Alarcon & Holt Present at Flame Conference
Poliana Alarcon Bustos and Chloe Holt, second year students in our Hispanic Language & Literatures program, presented on an innovative remote learning pedagogy project they developed at the 2021 FLAME (Foreign Language Association of Maine) conference. Their presentation was titled, “Intercultural IPAs in the Age of Remote Teaching,” and was developed with guidance from Alison Carberry.
Poliana tells us:
“In the age of COVID, language teachers have had to adapt our teaching to create more accessible and highly scaffolded lessons that align with the new reality our students are facing. In order to do this we elected to create Integrated Performance Assessments (IPAs), in conjunction with our course coordinator, to provide our students greater engagement with comprehensible input in authentic cultural models. We showcased our approach to teaching the Day of the Dead in updated and intercultural ways, current events from the 2020 Chilean Plebiscite, and the way in which our communities have adapted to live with COVID during this past year. By implementing free technological tools like Google Apps and ThingLink, we have developed lesson plans that provide greater interactive accessibility to the authentic realia (such as photos and videos from actual demonstrators/voters), and that ask students to create and present their own representations of those authentic models using targeted language structures. This presentation focused solely on Spanish cultural input but can be adapted for other cultures and languages.”