On-campus initiatives and Russian proficiency

[John Dunn]

For this to work you would have to have access to the appropriate facilities and your students would already need to have acquired a degree of proficiency.  Still, for what it's worth, for a period of about twenty years our students completed each year what we called 'the video project', but which in reality was a television programme, recorded (in Russian) over 1-2 days in our university's audio-visual centre.  The programme was intended to last about 20 minutes, and we gave the students a fairly free hand over the subject: often they made a documentary on an author or a historical or literary topic; sometimes they parodied television programmes; once or twice they performed extracts from a play.  For all except the last type, each of the students was expected to prepare a written text, and these texts were then 'boiled down' by the students collectively to produce the script for the programme.   The preparation and the learning of the script were done under the guidance of!
  the Native Language Assistant, while the overall supervision of the project was undertaken by a permanent member of the academic staff (usually me).  It was normally expected that each student participating in the project would spend some time in front of the cameras, though not necessarily performing the extract they had prepared.

The students did the project in their third year.  Initially this year was chosen because these were the only students who did not have exams at the end of the year; later, however, as more students were able to spend time in Russia, this had the additional advantage of involving students who had just returned to Glasgow from their year abroad.  We made a deliberate decision not to award a formal mark for the project, and this in the end was one of the reasons why the project was discontinued, as students became increasingly unwilling to participate in activities that did not contribute towards their overall degree result.  I think that if we had assessed it, we would have given each student a mark made up of two equally weighted elements: an individual mark for the written contribution to the script and a collective mark for the project as a whole.

Ironically we were only able to do all this because it didn't cost us anything (we had no money).  The University gave us access to the studio space, as well as the services of a producer (who worked with the students throughout the project) and on the day(s) of recording two camera operators and two or three technicians.  If you had to pay for all that, I imagine that it would eat up a fair chunk of the $10,000.  If we had had money, we would probably have used it for the following:
Paying the NLA for extra classes and sessions with individual students during the preparation of the script and the run-up to recording;
perhaps some tutorial assistance to allow the full-time member of staff to spend more time on the project;
incidental expenses, such as the hire of costumes, the hire and/or purchase of props;
the buying-in of supplementary film materials.  In the first year of the project the BBC kindly gave us some unused footage from a documentary on Tolstoy's last days, but this was something we were never able to emulate.  

I had better stop there, but please contact me if you would like more information.

John Dunn.


-----Original Message-----
From: Elizabeth Skomp <elizabethskomp at HOTMAIL.COM>
To: SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu
Date: Wed, 9 Dec 2009 10:01:50 -0500
Subject: [SEELANGS] On-campus initiatives and Russian proficiency

Dear SEELANGers,

 

I’d be grateful for any information you could share about
successful on-campus initiatives that you have developed (or in which you have
participated) that are oriented toward increasing students’ Russian language
proficiency and cost under $10,000 a year.   The development office at our institution has
asked us to devise a list of possibilities for a donor who wishes to make a recurring gift to our Russian program. (Study abroad and internships belong to a
different part of the proposal, hence the limitation of my request to on-campus
programs).

 

If you would be willing to share your experiences, please
e-mail me *off-list* at eskomp at sewanee.edu.

 

Many thanks in advance,

Elizabeth Skomp

 

-- 

Elizabeth Skomp, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Russian

Sewanee: The University of the South

735 University
  Avenue

Sewanee,
 TN 37383



Phone: 931.598.1254
E-mail: eskomp at sewanee.edu

 		 	   		  
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John Dunn
Honorary Research Fellow, SMLC (Slavonic Studies)
University of Glasgow, Scotland

Address:
Via Carolina Coronedi Berti 6
40137 Bologna
Italy
Tel.: +39 051/1889 8661
e-mail: J.Dunn at slavonic.arts.gla.ac.uk
johnanthony.dunn at fastwebnet.it

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