29, no. 1 (Fall 1997): 1-3
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From the Editor
Elizabeth B. Welles
AS WE round the corner into the fall semester, I cannot help but remember the excitement that accompanies each new school year. We will encounter the terra incognita of new courses, new knowledge, and new configurations of acquaintances; we are given a new slate on which to transcribe the narrative of a rich and busy academic year. What about the old slate? Is it wiped clean? Not as far as ADFL is concerned, or the profession of foreign language teaching, or, for that matter, higher education. Indeed the concerns developing over the past few years still demand attention, and to a large extent will determine the way this year's narrative turns out for us. Here are some of the bigger concerns: declining financial support for higher education and the humanities, the changing demographics of student populations and shifting enrollment patterns, the academic reward system and increases in the use of part-time faculty members, and external calls for accountability in student and faculty performance from many groups, ranging from parents and students to legislators. With so many pressures from outside and inside departments, it is difficult for chairs to be consistently independent, creative, and proactive about their programs. However, as we see from the papers in this issue, independence, creativity, and proactiveness are the very qualities needed to control and guide unfolding departmental and institutional structures.
A recurring theme in these papers is the need for language and literature faculty members to speak out on their own behalf and take responsibility for the future direction of the field. We must put our house in order not just to address calls for accountability, to increase enrollments because of threats to faculty lines, or to do something before someone does it to us first but also to create a more lively and coherent education for today's student. Heidi Byrnes argues that faculty members should not accept passively the arbitrary structure of departments they have inherited, because the administrative form no longer matches the educational function. Benign neglect has allowed new structures, notably the corporate models so distinctly inappropriate for academic institutions, to encroach on administration and substitute financial for educational priorities; thus the downsizing, the increased use of cheap part-time labor, and the departmental consolidations or closings. Faculty members need to consider the intellectual and educational justifications for their departmental structures and seek the kind of governance that will serve the goals of foreign language study in the setting of an American college. While often prodded into action by external forces, a department will have a stronger position in the institution if it has a “well-devised, well-considered plan about its contributions to students' education” (31), a plan based on a shared understanding of an educational mission. With such a plan, a department can produce a purposeful and coherent curriculum. Byrnes discusses the dangers in the division between literature teaching and language teaching, which can lead, in the name of institutional efficiency, to the assignment of language instruction to a single entity and to the grouping of literature with other literatures. Such reorganization threatens to demote language instruction to a service for other interests in the university and to cut literature off from its roots in language, thus weakening its foreign identity and consequently its value to the institution. Form and function can come together when faculty members and administrators give serious thought to the questions “What special knowledge and intellectual value can foreign language studies alone offer the academy? What contributions to the education of the citizenry can we make that are difficult, perhaps even impossible to produce elsewhere on campus?” (39).
Elizabeth Bernhardt notes that our portrayal of ourselves as victims of the system is a self-defeating stance. To give a context for this victimhood, she traces some of the important developments that have affected language teaching in this country: the federal government's concern with the practical application of foreign languages, which spawned the oral proficiency movement; the influx of immigrants who needed to know English for immediate use; and the research in second language learning that highlighted the nonlinear way that language is learned, a way not reflected in the traditional language program. These developments have created a curriculum that emphasizes everyday use of the language and that moves away from the capacity to understand literature or other complex texts of any kind. The materials and their concomitant analytical skills, which are precisely those that provide a key to the culture, have been put out of reach of this curriculum. Bernhardt agrees with Byrnes that departments should work from within to gain control of their futures and should bring together the diverging stands of language and literature teaching. Scholars need to be able to accommodate undergraduate levels of thinking, and language teachers need to move beyond popular culture to connect with the intellectual substance of the language, literature, and culture enterprise.
The next group of essays presents more specific advice for department chairs on how to take an active role in campus leadership to address the problems of creating a governance suitable for an evolving academic and public climate and of maintaining a strong position for languages and literatures in today's education. Reed Anderson, looking at the effects of enrollments on staffing and resources, points out that a department needs to demonstrate its value to the university not just in numbers of students taught but also in its centrality to the educational mission of the institution. He urges departments not to adopt a siege mentality but, rather, to extend their reach to other kinds of programs (e.g., women's studies, area studies, translation, comparative literature), to adopt different kinds of teaching models for advanced literature courses, and to take advantage of change as an opportunity to re-think the humanities curriculum. Roberta Johnson recommends that foreign language departments turn the administrative urge for streamlining to their advantage. Calls for campus internationalization, often a random set of unrealized projections, provide ready-made openings for foreign language departments to forge ties with other programs and disciplines—through arrangements for language across the curriculum and courses for professional schools. Tracking the era of restructuring and accountability, Judith Melton observes that a university's status (and its access to state moneys) will be measured not by the quality of its faculty but by the success of student outcomes. In such a context, departments can prepare for change by becoming part of the restructuring; instead of resisting the new, they should show that their goals fit with the mission of the institution. From the perspective of the field of Arabic, Karin Ryding sees foreign language departments as natural leaders because of their experience with pedagogy, evaluation, and especially interdisciplinarity, areas that are becoming increasingly important on campuses. Iride Lamartina-Lens and Adelia Williams have met this challenge of leadership by creating two new majors in French and Spanish, one in modern languages and cultures and the other in language, culture, and world trade to give students a choice between a traditional and an applied humanities major. All these authors stress the need to be flexible, to reach beyond the confines of the department, to see interdisciplinarity as a natural route for studying language, and to claim a central place for language study within the curriculum and mission of the institution.
The articles by Rebecca Benjamin, John Gutiérrez, and Ana Roca, written for a session in honor of Guadalupe Valdés, the recipient of ADFL's 1996 Award for Distinguished Service to the Profession, discuss issues involved in teaching bilingual, or heritage language, students, the field that Valdés pioneered. Using their experience in teaching Spanish, they point out that bilingual students are indeed different from those learning the language for the first time. Hispanic students take Spanish not to acquire a second language but, rather, to use their native tongue to find out who they are. Teachers need to be aware of the complexity of their linguistic profiles; such students often switch languages in the midst of conversation, are probably members of speech communities in which more than one language is typically used, and tend not to recognize grammatical descriptions of their heritage language. Benjamin, Gutiérrez, and Roca point to Valdés's work in establishing the need to teach these students according to what they already know and in validating the kinds of nonstandard Spanish they speak at home. The teacher should not teach these students standard Spanish as a substitute for what they already speak but should work to give them a linguistic instrument appropriate for formal and public situations. As Gutiérrez concludes, “We must build on the Spanish [that bilingual students] bring to our classrooms and use them to enlarge the nation's pool of competent speakers of foreign languages. Thus, by taking advantage of this valuable linguistic resource, we will do our part to enhance the linguistic capability of the United States” (36).
The last papers in this issue result from the work of the ADFL Executive Committee on the question of non-tenure-track faculty members. The committee invited Mary Burgan, the general secretary of the AAUP, to discuss the regulation against extending one-year contracts beyond three years. While the committee agreed that wide use of continuous annual appointments would undermine tenure, as department chairs they wanted to make employment conditions more humane and secure for non-tenure-track faculty members. The essay by Robyn R. Warhol and the response to it by Brian Kent focus on the efforts made by Warhol and other faculty members to gain contracts for lecturers (both non-tenure-track and part-time faculty members) at the University of Vermont. Since most of this exploited class of workers were women, Warhol enlisted the support of women's groups on campus and in particular the support of important tenured members of those groups. Her success was qualified, because after she gained the necessary backing and fulfilled all the required steps to make the contracts for lecturers part of the university's governance, the administration undercut the proposal by agreeing to the possibility but not to the certainty of such contracts. From his position as a part-timer, Kent adds a further dimension to the understanding of the relationship between non-tenure-track and tenure-track faculty members that this incident put into relief. He points out that while the new provision provides a much better opportunity for lecturers, lecturers are still dependent on tenured faculty members. The administrators at the University of Vermont allowed the change only because the tenured faculty members had supported it.
The ADFL slate will also contain other unfinished—perhaps unfinishable—business as ADFL continues its work on articulation with a project sponsored by the MLA in conjunction with the Coalition of Foreign Language Organizations (see ADFL Updates for a full description of the project, High School to College). Since breaks in the continuum of language learning frequently occur from high school to college, we are focusing on that transition rather than tackling the whole range of possible links among schools and levels. The MLA Office of Foreign Language Programs believes that long sequences coherently connected is key to the success of language learning. A previous project, funded by NEH, Achieving Consensus on Articulation in Foreign Language Education, aired many perspectives on the need for articulation, the obstacles to articulation, and the various points around which collaborations occur—goals, assessment, placement, curriculum, and institutional cultures (see ADFL Bulletin 26.3 [1995]). Our new project aims to go deeper into these issues and provide some guidance about how such collaborations can be realized. In an attempt to turn ideas into realities, the project will also support eight start-up teams of high school and college faculty members and administrators from contiguous institutions, each team to be advised by a mentor with experience in collaboratives (for application information see ADFL Updates).
The focal activity of the project will be a conference where participants from ongoing articulation collaboratives, coalition members, and members of the start-up teams will have the chance to discuss concepts and actions important to the formation of articulated programs. Crucial to collaboration is the establishment of trust and communication between the two cultures and the elimination of the stereotypes one group has about the other. Participants will discuss their differences by facing questions that each “side” may have about the other's curricula, assessment, and teaching methods; about the approaches to communicative teaching that inform the Standards for Foreign Language Learning (Yonkers: ACTFL, 1996); and about the use of language for intellectual investigation that entails reading and writing. Discussion will also focus on curriculum (content, goals, and approaches) and explore new ways of organizing teaching based on content in such models as languages across the curriculum and thematically structured modules. Central to the discussion about articulation is the question whether a common metric can be established that will be understood by both high school and college teachers. Also important is the need for research to refine the field's understanding of level-appropriate goals for students of language and literature. Other possible topics include false beginners, heritage language speakers, strategies for encouraging students to continue to high levels, new approaches to testing (computer-adapted, Web-based, or portfolio-evaluation approaches), working with institutions to obtain administrative support for new curricula, providing faculty development, and arranging for the use of electronic resources. One of the chief purposes of the project is to disseminate information about articulation. Therefore the conclusions of the conference and the mentoring will be made available in reports in the Bulletin and in an annotated listing of projects that will be a part of our Web site.
Yes, the MLA is going on the Internet, will probably be on the Internet by the time you receive this Bulletin (see ADFL Updates for details). The first part of this initiative will be based in ADE and ADFL. ADFL members will have access to our Web site, which will contain links to surveys and policy statements. Best of all, they will have access to the complete archive of the ADFL Bulletin, from its inception in 1969 to the present. The archive will be fully searchable both by categories and by words and have an annotated index. We believe access to the Bulletin will greatly improve our service to our membership and the field. The Web site will certainly be useful to us here in the office for answering questions from callers who need information or advice. Language requirements? Language and business programs? The number of students studying Hungarian? We have that, at the click of a mouse. The Job Information List will also go online and be fully searchable, by language, region, period, specialization, and rank. Chairs will be urged to submit their advertisements electronically. Those who do not have access to the Internet will receive the print version of the List. But electronic or printed, the List will be organized by language; gone forever will be the obstacle-course format and the illegible print. It has been surprisingly difficult to make decisions about the Internet to ensure that our services will match or be better than what they were without it. No one is certain what this new slate constructed on a network of intangible electronic pulses will mean for the association—we are in uncharted territory. However, it is certain that the Internet will vastly increase the association's reach and make it more accessible to our members and to the field of teaching languages and literatures.
© 1997 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
ADFL Bulletin 29, no. 1 (Fall 1997): 1-3 |
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