Teacher-Training Webinars
Below are webinars that we have created for the MI-BRIDGE initiative about language teaching methodology and maximizing learning outcomes for our students. Webinars are created by scholars in the field and can be used for teacher-training and continued professional development.
Webinar 1: Elephants in El Cuarto
By Dr. Andrea J. Queeley. Dr. Uju Anya (Ph.D., CUNY) is Associate Professor of Anthropology and African and African Diaspora Studies at Florida International University. She specializes in African Diasporic subject formation, migration, and the negotiation of globalized structural inequalities, and how these processes are situated within the specificities of national and international political moments. In her research, Dr. Queeley explores questions of social hierarchy and diversity within the African Diaspora, and the social and economic conditions under which racialized subjects assert their cultural identities and how such assertions shift over time. Her work has explored “jamaicano” identity and the reemergence of Anglophone Caribbean institutions during Cuba’s Special Period. She has also conducted research in the urban United States and the extent to which racialized categories are disrupted and/or reinforced by the globalization and mass consumption of multi-rooted black popular culture.
Webinar 2: Task-Based Language Teaching: Theory and practice
By Dr. Katie Nielson. Dr. Nielson (Ph.D., University of Maryland) oversees all curriculum development and efficacy research at Voxy, an educational technology company focused on teaching English to non-native speakers. Prior to working at Voxy, she served as the PI on large-scale projects investigating the efficacy of technology-mediated language training at the University of Maryland Center for Advanced Study of Language, and she was the Academic Director of Foreign Languages at UMUC. She has over twenty years of experience teaching Spanish and ESL in the U.S. and abroad, and she has designed and developed award-winning language courses as well as teacher training programs. Dr. Nielson has published and lectured on autonomous language learning, task-based language teaching, computer-assisted language learning, principles of instructional design, pronunciation instruction, and language training product evaluation.
Webinar 3: Identity and Investment in Language Learning
By Dr. Uju Anya. Dr. Uju Anya (Ph.D., UCLA) is Assistant Professor of Second Language Learning in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction and Research Affiliate with the Center for the Study of Higher Education. She specializes in sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, and second language education with particular focus on race, gender, sexual, and social class identities in the language classroom. She also has expertise in equity and inclusiveness in educational policy and curriculum design, as well as service-learning and civic engagement in language pedagogy. Please find information on Dr. Anya’s latest book, Racialized identities in second language learning: Speaking blackness in Brazil, here.
Webinar 4: Language Variation in the Classroom: What Language Teachers Urgently Need to Know
By Dr. Phillip M. Carter. Dr. Carter (Ph.D., Duke University, 2009) is a sociolinguist and scholar of language and culture in U.S. Latino communities. He work is interdisciplinarily, moving between quantitative and qualitative approaches to sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, critical discourse analysis, ethnography, and critical theory. His scholarship addresses a range of issues of contemporary concern, including the relationship between social formations and linguistic variation, Spanish language change in the U.S., maintenance and shift of Spanish in the U.S., new dialect formation, and popular discourses about language. Please find information on Dr. Carter’s latest book with Dr. Tetel Andresen, Languages In the world: How history, culture, and politics shape language, here.
