29, no. 2 (Winter 1998): 22-24
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Making Opportunities out of Problems: Passion, Programming, Personalization,
and Perfection
Sander de Haan
I AGREED to write this article largely because I had been foolish enough to open my mouth at a few discussion sessions at the 1996 Seminar East, and Elizabeth Welles urged me to share some of my thoughts this year. At the same time, it is indeed an interesting challenge to contribute to the ongoing discussion of how to deal with changing enrollment patterns and the issues they raise. We at Hope College have by no means been immune to the pressures created by the shifts in enrollments, and I have no magic formulas for eliminating the problems. We have, however, learned something in the process of dealing with them, and I would like to describe what our experience taught us.
The scope of these changes has indeed been dramatic, as Bettina Huber documented in her article in the ADFL Bulletin (see Brod and Huber). Spanish enrollments increased nationally by nearly 70% from 1970 to 1990, while enrollments in French and German for that same period fell by 22% and 33%, respectively. The shifting emphasis from French and German to Spanish at large universities and small colleges, as well as in the secondary schools, has been documented repeatedly. As a professor of German myself, I have witnessed this shift at our college; in the last fifteen years we have seen the number of students coming to Hope College with German on their high school transcripts drop from nearly 20% to under 10%. In French that figure has moved from 27% to just under 20%, but over that same period, Spanish saw an increase from 45% to well over 60% of the entering class.
With most students remaining loyal to the language they studied previously, we have seen resulting shifts in class enrollment. Whereas we used to have 80 to 90 students in four sections of beginning German every fall in the early 1980s, we are now offering only two sections, and sometimes even these are not as full as we would like. Last fall, for instance, we had only 35 students in beginning German. The French enrollment moved from five sections to three over that same period but has in recent years bolstered its enrollments somewhat by offering an additional track. Spanish first-year enrollments moved from five or six sections, serving about 120 students each fall in the early 1980s, to ten sections in recent years, packed with over 260 students, and there is also an off-sequence track in Spanish. Overall, with a steady rise in college-wide enrollments, the number of students taking a second language has increased, but the percentages in each of the languages have tended to reflect national trends. This trend has also, of course, occasioned some shifts in our staffing. Yet these changes have not been as dramatic as the figures I have just given you might imply, and I would like to discuss with you some of the reasons why. In the process, I would like to point out that there is more we can do than simply wring our hands.
It seems worth mentioning at this point that, while we have focused much attention on the difficulties these shifts have created in our departments, we have not always recognized that a major factor contributing to the stresses in higher education has been the shift in language enrollments in the secondary schools. To some extent, this has been beyond our control and probably remains so. Nonetheless, there are things we should be doing. To the degree we have contact with teachers and administrators in local school districts, we should be encouraging language teachers and supporting language programs, especially programs on the endangered list. Those of us with teacher-training programs on our campuses might prepare and encourage our most promising students to go into language teaching; we should then work with placement offices to help students obtain strategic positions. Surely good teaching is the key to the survival of language programs, and good teaching at the secondary level will bring us better students at the college level.
Having witnessed some of the tensions between faculty members teaching Spanish and those teaching other languages in combined language departments and between Spanish departments and other languages, I would like to suggest than an important ingredient in achieving a more positive attitude toward this situation is to acknowledge that the increase in the number of students taking Spanish is, in and of itself, not a bad development. There are many good reasons for students to select Spanish as their second language, and we should not discourage them from doing so. Nor should those of us teaching other languages resent our Spanish colleagues for having full classes, while we struggle to fill ours. Significant Hispanic populations live in most of our major cities and throughout the southwestern United States. Students considering careers in teaching, ministry, social work, nursing, law, medicine, business, service industries, as well as many other professions, are well advised to select Spanish as a second language. Most of them will find that a working knowledge of Spanish is a genuine asset on the job and often in even finding work.
Nevertheless, it should also be noted that these are the pragmatic reasons everyone cites in answering the question “How will studying a second language be useful for me?” It is the sort of question that parents and students alike have been asking high school counselors for years. Students ask the same question of college recruiters and again of their faculty advisers, when they are finally assigned one. And the answers above are very appealing for counselors, teachers, and professors to give, for the “consumer” can so easily identify with them. Moreover, college and university administrators find it handy in recommending budget cuts and staffing shifts to say, “Spanish is the most useful language.” But, even if we agree, we need to consider whether immediate usefulness of a primary skill such as the ability to use a second language is the most significant reason for studying it. As we all know, there are other important reasons for doing so: the development of critical thinking skills, the promotion of active learning, the fostering of cross-cultural understanding, to name just a few, and surely these can be gained as well in the study of French, Russian, German, Dutch, or Japanese.
Related to these issues is the observation that for many of us the recent levels of demand for Spanish and the subsequent lack of interest in French and German as well as other currently less commonly taught languages have reached crisis proportions. The fact that many of the articles to be found in our language publications of late have dealt with one aspect or another of this issue tends to leave us with the impression that it is the most serious challenge facing language teaching and learning in our country today. And even the theme of the 1997 seminars lends some credence to that view. While not wishing to minimize the extent of the problem, I think we could all profit from taking a step back from the situation and looking for some redeeming factors. Indeed, I would like to suggest that we view this shift to swelling enrollments in Spanish and declining numbers in French and German as a welcome chance to improve instruction in French and German, as well as in the other less commonly taught languages. Given the fact that faculty members in these languages are dealing with much smaller numbers of students in their classes, they are afforded a wonderful opportunity to enhance the teaching-learning environment in those classes and to make these courses increasingly more attractive.
This is basically what we have tried to do at Hope College in recent years, and I will illustrate this with examples from our French program, which has had the most spectacular success. Let me begin by noting that French enrollments at Hope College have moved from an all-time low of 129 students in the fall of 1992 to a much healthier 196 in the fall of 1996. At the same time, the number of students majoring in French moved from 12 in 1992 to 27 last year, and those with minors in French, from 12 in 1992 to 26 in 1996. This bolstering of the numbers was also noted by the administration, and French staffing has experienced a modest increase, from a de facto 2½ positions (the former chair, Judy Motiff, was a professor of French), to a robust 3½ positions currently; and if the pattern continues, we will petition for a fourth full-time position in the near future. How was this achieved in a national environment of declining enrollments in French? As my title suggests, we approached the challenge with passion, programming, personalization, and the perfecting of the programs.
I think it fair to say that everyone in the department, including our Spanish colleagues, felt passionately that the department of modern and classical languages not become the Spanish department. We recognized that we needed one another and that a liberal arts college needed at least the range of choices we had previously offered. And for us, that passion was translated into action—first of all, by a concerted effort on the part of the French, German, and classics faculty members to market their programs and recruit students. We proceeded to contact incoming students who had been identified as having studied languages other than Spanish in high school during the summer before their enrollment at the college. Every student who had studied French or German or Latin in high school received a personal letter and a subsequent phone call from one of our faculty members. In addition, the French faculty developed an attractive brochure of its programs, to send out with the letter. The personal contact with students continued as they arrived on campus, and, as you can imagine, goodly numbers of them appeared in our classes.
At the same time, we put into effect a placement policy that allows students to gain credit for courses earlier in the sequence if they place into a higher-level course and successfully complete that course. This policy encouraged the students to do their best in writing the placement test, and there were far lower levels of “dummying down” to get the easy A. It also increased our enrollments in upper-level courses; and as these students recognized that they were already close to completing the requirements for the minor, many more of them decided to push on and complete the minor or the major. Beyond that, we convinced the dean to allow us to add a second sequence in French—that is, to let students begin their study of French at the second-semester or fourth-semester level in the fall semester, whereas previously students who placed into these courses had to wait until spring to continue their study of the language. The impact of this change was even greater improvement in placement and increased cohesiveness of language classes, which in turn made for a more pleasant learning and teaching experience. We also noticed that higher numbers of incoming students who had studied French in high school decided to continue their study of the language immediately. Previously, a certain number of those students, having postponed their continued study of the language, would in subsequent years opt for the presumed “course of least resistance”—Spanish—to complete their requirements.
Besides these innovations was the development of additional off-campus study opportunities in France: the opening of a semester program in Dijon with an economics focus and of a premed pediatrics internship in Nice. These were added to the programs with the Institute of European Studies and the Center for International Educational Exchange that we have had in place for decades. But again, the key to getting students to take advantage of these programs was the more personalized approach to advising and mentoring. In addition to the attractive brochure, the French faculty developed an annual news-letter, which will go on the Web this fall. These efforts further increased personal contact between students and professors outside of class, which also allowed us to get better and more reliable feedback from students, helping us to perfect the programs we had put into place. Surely we are not done with that, but they are getting steadily better, and we hope to continue refining or adjusting them.
Now, of course, all this activity and personal contact involves a significant investment of faculty time and could never have been accomplished without a good deal of commitment and passion. And there is some irony in the situation, for, as enrollments in French increased, the advantages of having some extra time as a result of smaller classes with less student contact disappeared. So there is a catch-22 phenomenon here, but isn't that easier to deal with than the sinking feeling of having to go to the office day after day focused on what you can do to justify your existence? I hope that this is not the circumstance in which most of us, as language teachers, find ourselves. Besides the ideas I have already put forward, I would like readers to consider that being less in demand to teach courses in a particular discipline, such as French or German, makes them available to take on additional institutional responsibilities. For example, my being department chairperson has effectively reduced the German staffing in our department from 3 to 2½, but there are still 3 of us on staff teaching German, and if similar increases show themselves in German, we will be ready. And even before I took on my current administrative responsibilities, we were able to maintain the three positions by my teaching some interdisciplinary courses and being part of team-taught courses in cultural heritage studies outside the department. We have managed fairly well in German by maintaining enrollments in the upper-level courses, but the reduced number of students coming into the program has allowed us to become more involved in campus governance and interdisciplinary initiatives. So I would suggest that this is an additional option to be considered in combating the malaise of dwindling enrollments. In fact, if faculty members teach courses outside their discipline, it is possible, and even likely, that students in such courses will be impressed with them and will take an interest in their language. Beyond that, as others have noted at the 1997 Seminar West, our profession could profit from more of us moving into academic administrative roles.
At Hope, we are currently undergoing a change in our general education program and introducing a first-year seminar, and several of us with less stressful demands in our language sections are available to teach sections of this course. We also team-teach a literary theory course with a member of the English department and have contributed to the teaching of interdisciplinary courses in German and in Greek civilization. The changing patterns have allowed us to maintain and even increase our overall staffing, while our French and German and classics staffing has not been reduced. Our departmental passion has paid off in improving programing, increased personalization, and the ongoing perfection of the programs. I hope our story has been of some encouragement to readers and perhaps of some help to many of them.
The author is Professor of German and Chair in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages at Hope College. This article is based on his presentation at ADFL Seminar West, 26–28 June 1997, in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
Work Cited
Brod, Richard, and Bettina Huber. “Foreign Language Enrollments in United States Institutions of Higher Education, Fall 1995.” ADFL Bulletin 28.2 (1997): 55-61. [Show Article]
© 1998 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
ADFL Bulletin 29, no. 2 (Winter 1998): 22-24 |
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