Although the image of French and Italian professor John Rassias punctuating a lecture with sudden sprints around his classroom may be a familiar one, the audience watching Rassias' antics this week will be slightly different. In lieu of Dartmouth students, Rassias will be speaking to 40 educators who have come to the College from throughout Mexico as part of the 10-day Inter-American Partnership for Education program, an intensive series of teaching workshops designed to introduce visiting educators to the Rassias Method for language instruction.
The program, which is sponsored by the Rassias Foundation and Worldfund, a non-profit organization dedicated to transforming education in Latin America, was created by Worldfund executive director Luanna Zurlo '87 to improve English language teaching in under-served schools throughout Mexico, and to help instructors within the country build communication networks amongst one another.
In its second year at the College, the program has gained the support of the Clinton Global Initiative Commitment, a program launched by former President Bill Clinton in 2005 that serves to link international leaders to find solutions to large-scale world issues. Under the auspices of the initiative, the program's directors are now working with the Ministry of Education in Mexico, Nextel Mexico and the Fundacion Televisa in the hopes of improving the education of 50,000 Mexican students in the next three years.
Zurlo was initially inspired to create the program when, on a business trip to Mexico, she observed a generally poor education system that emphasized memorization and rote learning. Although she said that very few Mexicans use English on a daily basis, Zurlo said she believes the English language is a critical skill for anyone in Latin America who hopes to improve their lives and break out of the cycle of poverty.
Zurlo, who was herself taught under the Rassias Method during her time as an undergraduate at Dartmouth, said she realized the importance of speaking while learning a new language and decided to seek to bring that idea to Mexican schools.
"I wondered why we couldn't apply the same pedagogy to Mexican teachers about the need to have their students speak and avoid rote learning," she said.
Zurlo approached the Rassias Foundation with the idea of instituting a program that would help Mexican teachers provide better education to their students. After meeting with Rassias, a group from Worldfund and the Rassias Foundation traveled to Mexico and implemented the first pilot program. A similar pilot program with 20 educators from Mexico took place at the College last summer.
This year's 40 participants were selected from a pool of 120 applicants after being interviewed in Mexico by a selection committee that included Jim Citron, director of the program, and Helene Rassias-Miles, the executive director of the Rassias Foundation.
While all the educators are from Mexico, they come from a variety of backgrounds and range from 21- to 50-years-old, according to Rassias-Miles.
"They work with under-resourced populations, they teach in tough urban neighbors and rural one or two-room school houses. They work with indigenous populations or in orphanages," Citron said. "But what they all have in common is a real commitment to transforming English language education in their country."
Each day at the College, the participants attend lectures and discussions, along with four-hour Rassias workshops, run by Rassias himself, where they can gather interactive teaching strategies to take back to their classrooms.
"Essentially we are committed to teaching language by speaking it, not by learning it by rote. We are dedicated to be dynamic, to de-mystify language, to make it simple, to put it in its right place," Rassias said. "It's an instrument of peace -- I mean that language makes understanding between people clearer and with that things works."
Participants said the program has given them the opportunity to improve their teaching methods and meet other educators with whom they can share ideas and experiences to form a support network.
"One of the things that's caught my attention is that his philosophy is to create very close communication between teachers and students, and break barriers that both have as teachers and students," Ana Luisa Monarrez de Paez of Culiacan, Sinaloa, Mexico said. "We need to start as teachers to break down barriers so we can have effective teaching and learning processes."
Rassias developed his method of language instruction during the 1960s as a means of teaching languages to Peace Corps volunteers in their six-week training period before they were sent abroad to serve. The method, which is also known as the Dartmouth Intensive Language Model, has been used at the College since 1967 in introductory "drill" language courses.
