16 | In 2011, I had several discussions with Carl Blyth (director of COERLL) concerning an idea for a pedagogical approach that I wished to develop. Because Carl saw the potential in what I was proposing, I was given a grant accompanied by the extraordinary injunction: "Follow your vision!" The resulting textbook, Le Littéraire dans le quotidien, (LLDQ), was published as OER in 2013. The book was designed as a reading/writing complement to any first-year level French textbook. The primary motivations included: developing an approach to FL teaching and learning that would bridge the language/literature divide; and joining the open education movement so as to be part of the solution of providing good quality educational materials that would be free of charge and free to be adopted and adapted as teachers see fit. LLDQ is available in Google Docs. Each chapter can be downloaded in Word and modified to any degree. The only constraint is that attribution must be maintained for me as the source author and for COERLL as the host publisher. The textbook is also available in book form on a print-on-demand basis: b/w $21 and color $75. Additionally, because the approach underlying the Literary in the Everyday is applicable to any language, in 2014, COERLL (UT Austin) and CERCLL (U of Arizona), both federally funded LRCs, received a joint grant from the Department of Education to expand the initiative. This has resulted in the realization of the FLLITE Project: Foreign Languages & the Literary in the Everyday, co-directed by Carl Blyth, Chantelle Warner, and myself. The project has allowed the approach to evolve into a comprehensive pedagogy of meaning making, one that reframes a number of assumptions and practices held in Communicative Language Teaching but that builds on others in an intuitive and replicable fashion. The FLLITE website offers a number of OER that articulate and support application of the approach. Carl, Chantelle, and I are also in the process of writing a Teacher's Manual. All of this has allowed for yet another dimension of FLLITE to come to fruition: the authoring of CC licensed FLLITE lessons by teachers of any language and their publication as OER in the website archive. In order for publication to occur, submissions are peer-reviewed via a process that engages constructive feedback from editorial board members, scholars and professionals in the field who are also Open educators. Having the opportunity for FLLITE to offer high quality professional development is a fulfillment of my original vision that I never dared to imagine coming true. But such is the power of open education! |
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