On Monday, May 2, 2016, graduate students from the course Global Perspectives on Language and Education, shared their research on language practices across several CUNY campuses. Led be Ofelia Garcia (Graduate Center, Urban Education and Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Languages) and Carmina Makar (City College, Teaching Learning and Culture), the course took place in Fall 2015.

The work presented at the session will be published in the May/June 2016 issue of the open access Bellaterra Journal of Teaching & Learning Language & Literature.

Maria Cioè-Peña, Emilee Moore, and Luisa Martín Rojo did work on a project about plurilingual student-teachers “The burden of ‘nativeness’: Four plurilingual student-teachers’ stories.” They conducted oral histories of student-teachers to understand the construction of “native” and “nonnative” language and how their perceptions of fluency impacted their progress in teacher training.

Michael E. Rolland presented his work entitled “Ideology, Access and Status: Spanish-English Bilinguals in Spanish-as-Foreign-Language Classrooms,” which investigated how Spanish-English bilingual students fared when they did not have access to Spanish for Heritage Speakers classes at Brooklyn College.

Investigating the linguistic ideologies and experiences of students, teachers, and staff at the diverse Medgar Evers College, Hannah Göppert and Andrea Springirth presented their work “From Marginality to Mattering: Linguistic Practices, Pedagogies and Diversities at a Community-Serving Senior College.”

“A Volunteer Kuridsh Language Class in New York: A Platform for Social, Political and (Inter)Personal Engagement” by Demet Arpacik and Renata Archanjo explored a grassroots volunteer language course in Kurdish convened by language lovers in New York City.

Futures Initiative Fellow Michael Dorsch joined us remotely to present his CUNY NYC Language Mapping Project, which gives us a snapshot of the languages spoken in the communities closest to each CUNY campus and compares this linguistic landscape against language offerings across the colleges. Explore his full project site here.

Full photo set of the event is available on Flickr.