|
|
|
|
William F. Bottiglia died at 92 years of age on August 19, 2005. A professor of languages and linguistics at MIT from 1956 until 1991, Dr. Bottiglia was a prolific author of scholarly works on topics ranging from Voltaire’s Candide to pedagogical approaches to Dante. He taught humanities in the Sloan School of Management at MIT and belonged to the Phi Beta Kappa Society and the Dante Society of America. He was appointed an Officier in the Société des Palmes Académiques by the French government. Prior to his time at MIT, Dr. Bottiglia taught at Princeton (from which he had earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees) and at Ripon College, and also worked at the J&S Tool Company in the 1940s.
Dr. Bottiglia’s service to the Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages was exemplary. He edited the annual Reports volume no fewer than three times. In 1957, he was editor of The Language Classroom; in 1962, he tackled Current Issues in Language Teaching;in 1963,he returned as editor of the Reports volume titled Language Learning: The Intermediate Phase. He also did a stint Foreign Language,” Dr. Bottiglia joined with colleagues from a private academy, a college, a junior high and a state department of education to write in the 1966 Reports titled Language Teaching: Broader Contexts:
…we have new insights about language;we have improved methods for language learning; we have a wider demand for language; yet we continue to direct our students toward a single goal, literary appreciation. By so doing we overlook the broader horizons of language study and thereby lose many students whose interests and talents are not exclusively literary. (p. 62)
In his willingness as a pre-eminent literary scholar to acknowledge the multiple other motivations for language study, Dr. Bottiglia reflected the inclusive dispositions and “outside-the-box” thinking that have always characterized the Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages.
The Northeast Conference is privileged to be able to nominate candidates for the various ACTFL awards each year. In 1997, the name of Ursula Meyer, of the Goethe-Institut, was suggested for the ACTFL Nelson Brooks Award on the Teaching of Culture. Dr. Meyer’s dossier was selected by the Brooks Award Committee, and she received the award in 1998.As we wrote in our nominating letter, Dr. Meyer dedicated her life to promoting cultural proficiency among the nation’s teachers. She was among the most loyal of the many outstanding NECTFL workshop leaders and infected all of us with her joy herself, Ursula Meyer had an uncanny instinct for teaching Furthermore, she was exquisitely sensitive to the sacrifices teachers make in order to attend a seminar or conference and wanted every minute of a teacher’s time to be packed with information, collaboration, skills development and new perspectives. Our conference attendees left her workshops “feeling good” about themselves, as many stated, in addition to knowing much more about minorities in Germany or about using film to teach culture.Yet “Ulla”was unfailingly modest and humble, seeing her extraordinary work as nothing more than “doing my job.” We were so saddened to learn of her passing on October 29, 2005.
NECTFL is grateful to the Goethe-Institut and Ursula Meyer’s many friends for the opportunity to share her with our Review readers by quoting from tributes made at the memorial service in her honor here.
“She was the first person to turn me on to music as a means of teaching language.”
“… she made me feel legitimate in speaking her language and I always learned good teaching methodology from her – things I learned that first year are still effective, today.”
“How I will miss her hearty laughter…”
“Not many people could understand, let alone advocate for German teachers, the way she did.”
“She had the talent to make everyone feel included and valued.”
“Because of her profound influence on many of us, a part of her still exists in our teaching and our love for theGerman language and culture.
In 1996, acting in response to an Atlantic Monthly article by historian and educator Paul Gagnon on what all children should learn, Conference Chair Julia Bressler, a French teacher from New Hampshire, invited Dr. Gagnon to keynote the conference.The address was remarkable for its reflection of the breadth of Dr. Gagnon’s knowledge, the passion of his commitment to all children, and the pragmatism of his suggestions. As he commented in the speech:
“Standards”was the wrong word from the start. We should say “essentials” – the things most worth learning from the academic subjects, things so important that everyone in a democracy has the right not to be allowed to avoid them (…)So at a time when the hottest thing in educational fashion is to obsess over “outputs” or “outcomes,” I am here to argue the hopelessly backward notion that we have not yet worried enough about “inputs” — the things we try to teach and the conditions that equalize children’s chances to learn them. (…)
…equity requires us never to decide early – and certainly not beforehand – who can learn and who cannot…
Paul Gagnon died last year after a brilliant career of which we at NECTFL were privileged to be a very small part. We thank the Organization of American Historians and Dr. Gagnon’s colleague, Paul Bookbinder, for permission to reprint Dr. Bookbinder’s tribute to Paul Gagnon in these pages.
"Paul Gagnon was a French historian, a founding member of the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and an advocate for the importance of history in all Massachusetts, where he graduated from the High School of Commerce. After service in the Navy during WWII, he went on to receive a BA in history from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a PhD from Harvard. His personal educational experiences convinced him of the appropriateness and value of a liberal arts education for young people of working class background and of the crucial role played by public institutions of higher learning. He overcame a lifelong stuttering disability to become a devoted, successful, and popular teacher. While maintaining a broad a focus on history, Gagnon argued in the introduction to his major study A History of France since 1789 (1964) that, the writing and study of national history deserved an important place in historical scholarship because so many major historical developments took place within national frameworks.
In 1964, Gagnon played a key role in the founding of the University of Massachusetts, Boston, becoming its first Dean of Arts and Sciences. Richard Robbins, whom Dean Gagnon hired to create the Department of Sociology, calls Paul Gagnon “the heart and soul of the university” in its early days.“Paul had the vision to create a public urban university committed to providing a first class liberal arts education to students of working class background. He would never accept the idea that these students could only follow a vocational educational path.”
Gagnon was a passionate advocate for the teaching of history in secondary schools. In nominating him for an outstanding achievement award for his work on secondary education, the Personnel Committee of the History Department of the University of Massachusetts, Boston wrote,“Professor Gagnon’s activities in this area grow out of a lifelong interest in education and educational policy, reflected in his classroom teaching and his research into the history of education in France, Great Britain and America . . . he served as a consultant to a number of distinguished commissions including the Paideia Group, Pfizer,Inc, the California Blue Ribbon Commission on Social Studies, the United States Department of Education and the American Federation of Teachers.� The National Council for History Education has established in his honor the Paul A. Gagnon Award to be given to a teacher for scholarship or outstanding achievement in the promotion of history in the schools.
After retiring from the University of Massachusetts, Boston, Gagnon served as a senior research associate at Boston University’s Center for School Improvement and published widely on questions of state public school history curricula and standards. In his 2003 article “In Pursuit of a ‘Civic Core’ A Report on State Standards,” he wrote,“Alexis de Tocqueville gave us a tall order a century and a half ago. He opened Democracy in America with his plea to American and French leaders alike ‘First among the duties that are at this time imposed on those who direct our affairs is to educate democracy’.” Gagnon believed that young people needed a thorough knowledge of history to be effective citizens of a democracy and that their teachers needed a quality liberal arts education in order to help them attain this knowledge."
Paul Gagnon died April 28 in his Cambridge home at the age of eighty. He leaves his wife Mona Harrington, his sons Benjamin and Thomas, and his daughter Eliza.
Paul Bookbinder
University of Massachusetts, Boston From OAH Newsletter 33 (August 2005). Copyright ©, Organization of American Historians. All rights reserved. Used with permission of the copyright holder.
Robert J.“Bob” Elkins, Jr., professor emeritus of German at West Virginia University and former NECTFL Board member, died December 19, 2005 in Morgantown at age 75. He taught full-time at the university from 1973-1994, and part-time from the year of his retirement until 1997. Bob served on the NECTFL Board from 1991-1994, but his loyalty to the organization both predated and followed his tenure as a Director. Bob was known for bringing over 60 West Virginia University graduate students to the Northeast Conference each year, to introduce them to the benefits of professional networking, teacher development and the joys of the exhibit hall! The students’ affection and respect for Bob were obvious, and his work to guarantee their presence with us each year was unique.
Along with his co-authors, Theodore B. Kalivoda, and Genelle Morain, Bob wrote not one, but two Stephen A. Freeman Award-winning articles! In 1972, the article “The Audio-Motor Unit: A Listening Comprehension Strategy That Works,” which first appeared in 1971 in Foreign Language Annals, 4: 392-400, was honored. It was reprinted in the 1973 Northeast Conference Reports. The article begins:
The classroom teacher is not indifferent to the theorist. We listen attentively to the grammarian, the audiolinguist, the cognitive-coder, and the eclecticist. But while we wait for the Revelation, we have to go on teaching the language Monday through Friday from September to June. The question we ask most fervently when two or three gather together is,“What are you doing that works?” (p. 132, 1973 Reports)
The 1974 award went to “Fusion of the Four Skills: A Technique for Facilitating Communicative Exchange,” which was first published in1972 in The Modern Language Journal, 56: 426-29, and then reprinted in the 1975 Northeast Conference Reports.
Bob was a U.S. Air Force veteran who spent six years in Germany. His survivors include wife, Elfriede, and sons, Andre and James, as well as two grandchildren.
Copyright © 1995-2009 by The Northeast Conference.
All Rights Reserved. Contact the Webmaster.