Sharing Less Commonly Taught Languages
January 7, 2024
Learning Through Three Iconic Cities: Cairo, Jerusalem, Istanbul
Congratulations to Ragy Mikhaeel, Oya Topçuoğlu, and Hanna Tzuker Seltzer who have published together with the director of the MENA Languages program, Franziska Lys, an article in the volume Sharing Less Commonly Taught Languages in Higher Education, a collection of essays that bring together voices representing different teaching approaches to Less Commonly Taught Languages. It emphasizes collaboration and thinking across institutional boundaries to tackle challenges as well as share innovative solutions for a wide range of languages and proficiency levels.
The chapter Language Learning Through Three Iconic Cities: A Shared Approach to Curriculum Development in Arabic, Hebrew, and Turkish describes the shared planning, design, and implementation of three similar courses in Arabic, Hebrew, and Turkish. The theme of the three courses are three major cities: Cairo, Jerusalem, and Istanbul. Using the theme of a city enabled the authors to integrate historical and current cultural materials as well as relevant vocabulary, grammatical concepts, and practical linguistic skills. It also allowed the authors to focus on questions of social justice while promoting critical thinking and empathy for the target culture. Although the courses use different languages and cultural content, all three courses have comparable unit structures and designs and a common pedagogy with similar learning goals. The courses were developed during weekly virtual meetings in the summer 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Open Access to the volume is available (article on pages 65-79)
The authors acknowledge generous financial support from Northwestern University: from the Alumnae of Northwestern University Organization (2020 and 2022) and from the Hewlett Fund for Curricular Innovation, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences (2022). The authors would like to thank Matthew Taylor in the Media and Design Studio in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences for the kind and beneficial support; their undergraduate and graduate student assistants, Abdallah Al Khawaldh, Maya Blumovitz, and Hazal Özdemir, for their creative ideas; and Catherine Baumann and Karin Maxey from the Chicago Language Center, University of Chicago, for their invaluable workshop on designing content courses.
Mikhaeel, R., Topçuoğlu, O., Tzuker-Seltzer, H., & Lys, F. (2023). Language Learning Through Three Iconic Cities: A Shared Approach to Curriculum Development in Arabic, Hebrew, and Turkish. In E. H. Uebel, A. Kramer, L. Giupponi (Eds.) Sharing Less Commonly Taught Languages in Higher Education: Collaboration and Innovation (pp. 65-79). Routledge.