The WCC invites you to workshop, Why Are You Taking This Class? Student-Centered Strategies for First-Year Language Instruction, facilitated by Dr. Ellen Cole Lee and Dr. Amy Pistone.

Teaching ancient languages in 2025 is hard. The environment for language instruction is changing, as digital tools like Google Translate and ChatGPT improve their translation ability, as students become more and more overburdened, and as educational institutions at all levels become increasingly hostile to the intensive processes of language-learning. So how do we teach beginning-level languages in this environment?

This workshop will reflect on this question through the lens of student-centered approaches to teaching. In our current environment, it’s important to consider why our students have decided to take our language courses and what they want to get out of them. To meet our students where they are, we must consider how we can best help them set and reach their own goals, as well as how to balance students’ personal goals against our pedagogical objectives as teachers. In this 90-minute workshop, we’ll explore practical strategies for successfully balancing these (sometimes competing) priorities, from rethinking participation to creating assessments that help students develop their own autonomy as learners. The last 30 minutes of this workshop will be reserved for brainstorming and discussion, and participants are encouraged to bring an assignment or activity to workshop.

Note: To allow for deeper engagement, participants are highly encouraged to work through all modules in the Reflective Pedagogy in the College Classroom series here before the workshop begins!