Evaluating the Practices and Impact of Digital Scholarship on World Language Pedagogy in K-12 Urban and Rural Contexts

An evaluative study on the impact of teaching world languages using Open Educational Resources (OERs) in K-12 classrooms across Idaho.This Level II proposal addresses the third program priority to implement an evaluative study on the practices and impact of digital scholarship on pedagogy to enhance teaching and learning in the humanities. Our project, Pathways, is an Open Educational Resource (OER) that is a repository of more than 700 high-quality, editable digital materials (activities) that supports standards-based pedagogy centered on human inquiry for ten world languages and cultures. This project is innovative because we evaluate K-12 urban and rural pedagogy impacted over time as we explicitly train teachers to use Pathways and other digital humanities materials aligned to world languages and cultures. The findings from this evaluative study will provide new opportunities to communicate the impact of digital scholarship on pedagogy by characterizing the beliefs, perceptions, interests, and teacher practices of urban and rural K-12 humanities teachers, a profoundly under investigated population.