Program

Bodek Lounge, Houston Hall Ground Floor

Check-in, pick up symposium materials, and enjoy some coffee.

Bodek Lounge, Houston Hall Ground Floor

This informal keynote features an interactive conversation with the purpose to set the stage for the day's workshops. Presenters will share from their work concrete examples that highlight collaboration and what they represent for language education. The panel will also spotlight content-based instructional models and ways content and language educators can work together.

Catherine DiFelice Box
Lecturer of Educational Practice, Educational Linguistics Division, Penn GSE 

Dr. Box comes from a family of proud teachers, and she began her teaching career in the college composition classroom at West Chester University. After receiving her master’s degree in English and her high school teaching certification, she began working with English teachers in the Greater Philadelphia area and then in high schools in Paris, France. In all of these classroom experiences, Dr. Box was particularly drawn to exploring the challenges of students who were learning the dominant language of the school and were adjusting to life in a new country. She returned to the United States to pursue a doctorate in Applied Linguistics at Teachers College, Columbia University, where she taught adult ESL and French courses.

Dr. Box facilitates budding educators in examining content-based, language-focused instruction, task-based language teaching, and discourse analytic approaches to multilingual and multicultural settings. She teaches practica for students working in K-12 public schools, as well as those teaching in adult ESL settings. In addition, she consults as an English Language Specialist with the Department of State in implementing English as a Medium of Instruction in international higher education contexts.

Lynsey Farrell
Director of Research and Thought Leadership, Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship, MIT

Dr. Farrell joined MIT from the University of Pennsylvania where she was a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and the Africa program lead at the Lauder Institute of Management and International Studies. She spearheaded the annual Lauder Africa Futures Conference, an interdisciplinary and intersectoral event focused on bringing together over 500 business leaders, academics, NGO practitioners, policy makers, and entrepreneurs for conversations about Africa’s potential.

She also coordinated the Lauder Global Business Insights report, converting student writing into an anthology of business trends and insights from around the world.

Over two decades, Lynsey’s work has focused on the intersections of youth, international development, urbanization, and entrepreneurship in sub-Saharan Africa. She completed extended field research among youth-self-help groups in the Kibera settlement of Nairobi while directing American University’s Kenya program on Sustainable International Development. A scholar-practitioner, she spent several years at Ashoka: Innovators for the Public as the program director for the MasterCard Foundation funded Future Forward: Innovations in Youth Employment in Africa initiative, she curated and facilitated the Future of Work in Africa course, co-authored a report called Youth Unstuck: Innovations in Youth Livelihoods and Leadership in Africa, and pioneered the Ashoka Emerging Insights report, which showcases the latest trends in social innovation around the world.

Since 2018, she has been on the board of the action research organization, Grandmother Project, and co-founded the Grandmother Collective in 2021 to promote the powerful role that grandmothers and older women in every community and culture play as co-leaders in social and environmental change. She received her PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Boston University.

Christina Frei
Executive Director of Language Instruction, Penn Arts & Sciences
Academic Director, Penn Language Center

Christina Frei specializes in constructivist curriculum design, intercultural communication, and diverse applications of technology for teaching and learning world languages and cultures. She regularly offers a course in Second Language Development (GRMN 516/EDU 670) and her signature course German Crime Novels (GRMN  352). In addition, she directs all courses in the two-year German language and culture program. As part of the Bachelor of Applied Science degree in LPS, she offers each Spring a required online course ICOM100: Intercultural Communication.  

Frei co-authored a textbook for introductory/intermediate German language and culture: Augenblicke, German through Film, Media and Texts. Please visit the website to learn about the approach to Augenblicke and view the authors' informative Welcome video. 

She received two national teaching awards recognizing her contributions to Language and Teacher Education: The 2017 AATG Outstanding German Educator Award and the 2017 ACTFL-NYSAFLT Anthony Papalia Award for Excellence in Teacher Education.

Anne Pomerantz
Professor of Practice, Educational Linguistics Division, Penn Graduate School of Education

Dr. Pomerantz she works closely with language educators and intercultural specialists. Her research focuses on the role of humor in classroom discourse, pedagogical interactions, and language teaching. She is the co-author (with Nancy Bell) of Humor in the Classroom: A Guide for Language Teachers and Educational Researchers.

Bodek Lounge, Houston Hall Ground Floor

Indigenous traditions of knowledge can contribute to enrich the learning experience in a collaborative way, while engaging with contemporary issues: social and environmental justice, climate change, decolonization, human rights. For speakers of Quechua, the most spoken Indigenous language in the Americas, ‘Ayni’ is a practice and ontological approach to reciprocity and collective work.

We will explore collaborative strategies on how educators can effectively acknowledge Indigenous traditions of knowledge, empower students from diverse backgrounds, and develop meaningful community partnerships.

Américo Mendoza-Mori
Lecturer in Latinx Studies and Faculty Director, Latinx Studies Working Group, Harvard University

Américo Mendoza-Mori teaches and researches on Latin American, U.S. Latinx, and Indigenous issues at Harvard University. He is an interdisciplinary scholar trained in literary, linguistic, and cultural studies. Mendoza-Mori’s work has appeared in a variety of academic journals, has been presented at the United Nations, and has been featured in The New York Times, a TEDx talk, NPR, Remezcla. Recently, he has launched the Quechua Initiative on Global Indigeneity at Harvard.

Ben Franklin Room, Houston Hall Second Floor

Many teachers, particularly in the realm of Higher Education World Language programs, still struggle to fully integrate language learning with the learning of “content” (e.g., from the fields of literature, history, cultural studies, etc), particularly at the introductory and intermediate levels, and in the current climate where the use and usefulness of textbooks is increasingly questioned.

This workshop will focus on understanding the potential for an interdisciplinary or “content plus” approach to the teaching of language and content. Workshop participants will be introduced to key principles for working with authentic and adapted texts, including considerations for selecting texts, scaffolding language needed for studying content, and mining content for language purposes. Participants will observe how the principles work in action with reference to a set of texts and their associated activities and tasks. In addition, they will have the opportunity to discuss how such principles may be applied in their own teaching contexts and will engage in some preliminary design activities.

Claudia Lynn
Lecturer of Foreign Languages, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, University of Pennsylvania

Claudia Baska Lynn is Language Program Coordinator and Lecturer in Foreign Languages. She received her M.A. in Germanic Languages and Literatures from the University of Pennsylvania in 1996. Since 2005, she has taught beginning, intermediate, and advanced German culture and language courses. Claudia is an Ed.D. candidate in Educational Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education.

In recent years, several initiatives have originated from her teaching practice and pedagogical interests in research-grounded instruction, service-learning, as well as educational technologies. She is the co-author with Sibel Sayılı-Hurley of a content-based, intermediate German textbook, “Bewegungen”, currently piloted at the University of Pennsylvania, which won the SAS Language Teaching Innovation Grant First Place Award 2016. In the academic year 2018/19, Claudia was an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Price Lab for Digital Humanities. She is also the co-recipient of a Price Lab Project Incubation Grant which supports the integration of DH tools in foreign language learning. In 2018, Claudia was co-recipient of The Sachs Program For Arts Innovation Grant for Language, Culture and Contemporary Art, a project that focuses on the development of an arts-integration based pedagogy.

Claudia has presented on various topics including Digital Humanities and Intercultural Learning at national and regional conferences such the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages Convention, ACTFL, and the German Studies Association Conference, GSA.

Santoi Wagner
Senior Lecturer and Associate Director of TESOL, Educational Linguistics, Penn GSE

Class of '47 Room, Houston Hall Third Floor

John Pollack
Curator of Research Services, Kislak Center, Penn Libraries

John H. Pollack is Curator, Research Services, in the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries. He has worked in this department since 1995. His responsibilities include providing assistance to students and scholars, and teaching and organizing class sessions centered on the collections. He is also responsible for the Furness Shakespeare Library, which is part of the Kislak Center.

John holds a PhD in English from Penn and a BA from Washington University in St. Louis. He specializes in Early American literature and history, and early modern book history. His research has focused on topics including Native American languages; colonial writings from New France; and Benjamin Franklin and colonial education.

Bodek Lounge, Houston Hall Ground Floor

Assortment of Signature Sandwiches

• Tofu Banh Mi – pickled vegetables, cucumber, cilantro, sriracha mayo, baguette (vegan)
• Fresh Mozzarella – slow roasted tomatoes, grilled eggplant, pesto, rosemary focaccia (vegetarian)
• Herb and Lemon Grilled Chicken Breast – havarti, roasted red peppers, arugula, baguette

Gourmet Salad Selection

• Mixed Greens Salad – shaved fennel & celery, toasted almonds, white balsamic vinaigrette (vegan, gluten-free) with optional shaved pecorino
• Seasonal Roasted Vegetable Quinoa Salad – herb pistou, toasted sunflower seeds, fresh herbs (vegan, gluten-free)
• Optional Addition of Grilled Herb Lemon Salmon

Whole Fruit and House-baked Cookies

Bottled Water and Soft Drinks

Bodek Lounge, Houston Hall Ground Floor

Preparing a grant proposal for funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities is a large task that requires the support of many key collaborators across disciplines. With so many organizations competing for funding, receiving the grant funding is an achievement in and of itself. However, the most difficult task lies ahead- accomplishing all of the goals of the grant while also ensuring that the work is meaningful and beneficial to all who are involved. 

This session will address the ongoing NEH grant collaboration between PLC and EPIC (Educational Partnerships with Indigenous Communities) collaborators. Attendees will learn about the project background, digital repatriation efforts, an online platform built specifically for indigenous communities, and review current work for each group of partners. A special focus on indigenous approaches to building digital archives using indigenous epistemologies, and ways of using digitally repatriated materials for “cultural and language revitalization efforts”. There will be time reserved at the end of the presentation for questions from the audience. 

Betsy Jane Kells
Technology Director, Penn Language Center

Betsy Jane Kells received a B.A in Italian Studies from Temple University and an M.A in Italian Studies, Second Language Acquisition from Middlebury College, in addition to completing the Virtual Online Teaching Certificate through Penn’s Graduate School of Education. She will start her doctoral studies in Educational Linguistics in the Fall 2022. She is currently the Technology Director for Penn Language Center, where she helps language instructors to meaningfully incorporate technology into their classes. She is also a Lecturer of Italian in the Romance Languages Department at Penn.

EPIC Partners
Ojibwe – Lyz Jaakola and David McDonald
Six Nations of the Grand River – Talena Atfield and Kevin White
Tuscarora Language and Culture – Betsy Bissell, Caitlin Phillips, Patricia Pineda, Tina Pineda, Vincent Schiffert, and Nick Smiedala

Ben Franklin Room, Houston Hall Second Floor

This three-part interactive workshop invites participants to consider climate stories–lived experiences of climate change–as companions to the big data with which climate change is quantified. The workshop's first part introduces the public research project, My Climate Story. The second explores the project's open climate curriculum and encourages participants to conduct climate interviews. Using the project's multilingual storytelling prompts, currently available in fifteen languages, yhe third yields short climate narratives that can be contributed to the project's growing Story Bank.

Bethany Wiggin
Associate Professor, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and
Founding Director, Penn Program in Environmental Humanitiesm University of Pennsylvania

Bethany Wiggin is the Founding Director of the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities, an Associate Professor of German. Her scholarship explores histories of migration, language, and cultural translation since the Columbian exchange across the north Atlantic world; she is currently completing Utopia Found and Lost in Penn’s Woods. She holds research to be a human right and regularly leads public research projects designed to connect academic and community expertise for environmental action. These projects have been supported by the National Geographic, Whiting, and Andrew W. Mellon Foundations and include: An Ecotopian Toolkit for the Anthropocene, Data Refuge, Futures Beyond Refining, and My Climate Story (selected). She has offered testimony about project findings to audiences ranging from school children, to the City Council of Philadelphia, the U.S. Congress, and UNESCO.

Class of '47 Room, Houston Hall Third Floor

How can we explore intersections to spark innovation in curricular design? This workshop will consider how interdisciplinary, technological, and linguistic crossroads in course development can foster a deeper awareness and appreciation of culture and encourage greater collaboration both in the classroom and the larger Francophone community.

Lisa Ann Britton
Lecturer of Foreign Languages, French and Francophone Studies, University of Pennsylvania

Lisa Ann Britton is a native of Philadelphia and holds a Masters of Arts degree in French from Bryn Mawr College. As a Lecturer of Foreign Languages, she designs and teaches French 140, an Intermediate level French language and Francophone culture course that promotes linguistic competence through the art of storytelling. She is currently working with a Senegalese storyteller and French film maker to document the story of the Senegalese Tirailleurs on the Chemin des Dames during World War I.

Marc Papé
Lecturer of Foreign Languages, Lauder Institute, University of Pennsylvania

Marc Adoux Papé, originally from the Ivory Coast, West Africa, holds a Maîtrise in International Law from the University of Abidjan (Cocody), a Master’s degree in International Affairs from Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida where he received two Ph. D’s: One in Political Science (International Relations/Comparative Politics) and one in French and Francophone African Literature. His teaching experience and research interests reflect his dual background in the Humanities and the Social Sciences. More specifically, he is strongly committed to an interdisciplinary approach to teaching and research focused on issues relevant to African communities of what French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre famously called the “mystic geography of Africa”, which include continental Africa, Europe, and the Americas.

He is the author of three books and several journal articles with a strong interdisciplinary content.

At Lauder, he teaches in the Languages and Cultures section of the “Francophone” Africa Program.

Bodek Lounge, Houston Hall Ground Floor