Open Up

Conversations on Open Education for Language Learning

  • Home
  • About
  • Archive
  • COERLL website
    • About COERLL
    • COERLL Projects
    • COERLL Publications
    • COERLL Materials
    • COERLL Events
    • OER
      • OER Glossary
      • OER Intitiaves
      • COERLL OER Wiki
  • Donate to COERLL
  • Submissions
  • Contact Us

Inspiring case studies of open practices to engage teachers and students

August 18, 2019 Leave a Comment

Editor’s note: the below post is the forward by Carl S. Blyth, COERLL director, to the recently published book New case studies of openness in and beyond the language classroom, edited by Anna Comas-Quinn, Ana Beaven, Barbara Sawhill. The forward carries a CC BY license.  

Today, in the field of foreign language teaching, there is much talk of shifting paradigms. The term paradigm was popularized by the American physicist Thomas Kuhn in his 1962 book entitled The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. According to Kuhn, scientific progress is neither linear nor continuous, but rather subject to abrupt shifts in the consensus of a scientific community. To illustrate this phenomenon, Kuhn cites the well-known shift in astronomy from geocentrism (the belief that the sun and the planets revolve around the Earth) to heliocentrism (the belief that the Earth and the planets revolve around the sun). Kuhn stresses that paradigms are defined by contrasting concepts and discourses and, as a result, are largely incommensurable. Kuhn also notes that paradigm shifts are not only a matter of accepting new facts, but of reorganizing those facts into a new worldview. In other words, paradigm shifts entail objective as well as subjective change.

Despite examples of revolutionary change in the sciences, paradigm shifts in the humanities – such as in foreign language education – appear to be more gradual. Most foreign language educators integrate new ideas into their curricular and pedagogical practices in an incremental process of professional development. Personally, I believe that paradigm change in foreign language teaching is largely a matter of educators learning by example from each other. Simply put, there is nothing more powerful than a case study for catalyzing change in our field. And in this book, New case studies of openness in and beyond the language classroom, foreign language specialists share their stories of personal and professional transformation in the well-known form of a case study. Following the same format, each case study provides the reader with the necessary information to understand and to implement a specific pedagogical or curricular innovation. For example, each case study includes a detailed description of a new project, the intended student outcomes, as well as the tools and resources used in the project.

While many case studies focus on the use of ready-made Open Educational Resources (OERs), others describe how to integrate Open Educational Practices (OEPs) into foreign language classes. Several case studies explain how to implement principles of open pedagogy such as the creation of a Wikipedia page or a translation of a TED Talk by the students themselves. In such cases, students are challenged to follow the editorial guidelines of Wikipedia and TED for the creation of open content. Thus, in the open language classroom, students share their knowledge with the world while, at the same time, improving their proficiency in the target language. In short, each case study described in this book is a beautiful illustration of the creative commons in action. I sincerely hope that foreign language educators who read these case studies will embrace the affordances of openness for themselves and their students and thereby shift the paradigm one classroom at a time.

For an open world.

  • Read the book New case studies of openness in and beyond the language classroom
  • Read the case study “Creating and implementing open educational resources for the Spanish as a Heritage Language classroom” by Evelyn Durán Urrea and Jocelly G. Meiners, which discusses the Heritage Spanish website maintained by COERLL, and the OER featured there
  • Read the case study “An inclusionary open access textbook for Portuguese” by Carlos Pio, Eduardo Viana da Silva, which discusses the inclusive Portuguese textbook they are authoring, which integrates some content from Orlando Kelm and COERLL’s Brazilpod materials

Filed Under: Methods/Open educational practices (OEP), OER Research Tagged With: ana beaven, anna comas-quinn, barbara sawhill, case studies, classroom, digital literacy, heritage Spanish, inclusive, innovation, Italian, MOOC, OEP, OER, openness, outcomes, paradigm, professional development, reading, research, Spanish heritage language, TED, translation, Twitter, virtual reality, wikipedia

Looking Back on Four Years of COERLL Projects

August 5, 2018 Leave a Comment

COERLL’s 2014-2018 Title VI national foreign language resource center federal grant, and the projects funded by the grant, will soon be coming to an end.

COERLL and the project teams have learned a lot during this grant about the potential and the challenges of open educational resources. Each project had slightly different goals and a different way of reaching those goals. For every idea you see implemented in these materials, there is another great idea that we just didn’t have time for… but we hope to work on more of these in the future. And perhaps our reflections on these projects can provide some guidance or inspiration for those of you who may be considering creating your own open educational resources.

You can read about each of our projects by clicking the links below. Each of the projects was managed by faculty, created through faculty and graduate student labor, and supported by technical, graphic design, pedagogical, and administrative assistance from COERLL and other centers at the University of Texas at Austin.

  • Foreign Languages and the Literary in the Everyday (FLLITE) open literacy lessons
  • User-Generated Materials for Heritage Spanish
  • eComma: An Upgraded L2 Social Reading Tool
  • Língua da Gente podcasts
  • Chqe’tamaj le qach’ab’al! (Let’s Learn K’iche’) online course materials
  • Reality Czech online textbook
  • Open Digital Badges for K-12 Professional Development
  • Survey on OER/OEP use by language teachers
  • TELL Collab collaborative professional learning event

Thank you to all of the project teams! It has been wonderful working with you and we are proud to help share your work.

Filed Under: COERLL updates Tagged With: AISD, badges, Chqe'tamaj le qach'ab'al, Czech, digital annotation, eComma, English, FLLITE, heritage Spanish, K'iche', Língua da gente, Literacy, OEP, OER, Open Digital Badges, Portuguese, reading, Reality Czech, research, social reading, Spanish, survey, TELL Collab, Tzij

Empowering Learners of Spanish

December 17, 2017 2 Comments

From the Editor: This is a guest post about a new set of openly licensed activities “Empowering Learners of Spanish”, by Claudia Holguín Mendoza, Robert L. Davis, Julie Weise (University of Oregon) and Munia Cabal Jiménez (Western Illinois University).

We want to share with students and educators the Empowering Learners of Spanish project from Romance Languages at the University of Oregon. This collection of activities based on Critical Pedagogies developed in the Spanish as a Heritage Language program at the University of Oregon, serves to introduce students to a range of concepts in sociolinguistics and critical inquiry into language ideologies.

The activities are written in both English and Spanish, and resources are also in both languages. Working in two languages will allow students to reproduce the linguistic practices of bilinguals. Heritage learners of Spanish should find these practices familiar, and students learning Spanish as a second language will benefit from the scaffolding of using some English. Language development for both profiles of students can be enhanced with the techniques of “intercomprehension”, outlined in the “Guide to intercomprehension” in the resource section in the INDEX.

Instructors can decide what language(s) students should use to participate and respond (Spanish, English, Spanglish), depending on their local context, student level, and course objectives. We have developed these units and resources for teaching this content in regular Spanish language programs, including Spanish as a Heritage Language courses, and any other content course where Spanish is relevant! In fact, the first unit that we developed El corrido “El deportado”, has the purpose of supporting the teaching of Spanish to the understanding of primary texts in a course on History of Latinx in the Americas. This class is taught in our History department; it is not a language class per se, but students have made gains in proficiency by working in two languages. Moreover, content-based materials within a language program or elsewhere on campus become an opportunity for students to engage in debating the relationships between language, ideology, power, and the association of discourse and sociocultural change. Ultimately, this type of curriculum fosters the development of Critical Language Awareness regarding language practices in communities of Spanish speakers, particularly in the US.

One of our main objectives in the Empowering Learners of Spanish project is to provide students with opportunities to participate in current sociopolitical debates. We include several elements already presented in interdisciplinary critical pedagogies of language and discourse. In this manner, this initiative fits within curricular models that integrate language learning with critical studies in culture and discourse. Heritage and L2 students are able to engage with material that emphasizes language variation, social dynamics of language use, and the historical contexts that generate them. This content makes the ELS initiative particularly relevant and motivating to Spanish Heritage learners.

This project has been supported by a generous grant from the College of Arts and Sciences, at the University of Oregon.

Explore:

  • The full index of all of the “Empowering Learners of Spanish” activities
  • “Critical Language Awareness (CLA) for Spanish Heritage Language Programs: Implementing a Complete Curriculum” by Claudia Holguín Mendoza explains Critical Pedagogical approach(es) in relation to the University of Oregon’s Spanish Heritage Language program and this project

Filed Under: Instructional Materials, Spanish Tagged With: bilingual, critical language awareness, critical pedagogies, empowering, google docs, heritage Spanish, History, intercomprehension, language ideologies, Latinx, Oregon, Sharing OER, SHL, sociolinguistics, Spanish, Spanish as a heritage language

Find
Posts

Search by keywords

Popular categories

  • Badges
  • COERLL updates
  • Finding OER
  • Hybrid learning
  • Instructional Materials
  • Language Skills
  • Methods/Open educational practices (OEP)
  • MOOCs
  • OER initiatives
  • OER Research
  • Open education philosophy
  • Publishing OER
  • Remixing OER
  • Spanish
  • Teacher Development
  • Technology-based language learning

Popular posts

  • 10 French Resources for Students Anywhere
  • BOLDD: At the Speed of Language
  • Re-Mixxer: Using French and German OER in The Mixxer
  • "We're Committed to Openness in Content Creation"
  • Emerging Leader Creates Language Learning OER

Follow this
Blog

RSS Blog Feed
COERLL Facebook
COERLL Twitter

Subscribe2


 

Events

Upcoming COERLL events

  • Summer Workshop | Games2Teach collaboratory
  • Spanish Heritage Language Summer 2021 Workshop
  • Partner event | Open Conversations: UT Faculty & Open Education Practices
  • SHL Hangout | Creating, adapting, sharing: OER in SHL instruction

Join a Community of Open Language Educators!

  • Language OER Network
  • Heritage Spanish Community
  • Deutsch im Blick Facebook
  • Brazilpod Facebook

Guest blog entries

Submit a Topic

Awarded Top 100 Language Learning Blog

Awarded Top 100 Language Learning Blog

Creative Commons License · COERLL · University of Texas at Austin

We use cookies to enhance your browsing experience. By using this site you are accepting the use of such cookies.