CLAC Pilot Program Launches at CU Tomorrow Afternoon!
Tomorrow afternoon CAS will kick off the Culture and Languages Across the Curriculum (CLAC) Program with an inaugural lecture by Dr. JY Zhou. Dr. Zhou is the secretary of the CLAC Consortium and an Internationalization Specialist at Stockton University, she will be visiting campus to give a public introductory lecture on the CLAC program and how it works. This will be a great opportunity to learn more about CLAC options and their benefits. The lecture is scheduled for 4:30 p.m. at the British and Irish Studies Room on the 3rd floor of Norlin Library. We invite anyone who is interested in learning about integrating foreign languages into coursework to join us for this enlightening talk!
For those unfamiliar with the program, CLAC is a program designed to enrich coursework by affording students the opportunity to study texts and materials in languages other than English, which they typically can鈥檛 do in standard content courses due to unavoidable limitations in these settings. The program provides students with opportunities to explore their Asian language interests outside of the language classroom and across a wide-ranging curriculum in humanities, social and environmental sciences, or professional fields such as engineering or business. CLAC effectively allows students to integrate their Asian language skills into their content study in their field of interest, allowing them to enrich their studies of both. As defined by the nationwide CLAC Consortium: "CLAC supports translingual and transcultural competence as a reality for all students, not simply for those who major in a foreign language or participate in immersive study abroad programs. CLAC engages languages and intercultural perspectives to achieve a better and more nuanced understanding of content. It focuses less on bringing disciplinary content or culture into the language classroom than on assimilating languages and cultures into instruction and research across a wide range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary contexts.鈥
The CAS pilot program is running this academic year, and we have partnered with Professor Aun Ali in Religious Studies, Professor Andrew Stuckey in Asian Languages and Civilizations, and Professor Marcia Yonemoto in History to offer optional one-credit courses that are connected with existing content courses. We will be offering course development grants this spring for CU Faculty interested in adding CLAC components to their own courses.
We will also be running a smaller workshop with Dr. Zhou this Friday for faculty and graduate students interested in learning how to apply CLAC to their own coursework. We invite those interested to RSVP with danielle.salaz@colorado.edu
