Reevaluating Teaching Practices during the War. Episode 1: Interview with Irina Kogel

The war in Ukraine changed everything and certainly impacted the teaching of the Russian language. I decided to meet with colleagues and discuss the difficulties they faced in the spring semester and changes we can make before the beginning of the fall semester. How to discuss Russia's actions with our students? How can we keep motivating students? How to support them and ourselves emotionally? And what can we change in our teaching materials? We discussed this and many other things with Irina Kogel.

Irina Kogel is a lecturer in Russian Studies at Davidson College. A heritage speaker of Russian from Belarus, she is interested in heritage speaker motivation, as well as the use of technology in language acquisition. She started the @RogueSEELANGS Facebook group, a forum which offers space for K-16 scholars and educators in Slavic Studies and related fields to share resources and news about the war in Ukraine. She is also an author of the project Russian Voices, a series of interviews, which seek to give students a more diverse perspective of Russian speakers. It can be accessed at russian-voices.org.