February/March 2025

Our next sessions of the Thriving Language Programs Learning Community will be held on:

• March 18th (Tuesday) at 3pm Eastern 
• April 7th (Monday) at 2pm Eastern

More details and Zoom registration links are below!  

February 4th Learning Community

In February’s learning community, we discussed trajectories of students through our programs. Similar to customer journeys in the business world, mapping student trajectories helps us understand who we are serving and who we may be inadvertently leaving out. We have to not only look at the students who are currently enrolled in our program, but we also need to reflect on if our programs are keeping up with the changing demographics of the university as a whole.

• Do our programs fit the students that are currently enrolled in our programs?
• Have we reflected on the requirements for majors, minors, etc. recently
• Are we providing access to students of all backgrounds?
  • Most language programs are designed for students who have access to the language in high school. If students do not/cannot take the language you offer in high school, could they still progress through your program?

We had breakout groups go through these World Language Student Trajectory Scenarios and then a discussion, which we unfortunately had to cut off! We decided we needed more time on this topic, so March's session will also be focused on student trajectories. 

Our next session of the Thriving Language Programs Learning Community will be held on Tuesday, March 18th at 3pm Eastern. 

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

We will continue to discuss student trajectories.

If you did not attend last time, please look have the major and minor requirements and the related courses at your own institution handy so that you can easily reference them during the discussion. You may want to review the World Language Student Trajectory Scenarios and think about how your students experience your program. 

April Learning Community Session

The April session will be on Monday, April 7th at 2pm Eastern. Registration for April is available as well and will be sent again. 

Are you interested in leading a session of our learning community this semester? We will hold at least one more session of the learning community on April 7th at 2pm Eastern. 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!