June 4, 2001 Faculty awarded Teaching, Learning, and Technology Collaborative Grants The Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology of the University of California recently announced the recipients of the first round of Teaching, Learning, and technology Collaborative (TLtC) Grants. From a field of 18 proposals, three were selected for funding in 2000-01, and UCSC faculty from the Writing and Language Programs have principal roles in two of the three successful projects. Lecturers Elizabeth Abrams and Roswell Spafford of the Writing Program have garnered a grant for $70,249 to begin development of a systemwide Online Writing Institute at the University of California. The institute will serve simultaneously as a think tank and as a publisher and disseminator of recommended teaching tools and practices for teachers and students of writing within UC, as well as the general public. Envisioned as an elaborate web site with publicly accessible and password-protected portals, the Online Writing Institute will enable uninterrupted collaborative work in writing programs across the UC system in pedagogy, philosophy, and the development of instructional materials. As an outreach tool, the institute will inform high school and community college teachers of UC expectations for academic writing, while representing UC writing requirements and approaches to writing to prospective students and their parents. The three-year project will involve faculty from the Santa Cruz, Berkeley, and Los Angeles campuses in the first year, adding faculty from Santa Barbara, Davis, and San Diego in year two and Riverside and Irvine in year three. Lecturer M. Victoria González-Pagani of the Language Program is collaborating with language faculty from UCLA, Davis, Santa Barbara, and Irvine in the second funded project, which also uses the Internet to pool resources and improve instruction throughout the UC system. Recent advances in the field of second-language acquisition have shifted the curricular focus away from explicit grammar instruction toward content-based foreign-language teaching and learning. Students in these classes develop grammatical competence through close interaction with and analysis of authentic cultural materials. Lecturer González-Pagani has developed web-based activities and materials in several media formats for UCSC's Topic Oriented Spanish first-year curriculum. These and other electronic materials developed by her UC colleagues will form the core of a web-searchable Electronic Language Materials Archive (ELMA) to be used in teaching first- and second-year Spanish and French. ELMA will enable language faculty throughout UC to implement content-based instruction locally and to contribute their own materials, reworked according to the project's guidelines, to the expanding online archive. A grant in the amount of $57,860 will support this project in its first year. New rounds of funding for 2001-02 Teaching, Learning, and technology Collaborative Grants will be announced in fall quarter. For more information, contact Eileen Tanner in the Center for Teaching Excellence, (831) 459-5091. Return to Front Page