RUSSIAN TEACHERS TO CONVENE IN ALBUQUERQUE

April 3, 2003

RUSSIAN TEACHERS TO CONVENE IN ALBUQUERQUE

The Central Association of Russian Teachers of America (CARTA) annual conference features Dan Davidson, founder and president of the American Councils for International Education, presenting a keynote address on the current challenges facing foreign language teachers, Saturday, April 5, at 12:15 p.m., La Posada Hotel in downtown Albuquerque. The conference is held in conjunction with the University of New Mexico.

"The fifth annual conference will be celebrating the 200th anniversary of the founding of St. Petersburg in Russia as foreign language educators from the Southwest meet April 4 to 6 to exchange scholarly and pedagogical reports on their work both inside and outside the classroom," said Byron Lindsey, UNM Russian professor and conference local arrangements chair. He said that a special focus is opportunities for Russian students to study abroad in American collaborative programs.

Del Phillips, University of Arizona at Tucson, and national leader in study abroad programs, will give a lecture on his experience in a special plenary session on Saturday morning.

Original photographs by Dmitri Baltermants, the official Kremlin photographer from World War II until the death of Communist party chief Leonid Brezhnev in 1982, will be on exhibition at the UNM Art Museum. A special opening event is scheduled for Friday, April 4, at 1 p.m.

"The conference is expected to bring to Albuquerque almost 100 Russian language teachers from universities and schools throughout the region," said Lindsey.

"Making It Work: Teaching Russian under Challenging Conditions," a round table discussion of Russian language study problems in the United States since the end of the Cold War, will be a special feature of the conference agenda on Saturday afternoon. Lindsey will moderate.

Mara Sukholutskaya, professor of Russian at East Oklahoma State University, is founder and continuing CARTA president.

Call the UNM Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at 277-4771 for more information about the conference.

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