Grant+Proposal

//Grant Proposal Outline// //Amity Beane

I'll be working with my colleague Mary K. who teaches with me at Dirigo.

What we want to do is not easy, and that is focus on a learning style that we do not dominate ourselves and try to understand it so that we can differentiate our practices of language instruction.

The lens of understanding of this non-dominant learning style will be through music. More on that in a minute.

As world language teachers, our mission is to deliver in the best way possible a sound education in communication, community, culture, connections, and comparisons. When students ourselves (way back when) the methodologies were reading and writing based. We learned by rote drills, endless conjugations, and putting those rules into practice through reading and writing and memorizing vocabulary lists. Maybe saying "learned" is the wrong verb. We attended those classes and saw those methods. We learned by immersion, really, Mary in France and myself in Venezuela. And we want to// keep //learning by immersion, and at the same time focus on the skills or arts that were ignored when we were students but are the learning styles of our pupils. A double-shot, if you will.

Some numbers. How do we know what we lack as teachers? Not having Mary's data handy, I'll share my own.

The following is a snapshot of 97 students enrolled in Spanish in 2009-10.//



//As you can see, the dominant learning styles are social and aural.

Interestingly enough, my personal learning styles are quite different.//



//I'm not naive enough to think that through carefree practice, I can reach the aural learners. I'm smart enough to know that readers and writers tend to do well in my class because I tend to teach with some of the old methods I was taught with, in the absence of immersion. Therein lies the gap.

To close the gap, Mary and I would like to return to our roots of language learning, which is the immersion method, and focus on learning aurally. An aural learner is characterized by the good folks at Learning Styles Online://

If you use the aural style, you like to work with sound and music. You have a good sense of pitch and rhythm. You typically can sing, play a musical instrument, or identify the sounds of different instruments. Certain music invokes strong emotions. You notice the music playing in the background of movies, TV shows and other media. You often find yourself humming or tapping a song or jingle, or a theme or jingle pops into your head without prompting.

//Neither Mary or I are much for what you read above. We want to be better at this, and we want to evolve as learners. We want to attend to our students in a way that meets them where they are. How will we know if we succeed? My gut tells me after the professional development we'd like to develop through this grant, Mary and I can start creating aural assessments of language that match the aural learning style, as opposed to have so many reading and writing assessments. In addition, we hope our personal learning and research can transform into engaging lessons that really capture the essence of learning to love a culture. It sounds silly, like can we really get away with this? Singing? Music? It's the currency of our students' brains.//

//Our plan is to apply for the $10,000 grant through Fund for Teachers. Our outline is forthcoming but involves four weeks traveling in tandem learning aurally about language and culture. Our lens will be music--the rich tradition of music. Our itinerary has not been discussed, but Cuba, Haiti, the DR, Puerto Rico,Guadelupe, and Martinique is one suggested itinerary. I envision us tracing the thread of the African influence in Caribbean culture, and observing the fusion between colonial language, indigenous instruments and African rhythms.//



//The proposed time-line to apply and execute (if funded) is October 2010 through August 2011. The intended outcome is to complete travel and research and to design a unit that engages and educates aurally. Our end result should be transformed assessments and units that are rich with our findings, our investigations, observations, and those pearls of wisdom acquired through experience. We want to grow as learners, use our second and third languages, and inspire our students to continue to advanced study in world languages. Our current retention rate at the highest level is 12%. We both would like to change that, and the data tells us to reach out to aural learners.//

//$10,000 seems likes a lot of money to travel. I am confident in building a schematic that works for our travel. My experience in designing and executing service learning has taught me how to budget for an extended stay in another country. My last trip that was approved and executed consisted of 28 people, 9 days, one island nation and $32,000 that I managed, with a surplus that was donated back to the host country. Mary was a part of this trip. We discovered that we travel well together. Her experience as a Fulbright scholar in France is a bonus. We plan to work together to fill out the rigorous application//, //which is open in October for the 2011 summer grants. One of the greatest things about this grant opportunity is that it really focuses on us as learners, and allows us the room and space to be in that stage again, as opposed to relentless leadership and modeling of language acquisition in the classroom. I don't think teachers have enough of this type of experience. I am confident our professional development will nurture our practice in the classroom for many years to come. Our original experiences that motivated us to teach in the first place can be laid to rest and new experiences can help us renew the fire.//