professional development \
startalk workshop \
2014 workshop
Faculty
Susan Bauckus is a Senior Editor at the UCLA Center for World Languages and NHLRC. She is the managing editor of the Heritage Language Journal and was a co-editor of Heritage Language Education: A New Field Emerging (Routledge, 2008). She has taught Russian language at the college level to heritage and non-heritage students and spends many hours tracking down language-related data on the U.S. Census Bureau website.
Maria Carreira is a professor of Spanish at California State University, Long Beach. She was the co-organizer of the first national conference on heritage languages (1999). She is the co-author of a first-year textbook for Spanish (2004) and of a book for heritage speakers of Spanish. Her research interests include phonology, Spanish in the U.S., sociolinguistics, heritage languages, and educational linguistics. Carreira designed a curriculum for heritage speakers of Spanish for Westminster High School (Westminster, CA) pursuant to a Department of Education Title VII grant. She is the co-director of two of the National Heritage Language Resource Center's projects: designing a generic curriculum and creating language-specific materials for heritage language instruction. She is also a co-author of the preliminary report on the NHLRC's survey of college-level heritage learners.
Olga Kagan is a professor in the UCLA Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, director of the Title VI National Heritage Language Resource Center and the Center for World languages, UCLA. She received her Ph.D. from the Pushkin Russian Language Institute, Moscow, Russia. Her main research interests are in the field of applied linguistics and include language loss and maintenance by heritage language learners. In the past several years she has been working on developing curricula that would allow heritage learners to regain and improve their language competencies. She is the co-author of seven textbooks, among them a second-year Russian textbook V Puti (Prentice Hall, 1996 and 2005) and a textbook for heritage speakers, Russian for Russians (Slavica Publishers, 2003), that received an award for the Best Contribution to Pedagogy from the American Association of Teachers of Russian and Eastern European Languages (AATSEEL). She is co-editor of Teaching and Learning of Slavic Languages and Cultures (Slavica Publishers, 2000) that also received an award for the Best Contribution to Pedagogy from AATSEEL. In 2008 she co-edited the volume Heritage language Education: A New Field Emerging (Routledge). Kagan is also co-editor of the Heritage Language Journal.
Cynthia Martin joined the Russian Faculty at the University of Maryland in 1990. She currently teaches undergraduate courses in language, literature and culture, as well as graduate courses. Dr. Martin is currently the Undergraduate Program Director for Russian, and the Director of the Domestic Russian Flagship Program designed to help students reach Advanced levels of language proficiency. Currently, Dr. Martin is actively involved in a number of national assessment initiatives for academia, as well as private and government sectors.
Marina Kostina Dr. Marina V. Kostina is a distance learning expert, a trainer and an online business coach. She received her doctorate in Teaching & Learning / Distance Learning from the University of Iowa and is passionate about research on human psychology in distance learning environments. Dr. Kostina has held numerous teaching and managing positions in the field of distance learning and educational technology, has trained hundreds of teachers and professors from over seventy countries on how to use multimedia and distance learning strategies in their traditional and online courses. Some of Dr. Kostina's US clients were Kendall College, Blended Schools, Frontier Nursing University, Laureate International Universities, Sloan Consortium, American College of Education among others. In 2011 she co-authored an Amazon Bestseller, The golden climate in distance learning that provides practical suggestions for teachers and trainers on how to increase connection, engagement and enjoyment online. Together with her team from the University of Iowa she won STARTALK 2011, STARTALK 2012 and STARTALK 2013 grants that were designed to train Russian teachers on using educational technology and distance learning strategies to create a virtual library of learning objects. She is also a winner of two Oppenheimer Family Foundation grants, and a nominee for the Golden Apple Award. Marina is a CEO of Wired@Heart (www.wiredatheart.com) - a company dedicated to building connections, engagement and profitability online and a co-founder of Bookphoria- a multimedia project that helps convert expert content into interactive and engaging online courses.