End of 2024! 

Thank you for joining us this year for the Thriving Language Programs learning community and newsletter. We wish you a restful and relaxing end of 2024! 

Survey on its way!

We will be doing a survey to gauge interest for continuing the learning community and/or related activities. You will receive a survey link directly from our survey software (Qualtrics). Please fill this out when you are able, but no later than January 15, 2025. 

Recap of Session 4: December 9th

Participants were asked to reflect on actionable next steps for themselves on these topics, either silently reflecting or joining a group to discuss their ideas out loud. 

We used a Miro board to let participants discuss their future plans on three time scales (the last few weeks of this semester, next semester, and in the next 3-5 years).  (https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVKi8_X3I=/)

We then turned to a small group discussion about changing these goals to SMART goals and reflecting on others’ action steps. 

For the end of the session, we focused on a discussion of takeaways from this fall’s learning community and lessons from the edited volume, including: 

• Gathering data on your programs is crucial 
• Consider all student voices but pay particular attention to the 99% of students who are not taking our classes.
• Be willing to compromise and be generous with each other in your programs 

• Be open to new ideas 

We look forward to hearing from you in the survey about what would be interesting to you in future semesters!

• Language Program Vitality in the United States (edited volume on which this learning community is based) 
• Sharing Less Commonly Taught Languages in Higher Education: Collaboration and Innovation (edited volume with some “Solutions to Thrive”) 
• Article: How important is studying languages for undergraduate students and why (not) study languages? 
• Learning Community Website

If you have any information you would like to share with the rest of the community, please email us (Emily, Felix, Scott) and we will try to share it in our upcoming newsletters. We would love to include any stories of successful (and also unsuccessful) initiatives that you have tried. We could also share links to resources you want to share. We want this newsletter to be a place for our community to continue growing and thriving, so we would love to hear your voices as well!