As we all know worldwide, this has been a very strange year (!) full of adaptations, concern, discovery-through-necessity, and for many, resolve to make the best of it.

LTS Summer term cohorts

All of this was true for the students and faculty in the LTS program this Summer term. For our graduating MA students, the summer term focused on designing and writing a rigorous capstone project. We’re incredibly proud of what they were able to accomplish while isolating at home… with none of our normal summer in-person gatherings! For our incoming students, the summer term meant adapting to a new intensive graduate program during a spreading pandemic, trying to focus on our love of all-things-language while speaking through a mask or a screen.

Living with Loss

For some of our students and faculty in the department, this was a heart-wrenching time as family or community members were driven from their homes by the threat of wildfire or witnessed loved ones become sick or pass away. We mourned, for example, the passing of Arlita Rhoan, an elder and fluent speaker of the endangered language Ichishkin from the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs. Arlita had an enormous positive impact on revitalization efforts of this Pacific Northwest indigenous language through her mentorship in her community and her decades of participation in

events at the University of Oregon such as the Northwest Indian Language Summer Institutes. She will be deeply missed.

Fulbright FLTA and ETA Teacher Training

Not all of the summer was difficult news, thankfully! LTS students were successful in their classes and showed true grit in their studies and in their enthusiasm for our connections in the program. Many LTS faculty and some alumni also participated in two very successful pedagogical training events in August and September for individuals in the US and worldwide who were awarded the Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistantship (FLTA) award or the Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship (ETA) award. Organized by Jeff Magoto in the Yamada Language Center (YLC), these events allowed over 150 awardees to join us remotely for intensive work on language teaching and curriculum development. It was a truly inspiring experience to see the energy that these future language teachers were bringing to the goal of sharing their languages and cultures with others internationally. In fact, we are thrilled to have three new FLTA awardees with us at the University of Oregon this Fall, and look forward to getting to know them as they take classes and share their languages with us this term and beyond (keep an eye out for a blog post about them soon!).

Looking ahead to Fall term

Now we are starting our Fall term with a little more experience under our belts about what we can gain from remote and online teaching and learning. We are all exploring how to make this experience the best it can be, and how to take advantage of the fact that a world that expects remote connection is a world that can more easily share the benefits of language. There are actually many advantages to extensive online teaching that we are just beginning to understand. Let’s go, LTS – let’s keep talking!