Integrating the arts in foreign language curricula enables us to connect language to other semiotic spaces and cultural productions such as theater, the fine arts, art history, architecture, music, museum cultures, and literature. By embracing the notion of "texts" as socially, historically, and culturally situated practices, of which the written text is but one product, we can conjoin the basic literacy of reading and writing with a broader range of visual, aural, and spatial signifying acts. Understood in this way, the arts become a source and stimulus for not only textual analysis and communicative exchange, but also subjective response and emotional experience. In other words, by interacting with art--evaluating, interpreting, experiencing, embodying, and even producing it, in any one of its many forms--learners can understand culture as a process in which they are motivated to participate as subjects. This process can deepen the cognitive, social, aesthetic, and subjective dimensions of language learning. While many new instructors have interest or expertise in the use of one or more art forms, we cannot assume that they know how to incorporate the arts in their lesson plans. Our teacher training programs, therefore, have the potential to be transformative sites, where the concept of foreign language literacy and literacies takes shape through effectively varied pedagogical practices. This volume will not only provide a concrete vision for approaches to materials and learning goals, but also suggest directions for teacher training and long-term professional development for integrating the arts.
Introduction.
Museums and the Fine Arts – “Languages in Partnership with the Visual Arts: Implications for Curriculum Design and Teacher Training” (by Elvira Di Fabio and Maria Luisa Parra) and "Talking Images": Engaging Culture through Arts-based Digital Storytelling” (by Bettina Matthias).
Drama and Theater – “From Creative Adaptation to Critical Framing: Dramatic Transformations across the Foreign Language Curriculum” (by Lisa Parkes), “Italy at Your Fingertips: Integrating the Puppet Theater in the Italian Classroom” (by Federico Pacchioni), “Drama in the Classroom: Post-Holistic Considerations” (by Barbara Schmenk), and “Dramatizing/Digitizing Literacy: Theater Education and Digital Scholarship in the Applied Linguistics Curriculum” (by Per Urlaub).
Performing Poetry – “Finding a Voice in the Foreign Language Classroom: Reading, Writing, and Performing Slam Poetry to Develop Critical Literacies” (by Margaret Keneman) and “Performing Poetry in the Foreign Language Classroom: Pedagogical and Language Program Issues” (by Glenn Levine and Jamie Roots).
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Lisa Parkes
Lisa Parkes is Senior Preceptor at Harvard University, where she directs the German Language Program. She studied German and Music at the University of London (B.A.) and completed her doctoral degree at UCLA. Her teaching and research interests include foreign language pedagogy, drama pedagogy, technology in foreign-language teaching, modern German literature, music, drama, and theater. She has written and presented on the use of drama and comedy in the foreign-language classroom, on literature and music, and on sound in German exile Hollywood films. Over the past decade, she has directed eight student productions of plays by Bchner, Nestroy, Drrenmatt, Schnitzler, Borchert, and Brecht at Harvard and at UCLA. In addition, she directs a web-based, geo-referenced German language project that combines authentic video with interactive language exercises for the development of listening and pragmatic skills. Currently, she is President of the Massachusetts chapter of the American Association of Teachers of German, and serves on the editorial board of Unterrichtspraxis/Teaching German.
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Colleen Ryan
Colleen Ryan is Professor of Italian at Indiana University, where she teaches courses across the curriculum, from the basic language sequence to content-based bridge courses, to full-immersion theater workshops and graduate seminars in foreign language teaching methods and second language acquisition. Ryan's work conjoins the study of literature, film, and theater in different ways. She is the author of Sex, the Self, and the Sacred: Women in the Cinema of Pier Paolo Pasolini and co-editor (with Nicoletta Marini Maio) of two pedagogical volumes: Set the Stage! Italian Language, Literature, and Culture through Theater. Theoretical and Practical Perspectives. (Yale, 2009) and Dramatic Interactions: Teaching Languages, Literatures, and Cultures through Theater. Theoretical Approaches and Classroom Practices (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2011). Ryan has also published a series of articles and studies on teacher training, educational drama, performance assessments, and teaching for intercultural competence, as well as critical works on women and gender in contemporary literature and film.
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Stacey Katz Bourns
Stacey Katz received her Ph.D from the University of Texas, Austin, in French Linguistics. Stacey Katz is currently the Director of Language Programs in Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. She has published several pedagogical texts and presented her research at major conferences. Stacey's research interests include Applied French Linguistics, French syntax and French pragmatics.
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By interacting with art--evaluating, interpreting, experiencing, embodying, and even producing it, in any one of its many forms--learners can understand culture as a process in which they are motivated to participate as subjects. This process can deepen the cognitive, social, aesthetic, and subjective dimensions of language learning.
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This volume will not only provide a concrete vision for approaches to materials and learning goals, but also suggest directions for teacher training and long-term professional development for integrating the arts.