Now in its seventh year, the program has awarded more than $100,000 to Boise State faculty.
The 2018 Osher Institute Faculty Grant recipients are:
Kelly Arispe, Department of World Languages: $5,000 for her project: “Design Based Research using VEO: Helping Idaho K-12 Foreign Language Teachers Align to New State Standards.”
In February 2018, the Idaho State Board of Education approved revised standards for world language teachers. The new standards require K-12 foreign language teachers to understand and implement a communicative and proficiency-based approach to language teaching that integrates performance measures aligned to the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages.
The new standards go into effect on July 1, 2018. Idaho schools then will have a two-year grace period to implement them in their classrooms. Arispe’s two-year research project is designed to mitigate the professional development and curriculum materials “gap” for Idaho teachers.
It uses a state-of-the-art VEO, or “video enhanced observation” technology to digitally tag classroom observations of master teachers (i.e., best practices). The materials will be available for other foreign language teachers through an open-sourced digital archive to help them improve their own teaching techniques and align with the new standards.
Jim McNamara, Department of Geosciences: $5,000 for his project: “Linked Campus-Foothills Outdoor Facility for Hydrology Research, Education and Outreach.”
The Department of Geosciences has run the Dry Creek Experimental Watershed, a laboratory for research and education in watershed sciences, for around two decades, said McNamara. He estimates that data from the lab has informed around 50 student theses and dissertations during those years.
“Now that we have so much data, we’re turning toward educational outreach,” said McNamara. The Osher grant will help maintain instruments at the lab, improve the lab’s website to make data more available, create online educational activities and help support other projects, including building a field site behind the lab with meteorological stations, interpretive signs and more.
Tim Thornes
Tim Thornes, Linguistics, Department of English: $5,000 for his project: “Northern Paiute Oral History from Harney Valley, Eastern Oregon.”
The grant will help Thornes prepare portions of an extensive body of oral history narratives in Northern Paiute, a critically endangered language, for publication.
Thornes worked with tribal members in Oregon to record, transcribe, and translate the narratives based on interviews with elder speakers of the language.
“Most of the work was done sitting around a kitchen table drinking coffee and with occasional visits from curious grandchildren, whose generation are not speakers,” said Thornes. Most speakers, he said, are in their 50s or older.
Since his interviews, Thornes has stayed in touch with families of his interviewees, including a grandson of one subject. The grandson, said Thornes, wants to learn enough Northern Paiute to pass it on to his own grandchildren.
Thornes’ body of work will serve both the discipline of linguistics and the heritage language community by providing natural speech data from an understudied and endangered language, “and, more crucially,” Thornes added, “will provide a window into the history of extreme social and cultural transformation from the perspective of the community that experienced it.”
More about the Osher grants:
The Osher Institute began its annual faculty grant program as a way to support Boise State faculty while raising awareness of the Osher Institute on campus. Contributions from institute members support the program. Full-time tenured, tenure-track and research faculty are eligible to apply.
“The Osher Lifelong Learning Institute and its members take pride in funding this grant program,” said Osher Institute Director Rosemary Reinhardt.
“The Faculty Grant committee consists of Osher members from diverse professional backgrounds. They volunteer several hours of their time to thoroughly read each grant proposal and weigh the very difficult decision, from among numerous worthy applicants and projects, as to who will receive funding. I am impressed by their dedication to the process and by the difference these grants make for Boise State faculty.”
Osher Lifelong Learning Institutes operate through universities in all 50 states to offer noncredit courses without assignments and without grades to adults over the age of 50. They’re named for philanthropist Bernard Osher.
BY: ANNA WEBB PUBLISHED 6:43 AM / APRIL 24, 2018