With support from a $1 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, language students and professors at Haverford, Bryn Mawr and Swarthmore will be a lot more conversant with one another in the years to come.
The grant provides resources to create a tri-college cooperative language instruction program over the next three years. Under the program, the three colleges will upgrade technical equipment not only to provide students with state-of-the-art instructional materials and programs, but an atmosphere of cooperation and sharing between language departments on all campuses.
Each college will establish compatible modern language computer servers that will enable the campuses to share a catalogue of language-teaching audio and video programs. In addition, the arrangement will allow for better sharing of faculty and curriculum as well as the joint purchase of new materials. The grant also provides for professional development for faculty to learn more about technology-assisted teaching as well as time to develop World Wide Web sites to facilitate instruction in their classes. The colleges anticipate the cooperative venture will also allow them to offer instruction in more languages in the years to come.
