My capstone project is called “Get to know China” with the purpose of attracting more students to sign up for Mandarin in the high school, developing a curriculum that can be passed down, promoting better cultural understanding between the US and China, and building a sister school partnership.
As I work in an IB school, there is a tremendous focus on languages where Arabic is taught along with French, Spanish, and Mandarin. Yet, the school has no Arabic syllabus of its own; that is, no coursebook for teaching this language even though students – of all different levels – study it on a daily basis. This fact has arisen my interest to start this project that aims at starting to develop an Arabic syllabus that could be used by future teachers of Arabic at the school.
This project is to create a shared resource space to help the teachers, students and school community appreciate the diversity that is within our cultures, while recognizing we all have shared commonalities.
My capstone project is to establish a Chinese curriculum for my host school, Ewa Makai Middle School. Since this is the first year my host school has had Mandarin Chinese classes, I felt quite challenged when I started my teaching. How I wished that I had good resources that was suitable for my teaching context. Developing a curriculum alone is never an easy job, but I do believe it will benefit further development of this course and my successor. That is why I devoted a lot of time and energy to my capstone project.
When I was at Irving Elementary School in Bozeman, Montana I found that the school library has no resources for Arabic so I thought it would be a good idea to launch an Arabic Corner at the school library. I contacted some professors in Egypt asking for their recommendations about the best resources to be included in that library section.
