Author: CLAC Consortium

The CLAC Consortium welcomes our newest institutional member: Colgate University (representative Cory Duclos).

Through its FLAC program, Colgate University seeks to create an international ethos for the liberal arts by expanding the range of curricular settings in which students and professors can develop and use foreign language skills. Beyond the foreign language departments, faculty in various departments and programs encourage the use of foreign language materials in their curricula, and certain courses – such as literature in translation – offer FLAC sections in which students can engage with the material in the relevant foreign language.

FLAC gives students the opportunity to expand their foreign language skills and/or to experiment with new languages. FLAC sections thus offer a framework for curricular initiatives that not only improve the foreign language competencies of students, but also demonstrate the necessary and critical value of foreign languages in understanding today’s world.

We look forward to working with Colgate university and its institutional representative in years to come!

If you are interested in joining CLAC as an institutional member, please contact us at clacconsortium@gmail.com

The CLAC Consortium welcomes our newest institutional member: The University of Pittsburgh (representative Haixia Wang).

The University of Pittsburgh’s Languages Across the Curriculum (LAC) Program offers students the opportunity to use world languages in courses offered in a variety academic disciplines, including those outside of languages and literature.

The program aims to provide a curricular framework to develop and apply language and intercultural competences within all disciplines. It is based upon the belief that languages and intercultural perspectives promote a better and more nuanced understanding of content in any course. It aims to promote a better understanding of world regions while demonstrating the relevance of practical language skills across the disciplines.

The University Center for International Studies (UCIS), with funding from Pitt’s Title VI National Resource Centers, has embarked on a four year initiative to increase the number of LAC courses offered on campus. Currently, three Title VI National Resource Centers support the development of new LAC courses: the Asian Studies Center (ASC), the European Studies Center (ESC), and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies (REEES). The initiative also receives support from the African Studies Program, Global Studies Center, and Center for Latin American Studies.

Presently, students apply their second language skills in French, Italian, German, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Russian to the study of academic content in fields such as Anthropology, History, Art History, Film Studies, Literatures, and Environmental Science. In the future, the program will expand to more languages and other disciplines.

We look forward to working with the University of Pittsburgh and its institutional representative in years to come!

If you are interested in joining CLAC as an institutional member, please contact us at clacconsortium@gmail.com

Join us at the Virtual Coffee Hour with CLAC: 

Cultures and Languages Across the Curriculum (CLAC): An Effective Approach to Internationalize the Curriculum  

August 12, 2020, 1-2pm EST

Register here and you will receive the zoom link soon.  

Brief description:

Join us for this 1-hour virtual coffee hour as we discuss ways in which you can enhance global learning in any course or program through languages and cultures. In this casual session (30-min presentation, followed by 30-min Q&A), three Executive Officers of the Cultures and Languages Across the Curriculum (CLAC) Consortium will briefly introduce what CLAC is and its different models on various campuses to further internationalize higher education. We will touch upon ways in which you can further your professional interests by building or incorporating CLAC on your own campus.

Hosts/Presenters: 

Bernd Estabrook, Professor of World Languages and Cultures – German, Illinois College 
William Pavlovich, Director of Global Learning Initiatives, Binghamton University
JY Zhou, Interim Director of Global Engagement and Senior International Officer, Stockton University 

Please contact JY.Zhou@stockton.edu for any questions.

In this report, Matt Hartman highlights the amazing work on Cultures and Languages Across the Curriculum taking place at Duke University, an institutional member of the Consortium:

“Cultures & Languages Across the Curriculum (CLAC), founded in 2014, is a program that supplements Duke’s language departments by offering students the chance to take classes from other departments in their target language. Some classes, like Romance Studies’ Soccer Politics, are full classes that have English-language lectures and discussion sections that take place in different languages.

Other CLAC courses are half-credit tutorials graded on an S/U basis, planned in parallel with a class from a different discipline. Students are encouraged, but not required, to enroll in both. For instance, in fall 2020 students can choose to take the CLAC course Voices in the Environment in French, Chinese or Spanish; its partner class, Integrating Environmental Sciences and Policy; or both.”

Read the complete article in the following link:

https://trinity.duke.edu/practical-way-learn-language-and-new-perspective