Author: Victoria Williams

In spring 2009, a 25-minute documentary, Il corpo delle donne (The Body of Women), composed of images selected from 400 hours of television programs, exerted an unexpected impact on an Italian public which over the years had become uncomplainingly accustomed to seeing women made objects of the most explicit forms of degradation, humiliation, and misogyny.…

A website curriculum for teaching Russian phonetics and avant-garde literary culture. Website address: https://sites.google.com/a/fulbrightmail.org/russian-phonetics-through-avant-garde-poetry/ The idea for this project emerged from of my experience teaching Russian at Berkeley and my own budding dissertation work on Russian avant-garde poetry. As a graduate student instructor of Russian—and a student in the throes of research—I became increasingly convinced…

From a Fan of Little House on The Prairie to a Japanese Lecturer at UC Berkeley: Chika Shibahara PROLOGUE: As a teenager, Chika Shibahara had her mother sew clothes designed by Chika and inspired by her favorite American TV series, Little House on the Prairie. Little did Chika know then where life would lead her…

Dear Graduating Class, Dear Parents, Relatives, and Friends: On this day of celebration, many of you will be celebrating and talking about this graduation in many different languages. You will be dreaming of it in Spanish, raving about it in Korean, and in the years to come, who knows? You might remember it in German,…

World Language teachers and credential candidates are invited to participate in the professional development series Integrating 21st Century Technology into the World Language Classroom on June 21, 22, and 23. Create lesson plans that engage students in communicative activities using music resources, video, and Web 2.0 tools: Voice Thread, Google Voice, Voki, Animoto, PB Works.…

Instructional Development Research Projects Language and Culture in Documentaries by Italian Women Filmmakers Mara Mauri Jacobsen, Lecturer, Italian Studies The documentaries I have chosen for my Advanced Italian course present the Italian feminist movement, and/or the lives of Italian women, according to different aspects of the female condition, within the context of Italian culture and…

New Media and Literacy in Transnational Environments by Eva Lam, Associate Professor, Learning Sciences, Asian American Studies, Northwestern University. This paper discusses recent developments in sociolinguistic research that theorizes the nature of language and communicative practices in globalized and transnationalized spaces. We consider how this work proposes some new ways to think about language and…

Arabic: A More Commonly Taught Less Commonly Taught Language by Professor Roger Allen, Social Thought and Comparative Ethics, University of Pennsylvania. After presenting an introduction to the Arabic language and its history, I consider the development of Arabic-language pedagogy within academe over the course of the past half-century. Within the context of current discussions about…

Perhaps I might be considered something just short of insane to undertake a one-week journey halfway around the world to attend a three-day conference. But in the third week of February this is exactly what I did. I have to admit I had a few doubts about the undertaking; the trip itself takes at least…

I attended the 2011 Annual Conference of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and Eastern European Languages in Pasadena, January 6-9 on funds provided by the Berkeley Language Center. I presented a poster at AATSEEL’s first-ever poster session, Teaching Less Commonly Taught Slavic Languages and Central/East European Languages II. The poster session was experimental…