Tina is organizing two conferences this summer in addition to 12 regional two or three day trainings. The Cascadia CI conference is in Portland at the end of June. The Indigenous CI Conference the week before that is in Locust Grove, Oklahoma. Tina describes the purpose of the Portland conference below:
The conference is designed for language educators (of any language) to learn methods for delivering large amounts of understandable language using techniques that allow the group to communicate their ideas and create artwork and stories together even if they are just beginning their language study. We will teach methods to tell traditional stories, create artwork together, and use the characters from the class’ artwork to create original stories working together as a group.
Wade Blevins will be demonstrating the methods using Cherokee language to model the teaching strategies. The students in his Cherokee class will be mostly beginners with no prior Cherokee experience.
We also have an Arabic teacher, a French teacher, a Korean teacher, and a Spanish teacher. They will be modeling the same strategies in the various languages.
In the afternoons there are workshops given in English to teach about the methods that are going to be demonstrated in the morning language classes. And then there is coaching available all day and up until midnight to allow teachers to practice their skills and get feedback to help them improve. There is also a strand on Equity in the Foreign Language Classroom featuring John Cowart, Anna Gilcher and others.
The link to the conference in Portland is below: