Please join us for our Winter 2024 Applied Linguistics colloquium featuring Prof. Kelly Arispe (Boise State University)

Thursday, March 7th, 2024, 3:30-4:30pm

Open Educational Practices: Adopting and Adapting Pathways Project Materials to Support Language Teaching and Learning

In this talk, I briefly overview what Open Educational Practices are and how Open Educational Resources (OER) support language teachers looking to augment their curriculum with high-quality digital materials. OER permit teachers to localize (i.e., adapt) materials to students’ needs and interests and can elevate diversity and inclusion that is often missing from textbooks or curricula. I’ll showcase several examples of language teaching OER, including the Pathways Project, an OER K-16 community I co-direct that provides over 900 customizable language activities online for free. These activities are centered on tasks that target interpersonal speaking and intercultural competence for ten languages across three proficiency levels and include all materials needed to implement the activity in face-to-face and online learning environments.

In the second part of the talk, I will highlight my research findings from a Design-Based mixed-methods study involving 16 urban and rural K-12 language teachers who participated in a semester-long professional development program centered on Open Educational Practices (OEP) to impact language teaching and learning. OEP is integral to teacher professional development because teachers practice and grow digital and information literacy and increase awareness for accessing and modifying OER. In addition to the research findings, I will highlight practical suggestions to support teacher educators and educational leaders who provide online professional development/learning opportunities to their K-12 communities.