Covid’s Impact: Curricular and Programmatic Evolution of Language Programs
Without a doubt, COVID has promulgated an academic shake-up which has had an acute impact on institutional curricular models. Language programs have had to find immediate ways of engaging learners and instructors in new modes of acquiring course content. Specifically, programs have been challenged to quickly shift from live, in-class models to catapulting the teacher-learner compendium into a predominantly online model. These new paradigms and ways of interacting with students have brought about challenges and stresses but have also served as ways of reflection, movement, and change, specifically forcing us to look at new ways of connecting to our digital native students and finding ways of bridging generational technological divides. The presenter will provide a unique perspective from her role as Language Program Director and Chair of the Contingency Planning Task Force for Language and Writing courses at the collegiate level on how this pandemic has pivoted language curriculum in a new direction, transforming a path forward in addition to sharing how a specific language program initiated this change as a bottom-up process which ultimately led to faculty collectively rethinking how learners and educators can discover, apply knowledge, and use the online space in real task and multimodal exchanges and interactions.