Our next session of the Thriving Language Programs Learning Community will be held on Monday, May 19th at 3pm Eastern. 

Please register for the May Learning Community session and the Zoom link will be sent directly to you!  

April 7th Learning Community

We had an active sharing session, where people shared materials that had been developed for improving their language program vitality, from materials for college advisors to recruitment letters, career sheets to study abroad course design! 

Items were deposited in a shared drive, where people can continue to add their own materials.

Highlights:

• Anne VW presented information on Advisor Breakfasts that she organized at MSU, including best practices she’s learned
• Frederique G highlighted a letter that is sent to students who stand out in the lower levels to encourage them to be majors or minors
  • Takes time, check if they’re already majors/minors, tailor to make sure that they’re not asking a junior to add a major if they can’t possibly do that
  • Send letters before registration and have seen a response of students making appointments for letters
  • Has worked for French and German, is harder for Spanish since it’s such a big group
  • Ask instructors to make a list of the students (check to make sure if they’re a major or minor) and then submit it
• Kristin B mentioned that she started something similar in Italian, but even more basic, getting them to take one more class
  • Also pointed to the French NACE Infographic
• Lydia O (Language Institute at UW-Madison) added several materials from her position with outreach and career advising
  • Flyer “Why study languages”
  • Listing languages front and center
  • Stand up banner advertising all the languages offered
  • Where will your language skills take you? Flyer
• ThuyAnh N. talked about ways they have promoted and supported Vietnamese at University of Michigan, including a Vietnamese language table, joining forces with other Asian languages to promote

Are you interested in leading a session of our learning community at some point? Part of making this a true community is sharing the leadership of the sessions! 

Some ideas could include (from our survey): discussing research, enrollment, program revamp goals/steps, actions for programs with only minors or no majors/minors, surveys for students and/or alumni, ideas to reach out to other units, etc. 

You would craft the content and invite any additional colleagues/speakers to participate. We could help with ideas for facilitation if desired. 

Please let us know if you would like to lead one of the learning community sessions in the future by emailing us and describe your proposed topic. 

• 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!