Department of German

March 11, 2003

Final Report to the Spencer Foundation
under the

PRACTITIONER RESEARCH COMMUNICATION AND MENTORING GRANTS

For the Project

"SUPPORTING TEACHER-RESEARCHERS IN A COMPREHENSIVE CURRICULUM
RENEWAL PROJECT IN A COLLEGE FOREIGN LANGUAGE DEPARTMENT"
(Developing Multiple Literacies)

September 2000 - September 2002
German Department
Georgetown University

Heidi Byrnes and John Norris
Co-Prinicpal Investigators



As the Co-Principal Investigators of the grant we are pleased to submit this Final Report to the Spencer Foundation on behalf of the twelve teacher- researchers participating in the project and Dr. Lourdes Ortega who, along with us, served as mentor to one of the three teacher-researcher groups.

To begin with the most important observation: it would be difficult to overstate the significance and impact of the work accomplished under the auspices of the Practitioner Research Communication and Mentoring Grant -- for us as participating graduate students or faculty members and members of a teacher-researcher team and for the entire German Department at Georgetown University (GUGD). As future teacher-researchers we had been notified of the award in spring of 2000 just as the Department was completing the three-year implementation phase of its major curricular restructuring (1997-2000). At that time the department was rightfully gratified by the achievements that had thus far been attained - but there was also a sobering awareness that many more challenges and, more important, the most exciting opportunities for exploring collegiate foreign language teaching and learning lay ahead. The unspoken, though centrally important questions were: Who would take these on and how would they be taken on?

To those faculty and graduate students who had indicated their interest in the Spencer Grant, the grant's framework provided a welcome invitation to attempt to find answers -- to define their interests as practitioner-researchers in the ways they felt them to be most meaningful, to begin to specify and plan their methodologies and activities, and to begin to work together collaboratively as a group with the help of a designated mentor. Certainly part of the reason why they could to do so with great energy and enthusiasm, was the reward aspect that the group could associate with the grant award! Accordingly, each of the three groups set out in its area of inquiry with the benefit of a most advantageous starting position, namely the assurance of internal and external recognition and legitimacy for its projects. What we did not know then but do know now is that, over the two-year period of the Grant, both the three topics chosen and the many activities undertaken in their pursuit not only became our continuing interest and engagement; they virtually came to be "owned' by the entire departmental teaching staff! The department as a whole was willing to be drawn into them in a variety of ways: as informants who responded to our diverse questionnaires, as colleagues who offered suggestions on various aspects of our projects, as participants in faculty development workshops where we reported on these projects, as mentors beyond the official mentors, as "coaches" when members of the three teams prepared presentations at national conference, as colleagues who, on their own, adopted and adapted some of the stances brought to the fore by our Spencer Grant projects, and as an entire departmental unit that finalized policies, procedures, and practices that were clearly inspired by the Spencer Grant work. At the completion of the grant, then, we are proud to report that the kind of insights and practices that we engaged in as practitioner researchers groups have not only measurably enriched us but have , in some fashion, enabled all members of the department to advance in their thinking and in their practices.

Focus of Inquiry for the Three Teacher-Researcher Teams

As with our first year report, the bulk of this Final Report is once more be provided by the members of the three practitioner-researcher teams themselves. Also as was the case with the First Year Report, the group's convener, in collaboration with the group's members, produced these individual reports. Respectively, the three researcher teams investigated and report on

* the socialization and professional development of graduate teaching assistants in the GU curriculum, a continuing challenge with new cohorts of graduate students arriving every year (Report of the TA Development Group)
* the role and place of genre within the newly implemented content-oriented and task-based curriculum (Report of the Genre Group)development at the upper levels of a curriculum whose educational goal is the acquisition of academic-level literacy in German and whose curricular and pedagogical approach is text- and task-based (Report of the Materials Development Group)

Each one of the sub-reports addresses the nature of the group's specific activities, the kind of work it generated, presentation and dissemination activities it undertook within the department and at regional and national conferences, manuscripts group members created, and publications that have already appeared or that will appear in the near future. At the same time, each also speaks to the participants' learning, often experienced as insights that affected future plans of study and research alongside newly gained confident identities as teachers.

Highlights of Accomplishments Within the Grant - and Beyond

While the individual reports give a good sense of the specific work each of the groups accomplished, we would like to highlight some points that are particularly noteworthy in two areas,

* Grant-related Acitivties, and
* Effects of the Grant within the Georgetown University German Department (GUGD)

Finally, there is no doubt that the activities associated with the Spencer Grant have encouraged us to apply for additional grant funding, internally in order to assess more closely the nature of student learning within a curricular context and, more important, externally: The Department has applied for a grant under the NEH Exemplary Education Projects opportunities, entitled "Linking Cultural Literacy and Language Learning: A Curriculum Dissemination Project." Award of this grant would be a particularly welcome confirmation of what we already know to the be case, namely that we have benefitted immensely from the Spencer Teacher-Researcher Grant, a benefit we are eager to share with others.

Appendix Materials

* Disemination activities in the GUGD Spencer Grant.
* Flyer from Georgetown Graduate Student Research Days
* Paper delivered by the Genre Group at the University of California, Irvine, March 2002 (Crane, Galvanek, Liamkina, Ryshina-Pankova)
* Presentation outline and handouts of departmental workshop on genre, January 2003.
* Bibliography on genre (update March 2003, over 200 entries)
* Paper "' Awareness' as assessment tool in teacher professional development" (Sprang) and two additional abstracts from the TA Development group (Semler, Taylor)
* Handout from session at the ACTFL/AATG session, Nov. 2001. "Content courses as advanced language learning courses: Principles and practices for materials development."
* Handout from German Research Seminar: Linking content and language acquisition: Perspectives on materials development for upper-level content courses.
* Two syllabi: Liebe, Lust und Leidenschaft (also see Rinner "Text Choice in Task Development for the Differing Needs of Advanced Language learners") and German Business Culture and Globalization " (Weigert)
* Guidelines for materials development in upper level classes
* Publication offprint of "Reconsidering graduate students' education as teachers: 'It takes a department!'" MLJ 85,4 (2001):512-530.

March 11, 2003