Nadia Jaramillo Cherrez’s research while affiliated with Oregon State University and other places

Inclusive learning design affords opportunities to create environments, resources, activities, technologies, and strategies supportive of students’ diversity. While many efforts are underway to recognize the diversity of students as assets, it is important to turn our attention to instructors and instructional designers who play a substantial role in learning design. Raising self-awareness of the different social identities that students and instructors themselves have, the challenges in addressing student diversity, and the implications of a fixed-mindset are critical aspects that shape instructional choices. Further, cultural and linguistic dimensions have often been viewed through a deficit lens, and therefore as barriers to learning. Acknowledging the complexity of factors involved in inclusive learning design and the harmful effect of a deficit-oriented model, we propose an approach that offers a practical guide to self-awareness in order to go beyond the perspective of students’ deficiencies. In this approach, we promote self-interrogation grounded in the assumption of student diversity as an asset—an essential prerequisite for fostering a mindset for inclusive design.

Language Teacher Development in Digital Contexts Edited by Hayriye Kayi-Aydar and Jonathon Reinhardt Amsterdam: John Benjamins US $143 ISBN 9789027210579 (Hardback) 196 pages 2022

Social media platforms contribute to the dissemination of information and encourage communication between health agencies and the public, especially during health crises. Public health agencies must engage in carefully crafted educational, communicative, and interactive practices to be effective in their messaging to build relationships with the public. Using quantitative content, social network, and thematic analysis, this study examined 2,500 tweets from April to August 2020 that included the hashtag #YoMeInformoPMA. Panama’s Public Health Ministry created the #YoMeInformoPMA hashtag to keep citizens informed and engaged during the COVID-19 pandemic. Research on social media use and implementation in Latin America during the COVID-19 pandemic, to inform and engage the public, is limited. Therefore, the aim of this investigation was to analyze strategies, themes, multimedia formats, key actors, and overall communications patterns of a Latin American health community hashtag. Our results determined that actors using the hashtag #YoMeInformoPMA mainly used an interactive strategy, a message that aims to promote casual conversations, advice, and problem-solving. Findings highlighted evidence of a communication strategy by specific actors in this network, supporting recent studies that indicate engagement between the public and health agencies can take place on social media. Practical implications and recommendations for communication preparation via social media for future health crises are discussed.

This study identifies how instructors from higher education institutions experienced digital literacy during emergency remote teaching (ERT) as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. A total of 239 full-and part-time instructors completed an electronic questionnaire with closed and open-ended items. Analysis at the item level provided specific shifts and variations of digital literacy challenges experienced, tools used, tasks performed , and the resources employed. This investigation helps researchers inform the academic community of the digital pedagogy and technologies instructors used during the COVID-19 pandemic. This investigation also highlights some challenges that professional development addressing instructors' digital literacy can help mitigate.

Open educational resources (OERs) in language learning have recently captured the interests of language educators, curriculum developers, and researchers as these open-source materials serve as an alternative to traditional textbooks and costly web-based learning resources. OERs offer several benefits for language learners, including access to controlled language practice, self-study, engagement, and learning satisfaction. These resources can also promote innovative instructional practices that respond to constructivist and interactionist perspectives of second language acquisition. However, widespread use of open resources remains low among language teachers for several reasons, including a lack of awareness of how to develop and use them, overreliance on commercially produced textbooks, scarcity of resources, and guidelines for developing original open resources. In this chapter, the authors explore how to best approach the process of creating and using open resources in order to develop and promote OERs among language educators.

This study explores learners' perceptions of and experiences in a flipped-blended Chinese-as-a-Foreign-Language (CFL) course. Based upon dynamic complex system and social interaction theory for language learning as well as on instructional design approaches, this study examines the seamless integration between the online and face-to-face (FTF) components. Twenty-three first-semester CFL learners participated in the study. Data were collected via student surveys and a semi-formal focus group interview. The findings show that students' perceptions are highly positive and that the seamless integration of the two modes is beneficial and conducive to meeting the learning outcomes. The students also pointed out weaknesses of the design, such as the length of the videos, the need for more interesting writing tasks in the FTF meetings, and the lack of immediate help during the video watching process.