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THE University of Oregon is a Research I institution placing primary emphasis and support on excellence in research. The department offers programming in French, Italian, Spanish, and Romance languages with majors, minors, and MA degrees in each of these areas. The PhD is offered in Romance languages only and, like all degree programs under this rubric, requires preparation in at least two of our languages and literatures. We also participate in delivering an interdisciplinary minor in Latin American studies as well as certificate programs in European studies and in second language acquisition. Departmental comparators include the University of Kansas, the University of Kentucky, and the University of Florida; our primary competitor is the University of Washington.
Since 1995, the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures has fielded dramatic rises in enrollments in all three of our language and literature sectors. The figures in table 1 (p. 68) reflect numbers of students in our fall trimester courses over the last eight years. Increasing enrollments are due in some measure to an expanding student body at the University of Oregon generally (from 19,000 students in fall 1995 to 22,000 by fall 2004) and to growing numbers of students studying Spanish to satisfy the language requirement for the BA degree. But this expansion does not fully account for the rise, nor does it explain increasing numbers of majors in all sectors. French enrollments have grown with the general influx of students, and numbers of French majors have been roughly maintained during the last few years; Italian enrollments continue on a slow but regular rise; Spanish is now in high demand.
Reasons for interest in Spanish among resident students include the rapidly enlarging Latino communities throughout the West and in Eugene, the utility of speaking Spanish in the United States generally, and overwhelmingly, I think, the lack of state funding for local schools that have resorted to cutting all language programs except Spanish. There are local immersion programs run by the school districts in both French and Spanish, but it is not clear whether a significant number of students enrolled in those programs continue their language study at the university. While we are pleased that many students see the social value of learning Spanish as a second language, we also bemoan the impoverishment of the opportunity to study other languages that comes with growth in Spanish enrollments. Facing this limited pretraining in second language acquisition head on, we have worked hard to attract students to French and Italian, to dissuade some students from continuing on in Spanish when they have other options, and to develop courses in Romance languages that encourage students to learn one of the other languages along with Spanish. Numbers of majors in Romance languages have risen steadily, though as of fall 2002 they seem a bit unstable.
Beyond the broad social and institutional trends that influence the choices of language learners in Oregon, we believe that increasing and steadily maintained enrollments in all three sectors are due in part to our promotion of excellence in teaching. Superb teaching in small classes is our signature. Although the university refers to these small classes for recruitment purposes, support for capped enrollments in second-language classes is hard won and in need of continual boosting. Limiting the numbers of students in our classes helps account not only for our popularity and retention but also for good pedagogy. Numbers are capped at twenty-seven for lower-division language classes (though these caps have been inching up over the past ten years because of budget cuts), at twenty-two for upper-division language and literature classes, and at fifteen for advanced seminars.
The University of Oregon has retained the two-year second-language requirement for all students seeking the BA degree. When it comes under attack, which it does now and then, we mobilize our defenses. With few decisive changes in requirements, no significant shift in the demographics of the region, and only minimal development of new recruitment practices, increasing or steady numbers may reflect our attention to our campus and community visibility and some new projects and arrangements we have launched over the past four to six years.
The most decisive recent shift in programming has been the rehabilitation of the very concept of Romance languages as a discipline, a concept that has been particularly useful in our efforts to build community within the department. Our definition of departmental programming has moved away from the traditional philological conception of Romance languages toward a more culturally grounded notion of geographic regions that are Spanish-, Italian-, or French-speaking. The idea of European languages and their literatures has been decentralized allowing greater visibility to the traditions of Latin America, the Caribbean, the United States, and Africa. The concept is pleasing to the administration because it holds the unit together and appears to encourage steady enrollments in all the languages. It is attractive to students, I think, because they believe they are satisfying professional, instrumental, or community-oriented needs by studying Spanish while fulfilling “dreamier” notions of what constitutes a liberal arts education by studying Italian or French. I do not mean to suggest stereotypical models for language learners and their motivations—these ideas reflect campus hearsay, for the most part—and students are also increasingly interested in travel or study abroad and in preparing for international careers in a global economy. It is nonetheless true that the Romance languages degree continues to grow in popularity. As the program is currently devised, students are at liberty to design their own dual-language programs (with one primary and one secondary language specialization area) and to benefit from more than one study-abroad option. The program may also appeal to the less specifically literary minded, but that is not certain. We do know that it is beginning to serve Oregon schools by helping prepare students who can teach Spanish. But other programs are kept alive as well; while some twenty-five percent of our students go on to degrees in teaching or to graduate school, most students seem to go into international business or law, social services, tourism, or editing.
Beyond rehabilitating the Romance languages major, the new conceptual design of the department has resulted in curriculum development more generally. Over the past four years, we have fully redesigned our third-year language sequences in all three languages. Reading, writing, and oral skills classes have metamorphosed into proficiency-oriented culture-based curricula. Having changed with the times, these courses remain attractive to majors and nonmajors alike. We work hard to entreat students into the majors from the ranks of these classes. The University of Oregon does have a program in international studies that requires three years of second-language training, and many of these students seek to study in our department. While senior instructors particularly skilled in transition-year pedagogy often staff classes at this level, we are careful to schedule regular faculty members in these classes and to keep channels of communication between instructors and faculty members alive. To this end, an Instructor Advisory Committee has been created as has a new supervisory position for oversight of these classes in Spanish. In the Spanish sector, faculty time is at a premium, and attention to the preparation of graduate students has diminished time spent advising undergraduates.
In our efforts at outreach to the broader campus, six years ago we launched the “150 experiment,” culture classes taught in English and directed primarily, though not exclusively, to incoming freshmen. With attention to film, literature, guest speakers, and topical issues, these classes help advertise our treasure of Romance languages faculty members and focus on developing cultural competence among both language learners and non-language learners. These courses satisfy general education requirements and provide some outreach to students enrolled in professional schools or interested in international experiences. We open the classes to forty or more students as needed but always staff them with regular faculty members. Variously titled Cultural Legacies of France, of Italy, or of the Hispanic World, these courses introduce students to faculty research issues. Since they have been popular, during the past two years we have developed a follow-up 151 class in each language as well. Built on film viewing and conversation, these courses offer one discussion section in English and a second in basic language. They are very well subscribed.
Other courses we offer in English are limited—since foreign language curriculum is our specialty. However, we have put in place French, Italian, and Spanish for Reading Knowledge courses. Popular among graduate students seeking to meet the language requirements of their programs, these offerings also benefit undergraduates.
Another recent pedagogical experiment grew out of our Cultural Legacies programming and dovetailed with a new university-wide initiative called Pathways. In fall 1999, the university launched this program to help students satisfy general education requirements during the first two years, but in an integrated set of courses designed by regular faculty members. Involving funding from the central administration for successful proposals, the Pathways program creates a cohort of students who attend the same classes, meet weekly in a College Experience course for one hour, receive regular timely advising, and face the challenges of the university together under the guidance of excellent regular faculty members. These sets of courses have had various degrees of success. Our Romance languages pathway, Voicing Diversity, tended to net us students who might have sought out our departmental courses anyway. However, the relations we established with colleagues in history, geography, English, linguistics, and philosophy have set the groundwork for future projects in language across the curriculum, and the many planning meetings among colleagues in French and Spanish have helped us begin to address and heal some of our departmental divides, between Spanish and French, language and literature, peninsular and Latin American cultures, European and developing nation priorities. After three years, we pulled out of the Pathways program though we have retained a one-term version of it called the Freshmen Interest Group, requiring a much shorter commitment and therefore more appealing to students. However, the supplementary funding for faculty, visitors, and some technical needs went a long way toward boosting morale, building department visibility on campus, and creating spaces for faculty discussion and team work. We withdrew from the program because it involved a lot of faculty effort for gains we might have made without it. The advising component seemed to meet the needs of students who would have sought the advice of our departmental advisers in any event.
Another reason for our high enrollments is that students remain attracted to foreign study opportunities, and the University of Oregon is recognized as one of the nation’s greatest contributors of students to foreign study programs. Administered by our Office of International Education Programs, several university-wide informational events are staged each year. The Peace Corps and Teach for America also hold regular meetings on campus. For each of these programs, we disseminate information and advise students to aid in recruitment. Programs for study are offered in several Spanish-, Italian-, and French-speaking countries including Spain, Mexico, Ecuador, and Chile; France, Cameroon, and Mali; Siena, Rome, and Perugia. Students flock to these programs and, as a result, to our courses. They have many options at all levels to study abroad for one term, during summers, or for an entire academic year.
In house, we offer preparatory courses for students seeking to study in Seville, in Lyon, and in Siena and Perugia. We also support one professor during each winter term to direct the Seville program and one each summer to direct the Perugia program, and we allow course relief during one term to professors and instructors applying to teach in and direct term-long programs in other locations. We have established true exchanges among graduate students with several of these sites as well as some professional exchanges for faculty members. We have undertaken to fund one graduate teaching fellow each year to serve as a resident assistant in Lyon.
Each year we also screen applications from students to benefit from a lycee assistantship program sponsored by the French government. Numbers of participating students have risen from three to nine annually over the last three years. Students spend one year teaching English in French high schools and often return to pursue graduate studies or to complete majors and minors with us.
For students who are unable to study abroad or who have an express interest in teaching or in social services, we have developed the Participatory Learning Experience. This program places students in a variety of community organizations and area public schools. Through a set of partnerships, students help with literacy, translation, and teaching in primary, middle, and secondary schools or in public sector groups serving the Hispanic community. The program has grown dramatically over the two years since its inception. Beyond the professional training or insight it offers students, who work under the guidance of departmental faculty members, it strengthens our ties to the school district and its public immersion programs in French and Spanish. For the past two years, we have also hosted Spanish-speaking middle school students in one of our Spanish conversation classes. These relations are the starting point for further efforts at program articulation with area secondary schools.
Another campus-wide effort to support students potentially interested in second-language teaching is sponsored by our Yamada Language Center. The Yamada center administers programs for individual study of lesser-taught languages and maintains an impressive virtual library. For our students, it functions as a state-of-the-art language lab and oversees their access to taped or computerized language resources. It screens satellite news broadcasts from the world over and facilitates international encounters. It is also an important resource for information and guidance to our instructors and graduate teaching fellows in their efforts to use foreign language technologies. We maintain excellent relations with the center and its director, but would certainly not wish to see it take over foreign language pedagogy.
Each year the center sponsors a high school outreach program called Foreign Language and International Study Day. During one entire spring day, some five to eight thousand high school students come to campus to attend a variety of sessions in and on our languages and their cultures. These sessions range from twenty to fifty minutes long and present topics from cuisine to cinema, from EU politics to rudimentary elements of Urdu. We require all our graduate teaching fellows to propose presentations, and we help them prepare; many faculty members also present sessions or workshops. In exchange, we receive a small amount of funding to buy high- or low-tech pedagogical materials for use at the center. We have used this event to give keynote address opportunities to visiting students, to create capstone foreign language video projects for our second-year language students in the Pathways program, and to encounter Oregon high school teachers. In the future, we hope to expand our interactions with the teachers who attend. Our ultimate goals are to promote articulation and to co-design summer workshops on Standards K-16, projects requiring meetings with equals and friends interested in promoting foreign language learning.
Finally, each year the Romance languages department sponsors two major events for undergraduate majors, minors, and prospective majors and minors. We use these events—complete with food and music—to disseminate information about our programs and program affiliates. Students often sign up for our majors during these events. With help from university librarians, career advisers, and foreign-study specialists, our entire staff welcomes new students each fall and spring term. In addition to giving five-minute presentations on topics of concern to these students, we engage in on-the-spot advising and, during spring, award departmental scholarships funded by donors each year.
In many ways, the staff of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures is overburdened by these varied outreach efforts, but we are all entirely committed to them. Ratios of faculty to student majors in Romance languages are among the widest on campus. The department is made up of 19.5 full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty members (7.5 in French and 2.5 in Italian because we share one specialist in French and Italian, and 9.5 in Spanish because we have one joint appointment in Spanish with the program in comparative literature). In Spanish there is one (very busy) second language acquisition specialist who teaches a methods course to all our graduate teaching fellows in all three languages. We also house 23 to 25 full-time senior instructors who have taught with us and have been committed to our programs for over six years, some 5 to 8 further instructors on staff during any given year, and some 40 to 50 graduate teaching fellows who teach in our lower-division language programs. These graduate students benefit from an intensive orientation, a term of methodology (expanding to two terms next year), and weekly practicum sessions all year long. Expecting a record undergraduate enrollment increase of 5% to 8% in fall 2002, we were given approval for one new line in Spanish and the joint appointment in Spanish and comparative literature. As of fall 2003, the total faculty will number 20.5, barely enough to meet our needs. We were accorded the new line in Spanish on the assumption that we would cover the growing enrollment pressures during each of three years on our own, without further financial support from the administration. Fiscal constraints make it difficult for the administration to support excellence in pedagogy or research. We continue to resist the idea of delivering basic language instruction to large audiences, but this means we have to rely heavily on non-tenure-track faculty members.
Over the past two years, central administration has decentralized unit budgets. As a result, we have control over the department’s budget, whose guaranteed recurring sums are limited to faculty salaries. Our regular budget includes 78% funding for salaries, 21% for benefits, and 1% for services and supplies. For faculty development and travel, we benefit from a self-supporting program during summer session, from which both the College of Arts and Sciences and the Office of Summer Sessions take a cut. There is little room for innovation during the summer and a great deal of speculation about numbers of prospective students and salary figures since we have come to rely on this summer budget for all faculty perks. Each year we have an opportunity to apply for education technology funds with proposals to aid undergraduate education. Student fees support these funds. Though we have been successful in garnering funds for the past four years and have used them to build a departmental computer lab for graduate students, these funds do not help meet the technical needs of the faculty.
The success of our department builds on the commitment and devoted labor of the faculty. Our focus is on literature, its histories, its theories, its languages, and its cultures. We teach almost exclusively in our target languages, and we view our mission as a small contribution to developing cultural sensitivity among American students. We emphasize language learning at all levels of our curriculum, including our graduate seminars, and we consider literary texts to be the primary and richest source of study for questions of cultural and linguistic diversity. Regular review of and communal thinking about our departmental practices is at the heart of our performance. Though divisions in priorities, including those I mentioned earlier, are aired in regular departmental meetings, these are limited by our collective sense of pedagogical purpose in the unit. Common purpose in delivering second-language programming and in celebrating the joys and rigors of literary study reigns supreme. To shore up our sense of community, we engage in regular discussions about our differences and commonalities. The higher the theoretical level of our discussions, the better or more fruitful the results. Continued attention to theoretical speculation and the maintenance of high ideals are important aspects of faculty governance and feed the minds and hearts of high-minded colleagues. Ongoing discussions about the changes in the study in Romance languages and literatures—with all of the glorified and frightful attributes of the civilizations they have enabled—are the most relevant force in maintaining our sense of shared values.
Faculty and students are encouraged to work together on collective Romance projects, though there is also a need for programs and events that celebrate the individual language traditions. Two projects have been particularly successful. On two occasions, committees made up of graduate students working in each of our languages were appointed to propose and develop international graduate student conferences. The staff and budget were put at their disposal. For three years, we have developed topics of shared concern to be aired within the context of our sequence Approaches to Romance Studies, courses for graduate students that feature seminars by invited distinguished scholars, receptions and gatherings that bring us together in a collective enterprise. Topics for these courses have included Multiculturalism in the Romance World, Mapping the Romance Languages, Digital Humanism, and, most recently, The Essential Other: Jews, Modernity, and Alterity in Latin America and the Mediterranean. For each of these courses, scholars working in each of our languages have been hosted on campus, and materials reflect Spanish, French, and Italian language traditions. The Romance thread is fragile at the University of Oregon, but it has proved to be a sound source of inspiration and has helped enable the success of our administrative unit.
Evlyn Gould
| 1995 | 1999 | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spanish | |||||
| Introductory sequence | 461 | 583 | 1,264 | 1,350 | 1,562 |
| Advanced courses | 400 | 521 | 380 | 394 | 374 |
| Majors | 101 | 135 | 250 | 235 | 304 |
| Italian | |||||
| Introductory sequence | 80 | 96 | 373 | 346 | 359 |
| Advanced courses | 22 | 38 | 37 | 39 | 45 |
| Majors | N/A | N/A | 14 | 14 | 15 |
| French | |||||
| Introductory sequence | 74 | 88 | 488 | 495 | 488 |
| Advanced courses | 46 | 53 | 122 | 109 | 90 |
| Majors | 9 | 13 | 65 | 53 | 72 |
| Romance | |||||
| Introductory sequence | – | – | 27 | 20 | N/A |
| Advanced courses | – | – | 43 | 76 | 55 |
| Majors | – | – | 58 | 65 | 48 |
| Full-Time Tenure Track |
Full-Time Non-Tenure Track |
Part-Time | Graduate Student |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|
| French | 7.5 | 4 | 1 | 12 |
| Italian | 2.5 | 3 | 3 | 5 |
| Spanish | 9.5 | 16 | 3 | 24 |
© 2003 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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