On March 5, more than 70 area K-12 teachers and community college faculty and students took over Luce Hall for a program packed with lectures and workshops as PIER (Programs in International Educational Resources at Yale) and the European Studies Council held their seventh “Teach Europe Seminar.”
Professor Timothy Snyder (Yale University) began the day with a keynote address, where he introduced his recent best-seller Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, a copy of which was given to every participant. Attendees then had to make a difficult choice among
four breakout workshops. In one, Ruta Couet, president of the National Council of State Supervisors for Languages, and Mary Ann Hansen, former State World Language Consultant at the Connecticut Department of Education, presented “LinguaFolio,” an innovative assessment tool based on the latest European advances in language pedagogy. In another workshop, Anastasios Bellesiostis, an economic adviser in the Bureau of European Policy Advisers of the European Commission (EC) and this year’s MacMillan Center EU Fellow, examined the EC’s new strategy for surmounting its debt crisis in Europe 2020. John Meyers, former Project Director for Education Programs at the World Affairs Council in Hartford, conducted a workshop on Norway’s complex relations with the rest of Europe that featured a live video-conference with Paal Frisvold, president of the “European Movement in Norway,” which is leading the effort to cajole Norway into the European Union. A fourth, very popular workshop was given by Jessica Sack, the Jan and Frederick Mayer Associate Curator of Public Education at the Yale University Art Gallery, in which she detailed ways of using European art at the YUAG as a teaching resource. Teach Europe Project Coordinator Brian Carter made a presentation on “Europe on the Web,” introducing teachers to some of the vast resources available online for study about Europe.