Part of the Sherred Center Teaching Arts Lunches series

Jessica Bacal (Wurtele Center for Work & Life)
Janie Vanpee (French Studies)
Joseph Bacal (Information Technology Services)

We will share how a faculty member, administrator and educational technology staff member developed an integrative curriculum, designed to get students thinking about their own cross-cultural experiences and to self-assess their language skills.

The collaboration evolved from the interests of Janie Vanpee, director of Smith’s Global Studies Center and Translation Studies Concentration, who wanted concentrators to develop their own “European Language Portfolios.” (The European Language Portfolio, or ELP, is used across the EU to assess language skills and cross-cultural fluency.)

Professor Vanpee worked with the Wurtele Center and ETS, and together they created a set of curricular tools to engage students in talking and writing about the evolution of their cultural competence. They also built a WordPress plugin that allows students to self-assess language-learning within an “exportable” digital rubric, and to include multimedia proof of their levels of proficiency.

The end product is a curriculum and digital tool that guides students in a kind of “authentic assessment,” easily-adaptable to any set of academic goals.