Yale CLS Virtual Brown Bag Series: Dr. Carl Blyth

Open Foreign Language Education: The Rise of a New Knowledge Ecology

Compared with STEM fields, foreign language (FL) education and second language acquisition (SLA) have been slow to embrace Open Education (OE) and the new knowledge ecologies it produces. FL educators may have been hesitant to participate in the OE movement due to a lack of research which investigates the benefits and challenges of FL learning and teaching in open environments. This talk contextualizes the impact of OE on FL departments by focusing on how different kinds of disciplinary knowledge is created and disseminated within different academic contexts: instructional environments (the microsystem), teacher professional development (the mesosystem), and the profession at large (the exosystem). Finally, the talk will touch on the ideology of openness (the macrosystem) to discern how the democratic ethos of OE is disrupting the “closed system” of higher education.