Project Name: Teaching Bilinguals (Even if You’re Not One): A Video Webseries for K-12 Educators
Grantee: Sara Vogel
Discipline: Urban Education
Funding Cycle: 2016-2017
Project Status: Ongoing
White Paper: Project Narrative – Vogel

The state-funded CUNY-New York State Initiative on Emergent Bilinguals (housed at the
Graduate Center) has published a set of guides which feature tips for K-12 teachers and
teacher candidates as they work to educate bilingual students. Several classroom teachers I
have worked with in my capacity as a research assistant at the Initiative have expressed that
while they know the guides are chock full of useful tips and strategies, they find them dense and
overwhelming to navigate. To aid teachers and teacher candidates in unpacking the strategies
in the CUNY-NYSIEB guides, and to fulfill the requirements of the Independent Study Project for
the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Certificate at the GC, I am in the process of creating
a 3-episode video web-series to introduce applications of translanguaging, a theoretical
construct from the field of bilingual education research (García and Li Wei, 2014), in an
accessible and friendly way. I respectfully request $4000 in funds from the Provost’s Digital
Innovation grant to hire an illustrator to produce playful, attractive animated visual
effects that will support the voice overs and interviews in an attempt to reach the target
audience, and to support my producing, interviewing and editing time. I plan on using the videos
as a pedagogical tool in my own instruction in the Hunter College bilingual extension program. I
will write a reflective piece for submission to the Journal of Interactive Technology and
Pedagogy which discusses how students in my course responded to the videos.