During the first two weeks of Short Term, Bates students, faculty and staff will be able to attend one-time language and culture classes taught by other students. The program, titled Short-term Peer-led Enrichment Language Lessons, or SPELL, is intended to “raise awareness and promote appreciation for linguistic and cultural diversity,” according to the program’s website.
Keiko Konoeda, lecturer in Japanese, is the program designer and grant recipient for this pilot program. The classes, only an hour long, aren’t intended to build proficiency. Rather, participants can expect to leave the class with a greater appreciation for the language and culture being taught as well as some skill and knowledge in that language.
“That can be being able to say one phrase that is very funny, or being able to pronounce some of the menu items more accurately,” Konoeda said. “It can take different forms. It can be a greeting that’s very culturally appropriate when you meet a person from that community next time.”
Konoeda is a researcher who studies the identities of language learners and users. She received this grant as part of her research. “I have always been interested, intrigued, troubled, all of them, by both the riches of linguistic diversity in this country and its invisibility,” Konoeda said.
She received her master’s degree from the University of Hawai’i and while there was impressed by how multilingual her surroundings were. “I hear lots of languages in the marketplace, in grocery stores, in all settings, churches,” Konoeda said. “But when I stepped into an elementary school to volunteer, it was a very English dominant space.”
So, Konoeda began volunteering at a local elementary school, bringing in picture books from different cultures. That experience inspired her current research. “That disconnect between how the school is such an English dominant space and the community, being much more multilingual is one of my fundamental questions I have as a researcher, and one of the ways I try to address it is by teaching a language,” Konoeda said.
Konoeda was inspired to start the SPELL program after a 2020 conference presentation that demonstrated the effectiveness of a similar program in a New York middle school.
She recognizes that the college and, specifically, the Student Writing Language Center have done a lot of work related to linguistic justice and diversity, and yet she wishes languages other than English were more present and visible on campus.
“All of these beautiful policies, but still, the place for different languages, especially a language that is not taught at Bates College, is very limited,” Konoeda said.
“My goal is to see what happens if the students who speak so many different languages can be hired to teach the languages that are so important to them, and the community can see and experience that richness,” Konoeda said. “I’m hoping that might cultivate some interest in learning additional languages too.”
Applications to teach a language through the program are open until Feb. 7 but will be accepted until slots are filled. The classes are open to faculty, staff and students and are not credit-bearing, so students enrolled during Short Term will still have to register for an additional course to stay on campus.
According to Konoeda, the qualifications to teach a SPELL course are intentionally broad. She hopes to hear from “any student who uses a language other than this English that we speak on this campus. That includes different varieties of English.” It also includes students who grew up speaking a different language at home, families who speak a mixture of languages and people who hold proficiency in one area of the language but not all.
The classes will be taught at noon and 7 p.m. for the first two weeks of May, with 20 slots total and 15 participants per class.
“I am proposing that they center one cultural text as an important part of their lesson,” Konoeda said. “That can be a song, that can be a poem, that can be a proverb, or can be a piece of media. But something that can convey both language and culture at the same time.”
For Konoeda, this will be a valuable experiment for her research as well. “I have not had an opportunity to study the identities of the people whose languages are not being taught on this campus. So how will an opportunity to teach their language impact their identity on this campus?”
