Presenters: Elizabeth Harper (Department of French); Meghan O'Donoghue (Department of French); Lauren Mehfoud (Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese)

Title:  Languages Across Curriculum: UVA Engagements

Description:

For our roundtable, we would like to talk about our experience teaching in the Engagements program as teachers coming from language departments. We envision a discussion with two primary components:

1. We would like to discuss how our training as language teachers made us uniquely prepared to teach engagements classes; how we incorporated language study into very different course designs and topics; how our attempts to do this played out over the course of the Fall semester and what changes we intend to make/will make in the Spring to further incorporate language study into the engagements classroom.

2. We would also like to discuss other possibilities in the future for offering engagements classes in target languages and/or other methodologies for increasing linguistic and culture diversity within the engagements program to reflect the diversity of our students and provide gateways into language majors & minors that are more integrated into the overall undergraduate experience.

We have all had really interesting experiences with different ways of incorporating language learning into the engagements and feel that it could be an extremely positive way of making our departments more visible across grounds and with first year students who are specifically looking for communities in which they can belong. We also believe that the directors of the engagements would be extremely open to new ideas/initiatives for incorporating language into the curriculum and would be delighted to help explain the program to language instructors to generate more ideas and more interest in participating in the engagements.