The BCIU's 2009 Asian Studies Collaborative (ASC) Spring Conference, designed to foster and support district efforts to establish Asian culture and language programs in the K-12 curriculum, was held at the BCIU in April 2009.

The conference opened with a keynote speech by Dr. Galal Walker and Kun Shi, directors of the Ohio State University Chinese Flagship Program. They shared experiences and lessons learned from launching Mandarin Chinese language programs in the state of Ohio.

The agenda included additional segments on staff development, curriculum, building community awareness and support, and the staffing of qualified instructors. Also featured in the program were resources available to area districts through the Berks County Intermediate Unit's Asian Studies Collaborative and the new resource center.

Teams of K-12 central office administrators, building administrators, department chairs, and teacher leaders attended the conference.

 View video clips from the 2009 conference.

sponsored by:
Berks County Community Foundation and the Regional Pennsylvania Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Effective Ways for Chinese Language Program Development: Experience of the Ohio State University K-12 Chinese Flagship Program

Dr. Galal Walker
Dr. Galal Walker is a professor of Chinese at Ohio State University and director of the National East Asian Languages Resource Center. In addition, he serves as the director of the Ohio State University Chinese Flagship Program.

With more than 20 years directing programs at the college level, his professional goal is integration of language and culture to ensure that American students can communicate with speakers of Mandarin Chinese.

Dr. Walker received his Ph.D. from Cornell University and in 2003 was awarded the “China Language and Culture Friendship Award” by the National Office for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language of the Ministry of Education, People's Republic of China.

Kun Shi
Since 2006, Kun Shi has been the director of the Ohio State University K-12 Chinese Flagship Program (http://k12chineseflagship.osu.edu). Before that, he served as a program evaluator for the Ohio Legislative Office of Education Oversight for six years and taught cultural anthropology and contemporary China at Denison University.

He has an M.A. in anthropology from OSU and a B.A. in English and Literature from Fudan University, and has published extensively related to Chinese cultures in Chinese and English.

Developing Quality Distance Learning Programs

Greg Palmer
Greg Palmer serves as director of the Mid-Atlantic GigaPoP (MAGPI) in Philadelphia, a division of the University of Pennsylvania, which provides connectivity to the Internet2 backbone network in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware. He has written several papers on advanced networking and high performance applications in the United States and has presented on several occasions to European University Information Systems (EUNIS).

NCTA: A Program for East Asian Curricular Reform

Diana Marston Wood & David Kenley
Ms. Diana Marston Wood serves as assistant director of the Asian Studies Center, University of Pittsburgh. She coordinates East Asia teacher seminars for the National Consortium for Teaching About Asia in West Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C.  Other responsibilities include the Pitt in China Program, the Chinese for Professionals program, and the distance learning initiative.

Dr. David Kenley (Ph.D., University of Hawai'i; M.A., University of Utah; B.A., Brigham Young University) is originally from Salt Lake City, Utah, but has lived in West Virginia, Hawaii, and the Republic of China on Taiwan. Dr. Kenley has been at Elizabethtown College since 2004.
His research focuses on the history of Asia, particularly modern China. He is the author of New Culture in a New World (Routledge Press) and other works dealing with Chinese intellectual history and diasporas in world history.

Chinese in the Schools: Confucius Institute at the University of Pittsburgh

Michele F. Heryford
Ms. Michele Ferrier Heryford has been the managing director for the University of Pittsburgh's Confucius Institute since its establishment in May of 2007 and the assistant director for external affairs for the Asian Studies Center since 1997.

In addition to overseeing corporate, public, and external educational projects for Asian Studies, Ms. Heryford is project manager for two Web-based and CD-ROM-based curriculum projects for post-secondary education. She has given lectures at numerous academic conferences around the world on issues related to digitized curriculum for higher education, expansion of specialized programs in Chinese studies, and methods for developing collaborative projects with foundations and public institutions.