DDGC 2023

March 31-April 2 (virtual; all times in PDT)
Creating Just Outcomes and Assessments, Together
(a.k.a. The 'Hot'-comes Conference)

Note: priority registration passed, but we welcome late registrants any time between now and the first day of the conference to accommodate people burdened by the times in which we live. Solidarity!

This virtual conference will discuss and produce new outcomes and assessment protocols for our shared fields of work, so that we may implement them at our schools. Together, we will identify, exchange, and develop ambitious new knowledge around these key questions for our future curricula—at every level of the multilingual learning journey.

Overview

What do language-oriented programs of learning say about the goals and purposes of their curricula in 2023? What are the outcomes to which they strive, how do they account for those outcomes, and how do they go about achieving them? Whose version of “culture” or “language” do they hold to when working toward these outcomes? How do students’ experiences, identifications, and desires figure into this process? What do communities and community organizations tell us regarding these questions? What does a decolonial outcome look and sound like in this context?

Based in DDGC’s Guiding Principles, this virtual conference will discuss and produce new outcomes and assessment protocols for our shared fields of work, so that we may implement them at our schools. Together, we will identify, exchange, and develop ambitious new knowledge around these key questions for our future curricula—at every level of the multilingual learning journey. We find that our larger national and international organizations do not offer resources adequate to this purpose, and we wish to foster a series of conversations that will do so. Focusing on program outcomes, learning outcomes, program assessments, and learning assessments, we invite participation from programs at all levels and languages.

Questions and topics that participants may share knowledge on during this four day virtual conference across the languages are:

  • Are “outcome” and “assessment” anglocentric / monolingual concepts? Can they be formulated multilingually?

  • What do the work of ACTFL / MLA / Common European Framework / British Council, and IELTS contribute?

  • What are alternatives to “outcomes”: throughoutcomes, incomes, etc.

  • Thinking through assessment as “assidere”: ways of ‘sitting by’ the learner

  • Is ‘outcome’ a colonial concept? Can outcomes and assessments be rematriated to the communities to which they are responsible? (Tuck 2011)

  • What is the role of local knowledge and practical circumstances for the formulation of outcomes and assessments?

  • What outcomes and assessments are available in and for Black linguistics, Pan-African sociolinguistics, multilingua francae, queer lives, Disabled lives, etc.?

  • Outcomes and their relationships to academic registers / structures / hierarchies / elite prescriptivisms / and business-finance idioms

  • Outcomes and their relationships to labour organizing and labour futures

  • Mutual aid and community solidarity as outcomes: Can we assess them?

  • What is a radical outcome? A feminist / queer / trans* outcome?

  • Must we compromise on outcomes? Is the work of producing outcomes / assessments necessarily the work of compromise?

  • Linguistic Outcomes and Indigenous Sovereignty

  • Do graduate programs need new outcomes and assessments, and why?

  • Outcomes and Poetics/Aesthetics

  • Outcomes and their relationships to Desire, Joy, Love, Community

  • The History of Outcomes

  • Outcomes in the Ruins of Neoliberalism / Outcomes in an age of climate emergency

  • Outcomes and Fugitive Study / The Undercommons (Harney and Moten)

  • Are outcome and assessment just slogans?

  • Assessing “Intercultural competence” and biased epistemologies

  • Nativespeakerism and raciolinguistics in outcomes / assessments

  • Identifying and dismantling linguistically indifferent outcomes and assessments

Conference Format

The conference will take place virtually over 3 days. It is conceived as a venue to foster and enact collective scholarship. As such, all conference participants will have the opportunity to co-create knowledge alongside language and culture studies practitioners from various backgrounds.

The end goal for the main conference is to collaboratively draft new awesome program outcomes / learning outcomes (a.k.a. “Hotcomes”) throughout the five days, with potential collective adoption on day 5 via general assembly.

Opening Discussion Day 1: Show and Tell 1

  • Bring your least favorite learning outcome

  • Bring your least favorite assessment tool

  • Bring the best outcome or assessment you’ve ever seen


Discussion Session Day 2

  • What mildly dismays you about “outcomes” and “assessments”? What excites you about them?

  • How can outcomes and assessments reflect DDGC’s guiding principles?

  • What do activists and community leaders outside of universities want from program outcomes and assessments, and why?

  • What are K-12 teachers’ wishes from, and insights about, higher-ed outcomes / assessments?


Discussion Session Day 3: Taking action together

  • Plenary Assembly: adopting shared outcomes / assessments that reflect our guiding principles


Each conference participant will have the opportunity to participate in one or two ways:

  1. As a general participant. In this capacity, you will be contributing to the discussions and co-creating outcomes with others.

  2. As a general participant who also gives a short talk on one of the topics below or a topic related to the general theme of the conference. Your presentation should be no longer than 10 minutes and would be intended as a conversation-starter that frames some of the workshopping that will take place over the course of the five days.

Pre-Conference Reading Group

In order to facilitate ongoing conversation around the topic of outcomes, we will hold an opt-in monthly reading group, beginning in October. During each session, we will read one text and meet virtually to discuss its main ideas and how these intersect with the theme of the conference. Participants are encouraged to attend any reading group session they like to attend, but are not required to do so.

We will circulate a schedule for the reading group, listing times and reading schedule shortly after the submission deadline for the conference.

Contact

Direct any inquiries about the conference to David Gramling (david.gramling@ubc.ca), Kiley Kost (kkost@carleton.edu), and Ervin Malakaj (ervin.malakaj@ubc.ca).