Interdisciplinary Innovation
ALTECÌýis proud to be at the intersection of community building, language learning and teaching, and innovation. ALTEC’s expertise is sought out when innovative solutions are needed to facilitate the learning, teaching and research of languages, literatures and cultures. Our collaborationÌýwith faculty on interdisciplinary projects withÌýbroader impactsÌýleads the future of language learning and teaching at CU and beyond.
Showcased here areÌýa few of the past national grants we'veÌýcontributed to.ÌýALTECÌýinvites you to collaborate with us to develop interdisciplinary research grant proposals with broader impacts.
Professor and Director Tim Oakes and Executive Director Danielle Rocheleau Salaz in the Center for Asian Studies in partnership with ALTEC, Anthropology, GeographyÌý²¹²Ô»å Religious Studies sought funding to create a certificate program in Tibetan and Himalayan Studies. They were awarded a 2020-2022Ìý through the U.S. Department of Education.
The grant’s first goal aims to build a sustainable area studies curriculum in Tibetan and Himalayan Studies. This will be achieved through an instructor hire to teach an introductory level civilization course and regional courses, offering professional development grants to enhance curriculum, andÌýgenerating student interest through enhanced programming.
The second goal is to enhance Directed Independent Language Study (DILS) instruction in Tibetan and Nepali for undergraduate students. Two instructors will be hired to teach these languages.ÌýIn addition,Ìýa series of open access online learning modules has been developed to support student learning of Tibetan. ALTEC provided guidance onÌýthe creation of these resources using the Canvas platform to make the content available to the wider learning community as an Open Educational Resource (OER). The Ìýwas developed and created byÌýMaggie RosenauÌý(they/she) andÌýTenzin TsepakÌý(he/him) and is now available on Canvas.
The final goal is to expand study abroad and other language opportunities for undergraduates studying Tibetan and Nepali. This will include providing language study scholarships for students looking to continue their language training beyond the introductory level and developing a new undergraduate global seminar in Nepal, India or Bhutan.
The Portugueses de Papel grant was originally funded by a 91PORN Research & InnovationÌýSeed Grant in 2017-2018. Associate Professor Tania Martuscelli in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese in partnership with ALTEC and CU Libraries then applied for a Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grant through the . They received recommendations to resubmit with revisions in light of the rise of digital humanities and the importance of Portuguese as a critical language in the U.S.
This project was an extraordinary effort with eight core members writing the proposal and further broke boundaries with its multidisciplinary, multinational, multigenerational and multi-ranked faculty, staff, graduate students and community.
Portugueses de Papel aimed to develop a digital database of Portuguese characters throughout Brazilian literature. This work fills the need of the Portuguese academic research community throughout the world who are completing literary analysis of thousands of novels and need a way to collect and run statistics on this gathered information. The platform created by ALTEC allows researchers to access information about a novel’s characters, such as their location, gender, race and social, economic, and employment status. This tool will be instrumental for researchers needing to analyze, for example, the professions of Portuguese immigrants in Brazil after the abolition of slavery in 1889, thus allowing the categorization of immigrants in a variety of ways.
After collecting literary analyses from over 100 researchers around the world, the project team translated the analyses into English and then used ALTEC’s recording studio to record audio of all submitted analyses in both English and Portuguese so that the research was accessible in both written and audio formats in two languages.
ALTEC then developed a database platform to enable indexing of all analyses and data. The project team is enthusiastic that this lays the groundwork for future derivative research to take place and is an example of how to engage in digital humanities research.
Professor and Director Tim Oakes and Executive Director Danielle Rocheleau Salaz in the Center for Asian Studies in partnership with ALTEC, Anthropology, , Geography, History and Sociology