LLRC Faculty Spotlight
Leading and Expanding World Language Teacher Education
Prof. Sarah Jourdain has been directing the World Language Teacher Education (TE)
Programs at SBU for over 20 years, while also teaching French and pedagogy courses.
SBU offers TE programs for Chinese, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish,
providing BA, MAT, and BA/MAT degrees. SBU doesn't have a school of education but
employs a unique distributed model of teacher education through The Distributed Teacher
and Leader Education program (D-TALE). This model offers teacher candidates richer
resources in content through specialized academic departments. Prof. Jourdain collaborates
with many language instructors and TE directors of other subjects such as math, English,
and science. She also maintains long-term relationships with a wide range of educators
and education leaders across school districts on Long Island and beyond.
Prof. Jourdain has taught all levels of French at SBU. She truly enjoys the enthusiasm of the students in FRN 111, where they are first exposed to the French language and its cultures. She also enjoys teaching at a graduate level, where many of her students start considering teaching French as their future career. In her methodology classes, she finds it rewarding to see all her students trying to become good teachers.
"They are all striving to be the best possible teachers in my methodology class. Some of them are passionate about working with young people. Some had one or more very influential teachers in the past and want to bring the same positive experience to younger generations. Others aim to share their cultural knowledge acquired through language learning and study abroad experiences. And some want to pass on their heritage language and culture to people from different cultural backgrounds."
SBU's World Language TE Program is expanding. For Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, BA-MA combined programs are currently being developed. For French, SBU recently launched the very first online TE program at the MA level in the state of New York. In this program, students take all courses remotely while participating in class observations and student teaching in schools in their home communities. A similar program for Italian is currently in development. Online TE programs for world languages are crucial because there is a national shortage of K-12 TE programs for world languages other than Spanish. SBU also offers another unique TE program that combines two BA programs: a world language and ENL (English as a New Language), along with an MA, enabling our graduates to teach one of the world languages as well as ENL in K-12 schools. SBU is the only institution in the state offering this 5-year BA-MA combined program with double certification. Many school districts prefer to have teachers with two certifications. So, many students have enrolled in SBU specifically for this unique program. Prof. Jourdain appreciates current SBU’s administrators:
“We are fortunate because current administrators at SBU are very supportive of language programs and TE programs. We recently added an Arabic curriculum, which is doing well. As a state flagship university, we should continue our leadership in world language teacher education.”
Recently, former students of Prof. Jourdain who are currently teaching world languages on Long Island came to visit her. Prof. Joudain was very touched to learn that they were making a positive impact on our local communities through their teaching. Prof. Jourdain welcomes more new students to come to Stony Brook to learn languages, cultures, and how to become excellent and influential teachers for our future generations.
Interviewed and written by Eriko Sato
October 25, 2023