27, no. 1 (Fall 1995): 1-3
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From the Editor
Elizabeth B. Welles
WE LAUNCH the academic year with a set of essays whose common thread is the thrust of foreign language study into diverse and culturally rich content areas, both by its extension to other disciplines or knowledge hases and by its incorporation of the methodologies and subject matter of other fields into language and literature studies. While some of the ideas presented are more pragmatic than others, all are supported by the fact that language study not only has content but as it is integrated and internalized by the student, informs and is informed by that content. Language departments—traditionally called language and literature departments—have reasonably been built on the assumption that the best subject for language study is the highest form of its expression, namely, literature. That model is being expanded in many directions and on many levels as new alliances are formed departmentally, institutionally, and, beyond the academic world, internationally in many other professional circumstances.
Reflecting on the institutional divide between area studies, which draws on the social sciences, and comparative literature, Michael Holquist describes diverse situations in which the knowledge and discourse of each field is being used to advantage by the other. Comparative literature itself, once solidly grounded in the Western tradition, is now being challenged to find a new direction in the face of the debates about gender criticism, multiculturalism, and postcolonialism, and in the face of national reconfigurations. Given the increasing geopolitical complexity that has blurred cultural boundaries, Holquist shows how comparative literature has become more inclusive in the number and kind of subjects and works compared. Holquist compellingly demonstrates the extreme ends of interdisciplinarity and its implementation by providing examples of the interchange of knowledge among international teams of professionals who use historical or literary narrative on the one hand and scientific or social science discourse on the other for exploration and explanation. Citing various literary scholars and political scientists, he points out that cultural values and the differences among societies “can be grasped only by looking at the stories people tell themselves about themselves” and that “literary texts are the most intense and most nearly comprehensive expressions of the cosmologies of the cultures in which they are enshrined.” Holquist thinks the cooperation and interaction of humanist—mostly literary—scholars with those from other disciplines and countries has special importance because it represents a grassroots movement toward the internationalization of knowledge emerging in the aftermath of the cold war. How this movement might play out in education remains a question.
Three of this issue's other authors deal in various ways with the institutional implications of the internationalization of knowledge. As if in answer to the issues Holquist raises, Robert Proctor grapples with the complexity of connecting liberal arts to international studies in the formation of Connecticut College's International Studies Certificate Program. Tracing the history of the different traditions in higher education, Proctor shows how the pragmatism of the land-grant initiative, the intellectual specialization of the research institution, and the artes liberales of the humanist-English model have come together in this program. Students in any major are able to link foreign language study with their own interests: the chief copula is a research project in which the goal is the integration of the major, an internship abroad, and the foreign language. This integration is informed by three overarching questions that provide a moral framework for thinking about the perspectives of the past and of other cultures. Proctor believes that “the liberal arts tradition can provide us with ideals and goals that put research and preprofessional training in a broader context,” and later, amplifying this idea, he emphasizes the need for interdisciplinary study: “We need to be able to put the specialized research and training in the major in the context of all the disciplines in order not to exaggerate the importance and explanatory power of any one discipline.” In quite a different setting, the College of Staten Island (CSI), a large comprehensive urban institution, similar stimuli have produced a somewhat different result. As Karen Masters-Wicks points out, students there needed a program that connected foreign language study to practical applications, to the international community, and to the rich cultural resources available in and around New York City. The Culture and Commerce program was thus initiated to put language, literature, and culture in such a context through a curriculum of language study, a commercial internship, and courses in international business. A rigorous commitment, especially for the typical CSI student, who may have family responsibilities and may work part-time, the program has rewarded those who have completed it by enlarging their career choices and enhancing their lives. Masters-Wicks notes as well that the cross-disciplinary curriculum has been a catalyst for revision in the way language is taught, resulting in increasing enrollments and stronger departments. At Agnes Scott, a liberal arts college for women, a program of languages across the curriculum reinforces the teaching of language with an extra hour of foreign language study in regular humanities courses. Ingrid Wieshofer walks the reader through the various stages of the program's creation, including the securing of funding, the preparation of faculty members, the development of course materials, and the introduction of a pilot program of foreign language components in history, art history, music history, anthropology, and political science. Students report that these extra hours make the course content more vital for them, while faculty members have found that the program fosters collegial dialogue about teaching and the curriculum. Wieshofer concludes, “By linking languages to other disciplines at Agnes Scott College, we are demonstrating to students that the achievement of foreign language competence is an integral part of liberal arts education that will deepen their understanding of the humanities as their mastery of the language increases.”
The study of language itself has impelled the other three authors in this issue to incorporate rich and culturally diverse material from the arts and other disciplines into their courses. Les Essif takes students beyond their usual roles as language learners and makes them performers of the language, in this case French. He believes that the purpose of language learning is not to produce native fluency but “to prepare and encourage nonnative French speakers to enter into a culture in which they can eventually become … highly competent communicators.” He focuses on theater (here Alfred Jarry's Ubu roi ) in class because it enables the acquisition of language competency through a combination of subject matter and discourse that pushes the internalization of language, thus making language a living and expressive instrument. Victor Turner's theory of performance as the completion of an experience provides a context for engaging a text in which the word can inspire students to create their own texts and acts. The performance of the play resulted in “the coalescence of a group of language-culture learners into a performance community, a French-speaking community—brought together by creativity, complexity, and close collaboration—that transcends any conventional sense of the term speech .” Students achieved varying degrees of linguistic fluency as they were “deformed and reformed, molded by unique French cultural codes.”
Michelle Bloom uses the opposite approach to achieve similar goals by concentrating on the lack of verbal text in silent movies. The cinéma muet establishes a cultural context by providing a window into French history at the turn of the century, when French cinema became important. She finds the use of silent film to be a stimulus for the communicative conception of language acquisition, in which interpretation, expression, and negotiation form the basis of language learning. Students are free to discover grammar and use language creatively as they experiment with narrating the films and with role-playing. The silence of the film makes a space for speech that leads the class to produce a wealth of written and oral language in many forms. The students become part of the meaning of the film as they, the audience, become a part of the consummate experience of performance.
The essay by Franz Kempf describes the German program at Bard College, which, conceived as whole humanistic education, springs from the dialectic between “language as instinct and language as weltanschauung.” Inherently interdisciplinary, the program emphasizes the transformative power of language learning to lead to self-knowledge and self-actualization. Taking into account the whole student, it recognizes language anxiety and provides one-on-one opportunities with native speakers to build students' confidence at the earliest levels. The first course of study, a semester-long immersion class ending with the possibility of a month of study in Heidelberg, not only brings students through several levels of German efficiently but also motivates them to reach for higher levels of achievement. Bard offers students a wealth of further incentives to continue advanced study by encouraging them to take courses in their own fields of interest that offer foreign language components and to branch out into other fields for their final projects. Films and other sources of cultural material are used to demonstrate the inextricable bonds of language and content and the foreignness of the language under study. The interaction between different kinds of knowledge and imagination is “much like a cross-pollination that engenders in-depth understanding and thus a much more thorough digestion of additional knowledge. Undoubtedly, students' interdisciplinary awareness and critical thinking are enhanced too, as are—and these benefits may very well be the most substantial—their sensitivity to the uses and abuses of language (including the pleasures and responsibilities) and their awareness of the intricate interrelation of language, thought, emotion, and imagination.”
The Spring 1995 issue of the ADFL Bulletin focused on the articulation of foreign language education through elementary, secondary, and college levels, that is, the vertical connections among sequences of study. In this issue the connections flow outward from the language base into articulation arrangements of a different sort. These essays, and many others published in the Bulletin , make clear that this kind of articulation, linking language study with other disciplines and discourses, is both positive and inevitable. Institutionally, this kind of articulation strengthens the position of the foreign language department so that it is involved with campus-wide activities and is central to the curricular enterprise. While literature will probably always be the cornerstone of academic scholarship in foreign language programs, interdisciplinary study can provide greater diversity in subject matter and cultural content by making it easier for students to follow their interests, to master languages as their own expressive instruments, and to step out of their own culture and their inherited mind-sets. Programs that include internships in another country or in the nearby community bring language study to the forefront of professional preparation and create links with the larger world that broaden student perspectives. Foreign language study, as represented in these essays, is helping students achieve one of the chief goals of higher education, that is, to think more clearly about complex issues within a broad human context. And to go back where we began with the internationalization of knowledge, students will ultimately need such interdisciplinary and broad cultural understanding to function in the modem world.
© 1995 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
ADFL Bulletin 27, no. 1 (Fall 1995): 1-3 |
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