Minnesota New Visions in Action
Minnesota New Visions: Languages for Life is a group of language teachers who came together initially in July 2002 to identify critical issues within the profession and begin working on plans to address those issues. The group is an outgrowth of the national New Visions in Action process begun in 1998 by the National K-12 Foreign Language Resource Center (NFLRC) at Iowa State University and the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL).
The participants in the Minnesota New Visions 2004 workshop met June 29 - 30 at the Germanic American Institute in St. Paul. This enthusiastic bunch decided to break into three steering groups, each adopting a different task, action plan and wish list. One group planned to create an Advisory Board for Minnesota New Visions. A second group planned to focus on educating the larger educational community about the need for learning World Languages. A third group planned to work to achieve the legislative goals proposed by Minnesota New Visions. MnNVA proposes that World Languages be taught starting at a young age and continuing for a long sequence, as is the model in many countries around the world.
Minnesota New Visions 2003 met June 19-20. The participants decided that the most urgent issue within the Minnesota world language teaching profession this year was the omission of world languages as a core subject in the state's new education standards. This group drafted a resolution that world language learning be a K-12 core subject in Minnesota, but this resolution was rethought and abandoned by the 2004 Minnesota New Visions workshop.
At the initial meeting in July 2002, teachers from all levels of education and languages worked together to identify a wide range of critical issues in the profession. During the process of prioritizing the group decided that the focus of the current New Visions project would be to:
* Develop a Toolkit for Advocating to support the promotion of world languages within schools and districts and
* Create general public relations materials to educate parents, students, decision makers and the larger community regarding the importance of language study.
The Minnesota New Visions group invites other language teachers to contribute to the currently identified priorities and to consider adding their own visions for the improvement of the language teaching profession. Members of the group will be sharing information about the New Visions process at the annual conference of the Minnesota Council on the Teaching of Languages and Cultures.
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New Visions Legislative Rally Held February 16, 2004
View pictures and reports from the rally held at the State Capitol in St. Paul.
New Visions 2004 Participants at the Germanic American Institute in St. Paul
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For more information, please contact:
Anita Ratwik at ratwi01@tc.umn.edu or
Jan Kittok at JanKittok@frontiernet.net