The faculty and staff of the English Language Center have met annually with Dean Christopher P. Long, College of Arts & Letters, for a number of years at the end of the fall semester.
Of course, this yearly tradition took a different form due to the changes we all experienced this year. In lieu of a meeting, we sent the following message highlighting the success we have had over the last year.
Dear Dean Long,
We have traditionally visited you each fall for the last few years and, while we wanted to ask you for a meeting this year, we thought it prudent to send a message instead of asking for a meeting. Of course, we would like to resume meeting you in person next year if possible. While we were hoping for a resumption to a more familiar semester this fall, we found that the various challenges for international education continued. We have continued to work through these challenges with an eye toward new opportunities in spring 2022 and beyond. Unfortunately, the recent variant has given us pause and, again, some of our international partners may postpone or modify their programming for 2022. While we will continue to find ways of ensuring student success, partnership support, and new opportunities for ELC stakeholders, we highlight just five successful areas from 2021:
- Knowing our international students faced additional hurdles in attending classes in person for 2021, we experimented with several modalities to best meet student needs, including running parallel sections in person and online, team teaching between sections in which students were allowed to choose the modality that best suited their situation, and offering content asynchronously to help students meet learning outcomes.
- We continued to strengthen our relationship between multiple campus units and partners, including the ITA program, the Graduate School, the Testing Office, the GEU, HR, Special Programs, overseas university partners, IIE, and Admissions. Our relationship with the Center for Integrative Arts and Humanities (IAH) has been particularly robust. Several ELC faculty have continued teaching IAH classes to help relieve IAH’s load during this period of record domestic-freshman enrollments, and we have committed to providing 650 seats each year going forward.
- Our summer was again full of activity as we coordinated and taught the second Virtual Fulbright English for Graduate Studies Program (EGSP) in which 117 participants from 50 different countries took part in coursework to prepare them for their graduate studies in the U.S. We also delivered the ACES summer program aimed at helping incoming international teaching assistants (ITAs) adjust to university teaching and learning prior to their first semester at MSU.
- We are in the midst of submitting our 5-year report for our accreditation body, the CEA. We have spent the last half of 2021 preparing the documentation, updating our files, and reevaluating our curriculum, courses, by-laws, and services to meet the rigorous requirements set by the CEA.
- We implemented or developed new initiatives including the Online American English and Culture Program and the Online Global Mindset Program, the MSU-Africa Physics Undergrad Program for English Language Development, Medical English in collaboration with the Universidade São Francisco and the Institute of Global Health, an academic writing for language learners proposal for the Universidad Cesar Vallejo -Trujillo Campus, and we coordinated with other MSU units to deliver new MOUs/MOAs with partner universities and other institutions.
We hope you and your family have a safe and restful winter break and we look forward to continued success in 2022.
Dr. Dustin De Felice,Associate Professor
Director, English Language Center
College of Arts & Letters | Michigan State University
B202 Wells Hall, 619 Red Cedar Road, East Lansing, MI 48824
(517) 353-5961 | defelic5@msu.edu
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