It鈥檚 a resource gap that four 麻豆原创 researchers hope to help fill through a new project called the English-Learner Infused Training and Experience Program for Early and Primary Learning Educators (ELITE).

The work is funded by a five-year, $2.6 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education鈥檚 Office of English Language Acquisition.

According to the Bureau of Economic and Business Research, 60% of Spanish-speaking students who recently moved to Florida from Puerto Rico have settled in the greater Central Florida area. Of those, 40% are being served by local district schools.

Meanwhile, statistics from the Florida Education Association show that the state is dealing with 5,294 teacher vacancies and 4,631 noninstructional vacancies.

The Project ELITE team is comprised of researchers from 麻豆原创鈥檚 and College of Arts and Humanities. The team will take a multifaceted approach to provide educators across three school districts 鈥� Orange, Pinellas and St. Lucie 鈥� with professional learning and individualized coaching to address key instructional practices that promote school readiness, literacy and achievement in English learners from volunteer prekindergarten (VPK) to third grade.

It will also equip the educators with the tools to advance family and community involvement in a linguistically responsive manner.

鈥淭he impetus for the project was the need to support teachers as they鈥檙e working with English learners academically, but we also need to support them as they are working with English learners鈥� parents, families and the community,鈥� says 鈥�00 鈥�06MPA 鈥�16EdD, principal investigator and assistant professor in the . 鈥淥ur focus is to help provide teachers with tools and research-based practices that they can use in the classroom to advance English learners鈥� literacy and academic achievement.鈥�

Florin Mihai, co-principal investigator and professor in the , says there is an academic achievement gap between English learners and non-English learners since the former face the challenge of simultaneously learning language and academic content.

鈥淚f we equip English-learner teachers in VPK through third grade with research-based tools that will accelerate English learners鈥� language acquisition, enhance their language proficiency and develop their literacy, their academic learning will significantly improve because they will concentrate on academic content acquisition unhindered by limited English-language proficiency,鈥� Mihai says. 鈥淲e want to focus on language and literacy development in the earliest years possible to ensure a successful school experience for our English learners all the way to their high school graduation.鈥�

The project has a three-pronged approach to achieve its goals. The first is to prepare 220 highly qualified teachers, paraprofessionals and educational leaders who work with English learners in the Central Florida area through a 72-hour ELITE Professional Learning program.

The initial cohort of roughly 30 scholars will begin the program in Summer 2023, with four additional cohorts 鈥� each comprising between 40 to 50 scholars 鈥� to follow through 2027.

The second involves increasing parent, family and community engagement through developing and implementing Bilingual Village and Parent Ambassadors programs at 10 schools in the partner districts.

The Bilingual Village partners with local businesses that employ bilingual staff, giving English learners and their families an opportunity to practice both their home and second languages in a supportive environment. Meanwhile, parent ambassadors actively support their English learners in school and help promote school or district programs, services, events and activities to other English learners鈥� families and community members.

鈥淲hen families and communities are involved in education, students benefit tremendously,鈥� Mihai says. 鈥淲e want to make sure that the learning continues at home and in the community.鈥�

The third approach focuses on sustainability and maintaining the pipeline of transitioning project materials and resources to the partner school districts.

This will be accomplished by training 40 of the project alumni who will continue the program within their school districts via a 36-hour Train-the-Trainer program. Doing so will equip each school district with the knowledge and resources needed to maintain the professional learning program beyond the lifespan of the grant.

鈥淎ll of these different components are major contributors to increasing English learners鈥� achievement,鈥� Ceballos says. 鈥淭he Professional Learning, the Bilingual Village and the Parent Ambassadors (programs) all are inputs to help support English learners in our schools and communities. Each one helps strengthen those bridges between the school, families and the community.鈥�

Educators in partner districts interested in participating in the program should contact Ceballos at Marjorie.Ceballos@ucf.edu.

Research Team Credentials

Ceballos joined 麻豆原创 in 2018 as an assistant professor of educational leadership in the Department of Educational Leadership and Higher Education. She earned her bachelor鈥檚 in social science education, master鈥檚 in public administration and doctorate in educational leadership from 麻豆原创. She has received over $2 million in training grants.

Mihai is co-principal investigator and professor of teaching English as a foreign language in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, which he joined in 2006. He earned his doctorate in multilingual education from Florida State University.

Joyce Nutta is co-principal investigator and professor of English for speakers of other languages education in the . She聽earned her doctorate in second language acquisition from the University of South Florida. Nutta joined 麻豆原创 in 2007 and has received more than $7 million in research and training grants.

Vassiliki Zygouris-Coe is co-principal investigator and professor of reading education in the School of Teacher Education. She聽received her doctorate in curriculum and instruction from the University of Florida and has been a faculty member since 1999. She has received over $9 million in external funding.

So what does this mean for college students? Is it worthwhile to focus on developing communication skills? We asked Professor from the what he thinks.

Dr. Tyler Fisher is a Spanish professor in the and the .

Do you agree that STEM and language arts are complementary skills?

They can be, yes. Students who develop a narrow specialization in one STEM area could profoundly benefit from developing skills in a second or third language. Doing so would equip them to communicate aspects of their specialist, technical expertise into that target language.

And for their part, students of languages would benefit from acquiring first-hand awareness of one or more STEM disciplines. At the very least, they would gain a working knowledge of the scientific method. I relish the 鈥減ermission鈥� that language learning grants us to consider any and every field of human knowledge 鈥� and to consider those fields at their most fundamental (their technology, lingo and jargon) and their most innovative (how to express the latest developments on the furthest frontier of a STEM field, for example.)

than for programming and even engineering majors in the future. What鈥檚 your opinion?

There is no need to pit the liberal arts against programming and engineering. The liberal arts, historically, encompassed seven domains of higher education: grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. The well-educated individual sought to master each of these domains in an integrative program. In other words, the complementarity of STEM and languages was already acknowledged at the dawn of university education. If we are now rediscovering their complementary nature, it is an ancient recognition that we only misplaced by stereotyping fields of knowledge into unnecessarily restrictive pigeonholes.

What do you see a modern language education offering that a STEM education might not provide?

Ultimately, language and culture are inseparable. We cannot understand one very well, if at all, in isolation from the other. The advantage of language learning, for me, can be summed up in one word: access. Access to ideas, to cultures, to the world. Creating access is fundamentally what we do in .

When we teach a language, we create access to other ways of thinking, perceiving and expressing. When we translate, we facilitate access to other peoples, cultures and worldviews. When we guide students through a piece of literature, we render accessible the best that has been imagined across time and place. When we help heritage speakers improve their first language, we offer access to their families鈥� deeper past and present. Acquiring a second or third language is an eminently transferable skill that enhances our students鈥� career prospects, cultural literacy and access to greater opportunities worldwide.

What are some things you suggest students do to be the most well-rounded graduates possible 鈥� and therefore increase their employability?

Students would do well to take advantage of the years they have during their undergraduate studies, in whatever field, to allow themselves to read and reflect on the nature of the knowledge they are gaining: How rapidly will this knowledge become dated? How might it apply to what they鈥檝e learned in the past and what they hope to learn next?

In this vein, I would encourage students to read at least two books 鈥� not textbooks 鈥� in their field each semester. Even while holding down one or more part-time jobs during their undergraduate years, which many 麻豆原创 students do, they are unlikely ever to have that amount of time or energy available again for highly intentional reading and reflection. More importantly, the practice of regularly reassessing the inherent limits and latitudes of one鈥檚 knowledge cultivates a versatility of mind, akin to what I鈥檝e been discussing here in relation to language acquisition.

Contrary to what the great Oz tells the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz, achieving a diploma does not confer some kind of substitute for brains. Real fluency, in languages as in any form of literacy, is an ongoing proficiency one must actively maintain even after the B.A. or B.S. certifies one鈥檚 attainment in a particular subject. Prepare to adapt. Be equipped to innovate.

The conference for the annual Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory [organizers pronounce the HASTAC acronym as “haystack”] will be hosted in Orlando for the first time by 麻豆原创 and the Florida Digital Humanities Consortium. The 10-year-old conference previously was held at Duke University, UCLA, University of Illinois, York University in Toronto, the Ministry of Culture in Lima, Peru, and elsewhere around the world.

鈥淭his conference is a venue where digital humanists from across the world and across disciplines come together to share their research, their pedagogical methods, and their experiences. This sharing of knowledge in both the practical and the theoretical allows us to broaden our own world,鈥� said Amy Giroux, managing director for the conference and a 麻豆原创 computer research specialist at the university鈥檚 Center for Humanities and Digital Research.

This year鈥檚 conference theme, 鈥淭he Possible Worlds of Digital Humanities,鈥� highlights new opportunities for digital humanities and allows attendees from the more than 400 member organizations an opportunity to discuss and explore new research and creative work. The program will include scholars from around the globe interested in topics such as the humanities across disciplines, gaming, social media, archives, and other fields. There will be roundtables, demonstrations, maker sessions, workshops, media art projects, and other sessions.

鈥淗aving the HASTAC annual conference at 麻豆原创 allows us to see the superb work being done in the digital humanities around the world, and to show off what we鈥檙e doing here at 麻豆原创 to help interpret our meaningful world using digital tools,鈥� said philosophy Professor Bruce Janz, conference director and co-director of 麻豆原创鈥檚 Center for Humanities and Digital Research. 鈥淗ASTAC has always focused on the ways education and society have changed and must adapt in the Information Age, and this fits into the forward-looking and socially conscious orientation of programs at 麻豆原创 such as Texts and Technology, Digital Media, and Digital History.鈥�

One of the conference sessions asks: What can other disciplines learn from Digital Humanities and what can Digital Humanities learn from other disciplines?

鈥淭his particular panel is made up of a group of scholars who work both in traditional academia and also on the cutting edge of innovative digital spaces,鈥� Giroux said. 鈥淭hey hope to foster a good discussion on how digital humanities practitioners can grow within institutions which may not be as interested in supporting digital humanities work and how the current institutional level research infrastructure may need to be modified to allow digital humanities research to flourish.鈥�

Many digital humanities projects draw from a number of disciplines including history, anthropology, computer science, data science, digital media, traditional media, and other fields.

For example, Giroux said, one project her team will present at HASTAC is ELLE, the EndLess Learner, a second-language learning video game in which her colleagues from the Office of Instructional Resources (Don Merritt), the Games Research Lab (Emily Johnson), and modern languages (Sandra Sousa and Gergana Vitanova) teamed up with a group of computer science undergraduate students to create a database-driven learning game.

鈥淚t is this type of inter/multi-disciplinary project that allows the digital humanities to emerge from many different fields,鈥� she said. 鈥淭he five of us will be doing a roundtable discussion on the project and the undergraduate students will be displaying the 2-D and 3-D versions of the project.鈥�

Other 麻豆原创 students will showcase their research and work in front of the international audience and will serve as moderators at many of the conference sessions. HASTAC also has a scholars fellowship program, whose digital-age members blog, host online forums, develop new projects and organize events. 麻豆原创鈥檚 three HASTAC scholars 鈥� Nicholas DeArmas, Jennifer Roth Miller and David Morton from the Texts & Technology doctoral program 鈥� will host a professionalization workshop for conference attendees.

Some of the conference speakers are: Purdom Lindblad, assistant director of Innovation and Learning at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities; Tressie McMillan Cottom, assistant professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University; T-Kay Sangwand, librarian for UCLA鈥檚 Digital Library Program, and Cathy N. Davidson, distinguished professor of English and director of the Futures Initiative and HASTAC @ CUNY at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Tours for registered attendees also are scheduled for the Orange County Regional History Center, the Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College, and the Wells鈥橞uilt Museum of African American History and Culture.

The conference will be presented at several venues around campus and is open to everyone. Advance registration is encouraged, but registration also can be done at the door at Classroom Building I. For the schedule and registration, visit .

The federal STARTALK Program is the result of an $89,000 grant secured by Alla Kourova, a 麻豆原创 assistant professor of Russian, and is available to anyone at least 15 years old. The program, sponsored by The National Security Language Initiative and U.S. Department of Defense, was established to expand and improve the teaching of strategically important world languages that are not widely taught in the U.S.

鈥淭his is very important because many students have never left Florida, and they need to learn another culture,鈥� Kourova said.

The morning language sessions will be held from 9 a.m. to noon, followed by lunch provided by Lacomka, a Russian bakery and deli in Winter Park, and Russian cultural activities from 1 to 3 p.m.

The course will be in the Modern Languages and Literature Department of the College of Arts & Humanities with the support of the Russian-American Community Center in Orlando.

June 20 is the deadline to register for the limited number of spaces. To sign up, go to .

Kourova has a Ph.D. from Moscow State University in teaching English as a foreign language and cross-cultural studies, as well as a master鈥檚 degree in speech therapy and teaching foreign languages. She came to 麻豆原创 in 2007 as a visiting instructor and became an assistant professor in 2011.

She also is implementing a grant of nearly $100,000 from the U.S. Department of State as part of the U.S.-Russia Peer-to-Peer Dialogue Program. Her project combines teaching foreign languages to U.S. students and blind/visually impaired students in Russia.

The project involving six other faculty and 10 麻豆原创 students traveling to St. Petersburg, Russia, next month is designed to strengthen mutual understanding and raise U.S.-Russian relations.

She has launched several projects through the years to show students the connection between the Russian language and culture, including hosting regular Russian tea gatherings and organizing a monthly Russian culture night.

In addition, she translates for the U.S. Secretary of Defense鈥檚 office in the area of International Security Policy-Eurasia, and last year she was awarded the University of Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award for the College of Arts & Humanities.

For further information about her programs, contact Kourova at alla.kourova@ucf.edu.

Paolo Giordano, Ph.D. is a professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, and the department chair of the