Leveraging Social Justice Approaches to Affirm and Support World Language Students
Presenter: Dr. Pamela M. Wesely
Date & Time: Tuesday, May 21st, 2024, 4:00-5:00 pm
1 hour of CTLE credit offered
The Office of Bilingual Education and World Languages (OBEWL) of the New York State Education Department (NYSED) presents this next webinar in its 2024 Professional Learning Series: Leveraging Social Justice Approaches to Affirm and Support World Language Students. This webinar is offered free of charge for world language administrators and leaders working and studying in New York State educational institutions.
Webinar description: What do we know about how to teach for social justice in world language classes? How can we create more equitable and affirming world language classrooms for all our students? In this webinar, Dr. Pamela Wesely, co-author of Words and Actions: Teaching Language Through the Lens of Social Justice (ACTFL, 2014, 2018), will pair recent scholarship on gender-just and racially-just language pedagogies with frameworks in social justice education. Participants will come away with new ideas about how to connect these ideas in the classroom with NYSED guidance, including the NYS Learning Standards for World Languages, Checkpoint Proficiency Targets, and NYS Themes and Topics.
Registration process: All participants are encouraged to pre-register for this event. Pre-registration will close on Monday, May 20, 2024; there will be no same-day registrations. Once the registrant's email address has been verified as being from a New York State school, college, or university, an email confirming their registration will be sent. Twenty-four hours prior to the event, all registered individuals will receive login instructions with the link to join the webinar. Only pre-registered attendees will be eligible for a certificate documenting attendance and/or CTLE hours.
For more information on professional learning webinars for world language educators, please visit our website.
Webinar presenter:
Dr. Pamela Wesely received her PhD in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Minnesota in 2009, and she is currently a Professor of Multilingual Education and the Associate Dean for Faculty and Academic Affairs in the College of Education at the University of Iowa. Dr. Wesely’s scholarship and teaching examines K-12 world language education in the United States. Building on eight years of work as a middle school French teacher and eleven years working in the experiential learning environment of Concordia Language Villages in Minnesota, she studies the attitudes, motivations, perceptions, and beliefs of stakeholders in K-12 world language education. She is particularly interested in pedagogical innovation that departs from the grammar-based curriculum, like content-based instruction, instruction focused on comprehensible input, social justice education, and technology integration in the language classroom. Her work has been published in journals including Foreign Language Annals, Modern Language Journal, Journal of Teacher Education, CALICO Journal, Language Teaching Research, and Journal of Mixed Methods Research. She is the co-author of Words and Actions: Teaching Languages Through the Lens of Social Justice (ACTFL, 2014, 2018). She is a former Treasurer and member of the Board of Directors of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL), as well as a former president of the Iowa World Language Association.