Kelly Arispe, an associate professor in the Department of World Languages, recently presented on two panels at the annual Computer Language Instruction Consortium.
Arispe presented on a panel of computer assisted language learning (CALL) teacher educators. Her talk focused on rural regions of the U.S., including Idaho, where access to professional development, specifically CALL teacher education, can be a challenge. Arispe highlighted her nine years of experience engaging with the local K-12 world language teaching communities and showcased the Pathways Project, a collaborative network of K-16 teachers and students creating open educational resources (OER). She shared past, present and future Pathways events, activities, and programs that bring rural and urban language teachers together to engage in the 5R’s of OER (retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute) to foster professional development by engaging teachers in the co-creation of pedagogical materials that are centered on best practices and provide teachers with experiential learning in digital literacy and CALL as a result.
In addition, Arispe helped organize an additional panel with five CALL teacher educators from the U.S., Canada, and Europe. Their presentation, “Innovative Uses of Digital Technology Informing Reflective Teaching Practices,” showcased digital tools that help pre and in-service teachers reflect on their teaching practices. Arispe presented on her 2018-2019 preliminary needs assessment and pilot study with 18 K-12 local teachers of French, German and Spanish to identify gaps between current praxis and expected outcomes according to the new standards. For this study she conducted a survey, interviews, and digitally tagged 2-3 video recorded classroom observations for all the teachers in her pilot.
The exploratory study centered primarily on the hot topic of target language use and Arispe showcased an innovative digital tool called “VEO” that allows teachers to tag key moments in their recorded classroom observations to become more aware of and reflect upon their practice. In this case, Arispe highlighted the results of their target language classroom use and concluded by showing how insights from the field in light of this study have directly impacted her approach to pre-service teaching to improve the state of target language use long-term.