Keynote address

TIMOTHY SNYDER received his doctorate from the University of Oxford in 1997, where he was a British Marshall Scholar.  He has held fellowships in Paris and Vienna, and an Academy Scholarship at Harvard. He is the author of Nationalism, Marxism, and Modern Central Europe: A Biography of Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz (Harvard University Press, 1998, Halecki Prize); The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999 (Yale University Press, 2003, awards from American Historical Association, American Association for Ukrainian Studies, Przeglad Wschodni, and Marie Curie-Sklodowska University); Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist's Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine (Yale University Press, 2005, Pro Historia Polonorum award); The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of A Habsburg Archduke (Basic Books, 2008), and Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (Basic Books, 2010).   He is also the co-editor of Wall Around the West: State Power and Immigration Controls in Europe and North America (Rowman and Littlefield, 2001). 

His most recent book is Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, a history of Nazi and Soviet mass killing on the lands between Berlin and Moscow.  It is a New York Times bestseller and a book of the year according to The Atlantic, The Independent, The Financial Times, the Telegraph, The Economist, History Today, the Seattle Times, and the New Statesman.

“Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin”

Our keynote address will be a presentation by the author on his acclaimed history of Europe’s “bloodlands.” The late Tony Judt reviewed the book as follows: “For over a decade in the middle of twentieth century, the lands between Russia and Germany were the killing fields of Europe. Tens of millions of civilians from Poland to Ukraine, Lithuania to Belarus were starved, beaten, shot and gassed to death by the authorities and armies of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. We think we know this story and we assign it shorthand labels: Auschwitz, the Gulag. But neither the concentration camps (which were mostly not death camps) nor the Soviet network of labor camps in Siberia (from which many survived) were representative of the worst crimes committed in these years. Jews were without question the supreme victim (and in the Nazi case, the dominant target); but there were many other victims with whom western readers are far less familiar. Without a better grasp of the scale and breadth of the suffering experienced in these lands, we cannot hope to appreciate the true impact of the twentieth century.

“In his path-breaking and often courageous study of Europe’s ‘bloodlands,’ Timothy Snyder shows how very much more complicated the story was. His account of the methods and motives of murderous regimes, both at home and in foreign war, will radically revise our appreciation of the implications of mass extermination in the recent past. Bloodlands – impeccably researched and appropriately sensitive to its volatile material – is the most important book to appear on this subject for decades and will surely become the reference in its field.”

Breakout Workshop #1

RUTA COUET has been the world languages specialist for the SC Department of Education since 1994. She provides leadership and support for language programs in K-12 South Carolina schools and is the liaison for higher education teacher education programs in world languages in the Palmetto state. Special projects for South Carolina include the development of Bringing New Languages to Young Learners, a distance-learning K-8 methods delivered by the authors of Languages and Children-Making the Match, Curtain and Dahlberg, and the Kids Interacting Through Early Language Learning (KITE-LL), a hybrid distance-learning program for grades 3-5 in French, German, and Spanish. Both were produced by South Carolina ETV. Ruta is a member of the education committee of the Confucius Institutes of Presbyterian College and the University of South Carolina working towards the implementation of Chinese programs in the state.

On the national level, Ruta was a member of the assessment team for the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards for World Languages Other than English. She also served as an advisor to the Teaching Foreign Languages Project, funded by Annenberg/CPB and produced by WGBH in association with the American Council for the Teaching of Foreign languages (ACTFL). Ruta currently serves as the president of the National Council of State Supervisors for Languages (NCSSFL), the organization that developed LinguaFolio. Recent publications as a co-author include the South Carolina Academic Standards for Modern and Classical Languages, South Carolina Academic Standards for American Sign Language, and Starting with the End in Mind: Planning & Evaluating Highly Effective Language Programs.

Ruta holds a Master of Science in Educational Administration from the University of New York, Albany, a Master of Arts in Teaching from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, a Licence d’Enseignement d’Anglais from the University of Tours, and a bachelor of Arts degree from Manhattanville College. Before becoming an administrator, she taught French in grades 1-12 for twenty years, nine of which were teaching English as a world language in France.

MARY ANN HANSEN served as State World Language Consultant at the Connecticut Department of Education from 1992 to 2009, where she provided leadership in the developing K-12 world language programs in Connecticut. From 1993 to 2001, Dr. Hansen directed a project promoting the study of Russian language and technology in school partnerships with Russia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, entitled "Linking Schools through Language and Technology," that was funded by the United States Department of State under the Freedom Support Act. While at the Connecticut State Department of Education, she also spearheaded ongoing state educational partnerships with Spain, Italy, France, China, and India.

She was the first recipient of the National Network for Early Language Learning (NNELL) Award for Outstanding Support of Early Foreign Language Learning (November 2002). She was named Chevalier dans l’Order des Palmes Académiques by the French government in October 2003. In November 2009, she received a lifetime achievement award from the National Council of State Supervisors for Languages at its 50th-anniversary meeting in San Diego, “for a lifetime of personal and professional advocacy, support, and dedication to the teaching and learning of World Languages. Currently, Dr. Hansen is working independently on various projects, including Startalk.

“LinguaFolio: Can-Do Language Learning”

Lingua Folio™ is a standards-based tool used for learner-directed, formative self-assessment to record ongoing learner progress and, along with external summative assessment results, provide a comprehensive view of an individual’s language performance and proficiency. Developed by the National Council of State Supervisors for Languages (NCSSFL) LinguaFolio is based on the European Language Portfolio (ELP). Like the ELP it includes three components:  (1) Biography, where learners record personal information about their language background and intercultural encounters. (2) Passport, where learners document their self assessments and store results of formal assessments, and (3) Dossier, where learners archive evidence of proficiency levels expressed in the can-do statements. This workshop will introduce K-12 language teachers to the conceptual framework of LinguaFolio: autonomous and reflective learning, goal setting, and interculturality as well as options for its implementation.