to using the Schweizerisches Idiotikon (new to me!) to look up the “official” Swiss definition of the M-word, to predicting and then analyzing public perception statistics, to connecting the debate to similar debates in the United States. The unit was text-rich, and really aligned with the learning I had done this summer about a discursive mode of cultural studies: asking questions about texts and cultural phenomena, and critically questioning our assumptions and reactions to them.
Dr. Sheffer focused on Black Lives Matter solidarity protests in Vienna, which really showed the ever-increasing connectedness of cultural discourses across the world. At the same time, regional/national cultures have influences on how these debates and discourses play out – I learned here for the first time about the Opferthese, as well as the life of Angelo Soliman. Context is so important in building learning, and the connections of each of these units about Switzerland and Austria tie closely into debates that have also been present in the US in recent years. I can see each of these units being easily integrated into my upper level courses, as my students are at an age where they have more capacity to engage in cultural discourse about race and society. A question from the audience reminded me, though, that learning about and reproducing slurs, even if in the L2, can be potentially triggering for our students, and we need to create and maintain brave spaces for students to explore these topics.
I missed this session to go to the Swiss/Austrian session above, but luckily, Abbi posted her slides online! In her presentation, Abbi illustrated the journey she has taken to make her Latin class into one where all students have a chance to succeed based on what she could control in her own classroom. This led her to dropping homework to level the playing field of home environment (dis)advantages, and then on to dropping other things that have often been staples of language classes: tests weighted more heavily than other classwork, vocabulary quizzes, and explicit grammar instruction. All this seems to have helped raise her reading scores – score!
One key seems to be the use of daily exit tickets. Abbi writes on her slides that she changed from using a calendar to set the pace for her instruction to pacing with the exit tickets. This is so simple and brilliant. Exit tickets can show us what truly stuck and where students are struggling. By “publicly committing to not moving on until everyone is ready,” as Abbi puts it, we make adjustments to our instruction that benefit ALL students – and they can always use more input!
If you are able to plan ahead sufficiently to have pre-made exit tickets for content, go for it! The shorter the better. I am a huge fan of trade-and-grade because going over the answers can serve as more input for learners. If pre-made exit tickets aren’t possible for you, I am a huge fan of the Quick Quiz as a formative assessment. (My observing principal thought the Quick Quiz I gave during an observation was just about the coolest thing ever…ding!)
I also appreciate this post by Lance Piantaginni that takes a Twitter thread by Abbi on the same topic (simplifying for equity) and lays out how it aligns with the research on best practice. Check it out for more mind explosions!
I currently teach one section of Spanish 1, and then the rest of my day is all levels of German. I am also the only German teacher. Foreseeably, I will only teach German next year, but I want to make sure I’m sending my current Spanish students to the next level with confidence and skills, so I was interested in seeing what this session suggested in terms of aligning with other colleagues. I really loved the protocol Bailey and Whyard presented and think it could be very powerful for departmental conversations.
Where I still struggle is finding the time to do this work. The long term ROI for me personally is kind of low because I might not be teaching Spanish next year, so I tend to invest my time in things that will make my immediate planning for five different courses more manageable. We have been doing a smaller version of this protocol in my department this year by all trying out Puedos as ways of designating appropriate skill checkpoints in our Spanish curriculum, and it’s been helpful to open conversations about what’s needed and then taught at each level.
This session also reminded me that I should collaborate more with others, for a couple reasons. One: hopefully, it would eventually lessen my workload by distributing the creation/curation of resources. Two: by doing some grading calibration of assignments, I could figure out appropriate expectations for each level of German I teach (for which I create my own curricula), and talk in a more concentrated way with colleagues about how we get students to those expectations. It’s hard feeling like you’re doing everything alone. Part of it is that I am an Einzelgänger in some respects, and the other part is that I just don’t have time to seek out collaborative relationships with other German teachers in my area. But dang it, I’m going to try!
Making Authentic Materials More Comprehensible Without Changing a Word (Maria Goebert)
I’m trying to build more #authres into all of my units as I flesh out my curriculum, so I’m always looking for new ways to use them. Goebert’s process was pretty straightforward: take a text, and highlight certain categories of essential information in the same color (who, what, when, where, causes, effects, whatever you could want, each with its own color). Then, have students fill in graphic organizers to show their understanding of the categorizations and information from the text. Finally, give students another text on the same topic, and have them highlight the information relevant to the categorizations they worked with earlier using the same colors. (So, same color used for the “who” in both articles, same color for the “where,” and so on.)
I think this is a cool idea – it helps students focus on the specific information they really need to understand the text. Sometimes, blocks of texts in the L2 can just feel massive, and this helps narrow the focus and concentrate on the really key info. For high fliers or heritage speakers, they can certainly go beyond the highlighted info to read and learn more. Something for everyone!
ACTFL’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee Listening Session
ACTFL’s DEI committee held a session to hear people out about their areas of focus in making ACTFL a more accessible, equitable organization. I got a friendly invite from a committee member to come, and was happy I did.
The session was closed for photos, recordings, and the like, but I feel comfortable sharing the question that I came to the session with: how does ACTFL vet (if at all) the vendors in the exhibit hall for each convention, especially when there were vendors on the floor this year with documented histories of contributing directly to structural inequities?
I felt confirmed in the importance of posing this question at the listening session when I saw this tweet from Carrie Toth about something she purchased in the exhibit hall. We have to demand better materials – our students deserve culturally-sustaining reading materials and curricula – and I am so appreciative of all teacher-leaders who use their platform to make these demands.
I am very proud to work with the Language Learner Literature Advisory Board, serving this year as the President of the Board. We provide feedback on language learner literature (CI readers, novelettes, etc.) with regards to issues of identity and positive representation. Through this work, we’ve read and reviewed tons of books and discovered how many of them contain harmful, disrespectful tropes. Students need CI to build their language system, but that language always conveys a message, so we want to make sure that the books we put in our students’ hands are transmitting positive, culturally-sustaining messages about cultures and people (in addition to providing compelling input).
This presentation dovetailed very nicely into the work we’ve done with LLLAB: the presenters did a survey of 90 language learner books (30 each across 3 languages) to see who was represented in the texts, and how. Confirming our readings of individual titles through LLLAB, their study found that language learner literature is overwhelmingly white, male, and heterosexual. Additionally, they found that most texts have little or no cross-cultural representation, meaning that the titles we are serving our learners just serve to reinforce US-American cultural viewpoints about the world. This can lead learners to believing that cultures are monolithic entities expressed through one ethnicity, or by the government of a nation, and that culture is something that is static across time.
I had so many thoughts during this presentation. Again, it confirmed from a birds-eye view what we had seen in up-close discussions of particular books: there are many books for language learners that represent and reinforce majority stereotypes. There remains a great need for readers across a greater variety of genres, as well as representing more aspects of identity ((dis)ability, mental health, neurodiversity, religion/faith, LGBTQ+ issues, etc.). I encourage you, reader, to find a community of CI teacher-authors and think about writing a novel yourself. At the very least, audit the books you already have on your shelves, and see what adjustments need to be made to your classroom library. Additionally, our community needs to find ways to support authors from minoritized identities in creating texts from their own voices so that the representation in these works remains thoughtful, positive, and nuanced.
We can also build our learners’ critical awareness of what they read by having them complete an audit of the books they are reading. I thought this could be a whole-class activity: after doing the Free Reading for the day, stop to take a tally of the genders of the characters in the books we’re currently reading, the skin color(s), how the male, female, and nonbinary characters are represented, and so on. I think it would be very revealing to everyone involved – what are we reading? What are we not reading?
I was very thankful for this presentation and look forward to when the research is published so I can share it far and wide!
Phew!
That was Saturday! I have two more posts with reflections from Friday and Sunday, as well, if this has served you in any way. Happy reading and stay reflective!
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