Global Studies Seminar presents Hanada Al-Masri and Cheryl Johnson

The Global Studies Seminar presents a talk titled “Oral History Project: The Arab American Community in Central Ohio: Negotiating Cultural Identities and Adapting Traditions,” by Hanada Al-Masri, associate professor of arabic at Denison and Cheryl Johnson, instructional technologist of modern languages and classics at Denison.

Al-Masri currently serves as the director of MENA. She earned her doctorate in Linguistics at Purdue University, her masters and bachelors degrees from the University of Jordan in Jordan. Al-Masri teaches all levels of Arabic language courses and cultures of the Arab world. Her research focuses on the fields of applied linguistics and sociolinguistics, where she particularly researches translation theory and Arabic literary translation, language teaching and Arabic language pedagogy, discourse analysis, language attitudes and linguistic code-switching in Arabic. She co-authors the Arabic textbook “Arabiyyat Al-Naas: An Intermediate Course in Arabic, Part II.” Al-Masri is also a certified ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) Tester and a Rater of The ACTFL Assessment of Performance toward Proficiency in Languages (AAPPL).

Johnson has a wealth of experience working in collaboration with faculty who teach a variety of languages and with a wide range of technologies. She has also developed various websites and media programs for Spanish, including the important Historia y cultura de España website (civycultura.denison.edu) in collaboration with the late Professor Vicente Cantarino. Johnson also publishes the online Istmo journal (istmo.denison.edu), which is an academic publication focusing on Central American literature and culture. In the current project, Johnson directs the online platform design and provides mentoring in oral history pedagogy.

Al-Masri, Johnson and a team modern language students will share with the audience the process of creating a digital collection from an oral history project: its logistics, procedures, and pedagogical values and benefits tostudents.