16, no. 2 (January 1985): Back Matter
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Back Matter January 1985
National Humanities Alliance Report
The National Humanities Alliance, a coalition of membership organizations including learned societies, state humanities councils, museums, colleges, universities, libraries, and historical societies, has presented its Report on Priorities in the Humanities to the US House of Representatives' Subcommittee on Postsecondary Education.
As part of its recommendations, the alliance has called on the National Endowment for the Humanities to create a coordinating office to assess existing programs that address the international components of humanities scholarship, to develop policies for expanding these programs and funding new ones, to implement interagency agreements, and to administer grants to further international understanding. The alliance has also recommended that this new international office focus on three types of programs: bilateral agreements; support for American scholars involved in scholarly exchanges; and programs teaching language, literature, and a widely defined category of culture, all stressing humanistic content and methods.
In addition, the alliance's report addresses the NEH's mandate to foster scholarly excellence in and encourage public access to the humanities. The authors of the report agree with the current application of excellence as the central criterion by which grant applications should be judged, but they emphasize that the health of the humanities depends on the NEH's recognizing potential excellence and rewarding “excellence perceived as well as excellence achieved.”
Further information about the report may be obtained by calling Lisa Phillips, the executive director of the National Humanities Alliance, at (202) 338–9194.
Washington International School
The Washington International School (WIS) was founded in 1966 by Dorothy Goodman and Cathya Stephenson in the belief that “a monolingual adult is a disadvantaged person and that the younger one begins to learn a second language the easier it is to learn.” WIS offers a bilingual education program in English and French and in English and Spanish, from nursery school through the twelfth grade.
At the nursery-school level, three-year-olds spend a half day with either a French- or Spanish-speaking teacher. Only music and physical education activities are conducted in English. A full-day course is provided for four-year-olds, who spend half their time with an English-speaking teacher and half with a French- or Spanish-speaking teacher.
In kindergarten through fifth grade, students continue to split their time equally between two languages. All subjects except math are taught in both languages and utilize books and materials from various countries.
From sixth grade on, students follow a traditional pattern of different teachers for different subjects. In any one year, a student receives instruction in a particular subject in only one language. An ideal schedule for the three-year period (sixth through eighth grades) would allow each student to study history, for example, in English one year and in French or Spanish the other two years, or vice versa.
At the high school level, all subjects are taught solely in English with the exception of French and Spanish language and literature courses. But the upper-class curriculum follows the International Baccalaureate Syllabus, which requires students to study two languages, one of which is meant to be one's mother tongue. Since many students enter WIS at the high school level and are not native speakers of one of WIS's three classroom languages, many other languages have been the focus of study using private language tutors.
WIS currently enrolls a total of 527 students, fairly evenly distributed throughout the grades. They come from almost one hundred different cultural and national backgrounds and include the children of staff members of almost twenty embassies.
© 1985 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
ADFL Bulletin 16, no. 2 (January 1985): Back Matter |
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