Collaboration in support of language education

The latest Modern Language Association (MLA) report paints a grim picture of the state of language education in the United States. Not only are overall language enrollments significantly down, but this drop in enrollments is now impacting almost all languages including those which, hitherto, has been thought to be immune to this trend. More troubling though is the fact that this shift is occurring at a time of significant financial constraints and budgetary cuts, which has led institutions of higher education, already under growing pressure to justify the cost, value and quality of their programs, to slash those seen as less able to justify their continued relevance. Given the acute nature of this crisis, it is vital for all institutions of higher education to act vigorously in order to counter this trend and affect a systemic improvement in the future of language education. One promising area that should be investigated is collaboration. Fundamentally, collaboration means thinking across boundaries in order to find shared solutions to common challenges. By working collaboratively, innovative solutions for offering a wide range of languages can be explored and exploited by like-minded partners. However, while collaboration can be a powerful vehicle to make a more efficient usage of existing local resources, most colleges and universities are conditioned to see their peers more as competitors than as potential partners and this entrenched mindset makes it difficult for collaborative initiatives to emerge. This presentation will investigate how collaboration can be a crucial lever to enact fundamental change in how individual institutions think of language provision. It will highlight and discuss examples of successful collaborations in areas as diverse as course sharing, professional development, and the creation of shareable curricular resources that improve the teaching and learning of languages across all participating institutions.