Current Work
Place and Education
Currently, at the end of 2024, I am working on a new book project with the working title “Place and Language Education: Materiality, Meaning, and Practices.” After years working on the concept of spaces for language learning, I am excited to shift my focus toward the concept of plac. More to come soon. If you are interested in this topic as well, please reach out!
Physical Language Learning Spaces
My monograph project entitled Physical Language Learning Spaces in the Digital Age was published with Bloomsbury Academic on February 8, 2024. More info on that project here.
Language Education Summit 2024
On behalf of leadership from language centers and institutes at Michigan State University, the University of Iowa, University of Michigan, University of Minnesota, and University of Wisconsin-Madison, and with funding from the Big Ten Academic Alliance Letters and Science (LAS) Deans, we are pleased to announce the 2024 Big Ten Academic Alliance Language Education Summit. I am excited to be a part of this group of language center leaders planning this event. More information here.
Asymmetrical Course Sharing
As part of the NLRC, we are working on a project to create and research a model of sharing language courses with institutions that are not in consortia or in equal bilateral relationships. More information on this project can be found here.
Enrollments in Language Programs
Another research project is our Undergraduate Enrollment study as well as an edited volume entitled Language Program Vitality in the United States: From Surviving to Thriving in Higher Education.
My co-editors and I are excited to offer several workshops and presentations on the topic. More info on that emerging work can be found here. We are working with several universities to offer workshops and are starting a new professional learning community in September of 2024.
Power of Place
I am also excited about the Power of Place project, in which Verna Case and I conducted expert interviews of college presidents and vice-presidents about the role that place plays in mission design, strategic planning, and overall college development. An overview was recently published as a post “Today’s Colleges and the Power of Place” on the AAUP Blog Academe. The main article was published in October of 2024 in the Journal of Higher Education Management (open access).
Supply and Demand of Language Education
This project is about a data-driven approach to finding potential language learners, pairing them with relevant language programs, visualizing data, and making it available to the public. I received a small seed grant in 2024 and we have begun exploratory work. This will be the basis for a larger grant project.
Grant Projects
I am currently the PI and founding Director of the National Less Commonly Taught Languages Resource Center (NLRC). The center is funded by a Title VI Grant by the U.S. Department of Education. I am also the Co-PI on the 2.5 Million Less Commonly Taught and Indigenous Languages Partnership, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which involves a number of projects. Here is more information on that project. I am currently working on three larger grant proposals for 2025 and 2026.
CeLTA Strategic Plan
We are actively implementing our 7-year strategic plan for CeLTA.