SAHAP students:

Please join the faculty and staff in the Sociology, Anthropology, and Health Administration and Policy department as we celebrate our Fall 2018 graduates!  

Wednesday, December 12th
5:00 - 6:30 p.m.
Public Policy Atrium

ALL SAHAP students are encouraged to attend.

Refreshments will be provided!  

UMBC has a long tradition of honoring and promoting thoughtful analysis of diverse scholarship and continues this focus through the annual W. E. B. Du Bois Distinguished Lecture. This year marks the 40th anniversary of the event, created by UMBC’s Africana studies department to honor the depth and range of applied scholarship for which Du Bois was known. Each year, the department invites a distinguished scholar or activist to share their work, to mark progress towards dismantling inequalities and to identify the work that remains on the path toward achieving full equality for people of African descent.

This year, Dorothy E. Roberts, professor of law and sociology and Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights at the University of Pennsylvania, will serve as the distinguished speaker. Her lecture will take place on Wednesday, November 14, 2018, 6:00 – 7:30 p.m. in the University Center Ballroom. She will critically examine collaborations between biological and social scientists involved in sequencing the human genome and linking social outcomes to genetic traits. Her talk will propose “a more just way for social and biological scientists to study race and racism.”

In addition to providing a space to learn about and discuss Roberts’s research, the lecture will also offer an opportunity to reflect on the legacy of Du Bois “as a preeminent and influential intellectual, scholar, public figure, writer, and ardent Pan-African activist” through the lens of contemporary research about race and racism, says Gloria Chuku, professor and chair of Africana studies.

W.E.B. Du Bois was a sociologist, historian, and social activist, and the first African American person to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University. His scholarship (including The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study) is foundational to today’s research on the health, economic, and social impacts of racism.

In addition to scientific scholarship Du Bois, became famous for writing The Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903, which became a foundational text of American literature and history of sociology, including poetry, autobiographical essays, historical articles, and memoir. Du Bois also founded the Niagara Movement and was among the founders of the NAACP. He was adamant about the importance of education to provide access and freedom for African Americans, other people of African descent, and women.

UMBC’s annual W.E.B. Du Bois lecture series “provides an important platform for intellectual dialogue on crucial aspects of African American experiences and those of peoples of African descent,” says Chuku. “It offers us an opportunity to draw inspiration from Du Bois’s scholarship and activism.”

Banner image: W. E. B. Du Bois. Photo from creative commons. 

Welcome to the 8th Language Educator Symposium, sponsored by Penn Language Center (PLC) and the Educational Linguistics Division at Penn’s Graduate School of Education (GSE). This year’s symposium focuses on two key concepts of interest to researchers and practitioners within the field of language education alike: discourse and interaction.

Discourse analysts whose research examines language beyond the level of the sentence and interaction in spoken, written, electronic format, etc. have a fundamental interest in language in use. Shared by language educators and within the language education field, this common interest prominently crystallizes in the concept of communication. Indeed, language educators have long recognized the importance of promoting and enabling communication within and outside of the language classroom. For example, Communicative Language Teaching, with the primary goal of the development of learners’ ability to interact meaningfully in the target language is the dominant paradigm in language teaching. The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) World Readiness Standards for Learning Languages identify Communication as the first goal area among their five goal areas. Thus, this first goal area intertwines with the remaining four: Cultures, Connections, Comparisons, and Communities. Whether language educators design activities or materials, choose or adapt textbooks, scaffold formative and summative assessments, or seek out resources, they draw upon and rely in part on their own intuition, experience, and understanding of how language is used to inform their practice.

Nevertheless, “intuition cannot be expected to encompass the rich detail and patterning of natural talk” (McCarthy, 2008, p. 145). How can research in discourse analysis and interaction inform language educators about, for example, how spoken and written texts, such as invitations or complaints, are structured and patterned, or what the importance of seemingly small interactional phenomenon such as “okay” or “y’know” might mean for instructional design, teaching techniques, and teaching practices. Additionally, given the complexities of what happens in a language classroom, classroom discourse research can shed light on practice, by slowing down the activity of teaching and learning, and subjecting it to micro-analysis. As our keynote speaker, Hansun Zhang Waring, notes, “Becoming a language teacher is in part a process of learning to “see” (social and classroom) interaction–millisecond by millisecond, and frame by frame”. (Waring, 2018).

The 2018 Symposium will focus on how language educators can bring to bear the fundamental concepts of discourse and interaction to practical and productive fruition in their classrooms. In the spirit of our theme for this year, we offer six interactive workshops that will address a range of issues from materials design, learning in online contexts, to humor in the classroom.

New ANTH Course for SPRING 2019!

ANTH 321-01

Sociocultural Contexts of Teaching and Learning

Instructor: Sarah Jewett

Tuesday/Thursday

10:00am-11:15am

Students will:

examine the sociocultural dynamics of teaching and learning across diverse settings within the U.S. and other societies
· focus on the interrelationships among educational processes, cultural identities and structures of power
· explore how such analyses inform public discourses on schooling and efforts at reform

Check out the attached flyer!