Project New Eyes

If you're here at my site, you already probably know a little bit about what Project New Eyes is, but odds are good that all the information has already been filtered through the grapevine, so it may have changed a little bit...

Project New Eyes is a study abroad program created by Steven Sternfeld and Heather Hirschi at the University of Utah. This is the third year that students from the U have gone to the Czech Republic on this program. Once in the Czech Republic, we're based out of the village Sušice, but many of us live with host families in villages all around that area.

Monday through Wednesday, we are in local schools helping teach English to the Czech children. Those afternoons, we have some sort of internship, really these are positions where we get to help anyone who wants to learn English, and get some practice talking with native English speakers. Thursday and Friday we are in classes of our own that will earn us credit at the U towards the TESOL (teaching English to speakers of other languages) certificate. Weekends are spent with our host families.

This year, a Czech language program has been implemented into the program, so many of the students from the U will be working with the Czech to learn their language. This will help us have recent first hand experience learning a language, so that we can better identify with what our students are going through. It also helps us figure out ways that we can make it easier for them, based on what we think would have helped us in learning Czech. I'm very excited to learn a new language!

Here are some the professors from the U that will be teaching the University classes that we will take on Thurs/Fri: Steven Sternfeld-Linguistics (Cross-Cultural Communications), Heather Hirschi-Writing non-fiction, Rai Farrelly-Linguistics Practicum/methodology, and Mara Haslam-Linguistics Practicum/methodology.

So, that's just a little bit about the program. If anyone has any questions feel free to let me know!

Emily