| Emory Report | November 17, 1997 |
Volume 50, No. 13 |
Language Across the Curriculum seeks course proposalsThe Center for Teaching and Curriculum is accepting proposals from Emory College faculty members for development of courses in the Language Across the Curriculum (LAC) program. A letter of intent with a brief description of the proposed course should be sent to Professor Walter Reed, Center for Teaching and Curriculum, Department of English, by Nov. 21. Courses from any discipline are eligible as long as the course offers the opportunity for students with sufficient language background to do part of the work in a foreign language. Faculty members from many disciplines in the college have been working for the past four years to develop LAC courses. The first course being conducted this semester is the four-credit Political Science 333, "The European Union," and its one-credit German component, 333-D, the latter taught mostly in German. According to Viola Westbrook, chair of the LAC committee and professor of German studies, enrollment in the course is strong. Additional LAC courses planned for the spring semester include anthropology/Italian, political science/Arabic, sociology/German and history/German. Next fall two additional courses are planned: political science/Spanish and history/ Japanese. The Center for Teaching and Curriculum funded the planning of four proposals this past summer, and the committee hopes to have four to six new courses funded each semester. "The faculty's response to the LAC initiative has been-and continues to be-very positive," said Westbrook. "This is especially gratifying in light of the fact that only a few major research universities have LAC programs." A further boost to Emory's LAC initiative is the opportunity to work with other Atlanta colleges. Jack Blanshei of the Department of Russian, Eurasian and East Asian languages is Emory's contact in a group that includes representatives from Spelman, Oglethorpe and Agnes Scott. Ingrid Wieshofer, a German studies professor at Agnes Scott, has a two-year grant to share Agnes Scott's success in LAC programs with other area colleges and universities. With a current offering of nine courses, Agnes Scott is viewed as the local leader in LAC programming. The partnership has been very beneficial to Emory, Blanshei said. "Several of us interested in language across the curriculum development at Emory have observed some of their courses and were very impressed. Because Agnes Scott has a well-established program, we've been able to get a lot of ideas and see the program at work." The group hopes to make a video showing LAC in action to encourage other faculty to develop language components for their courses. "We hope to internationalize the curriculum for students and give immediate and prolonged ways for them to use their language skills," said Westbrook. "We also want to motivate faculty to apply their language skills to acquire new insights into their respective disciplines." -Deb Hammacher |