Event Title

A Digital Module on Critical Language Awareness; The Children of Föhrenwald; Diagnosing Depression

Presenter Information

Sergio Loza
Angelica Amezcua
June Owens
Nichelle Morales

Location

CB1-307

Start Date

4-11-2017 10:00 AM

End Date

4-11-2017 11:00 AM

Description

A Digital Module on Critical Language Awareness: Resistance and Social Justice in the Classroom (Sergio Loza and Angelica Amezcua)

Despite Spanish being the second most spoken language in the U.S., its speakers often face hegemonic language ideologies. Moreover, it is vital for Spanish heritage language instructors to address these socio-political topics embedded within the heritage language itself. Spanish heritage students are speakers that were raised or born with an exposure to this language normally starting from birth (Valdés, 2001). Spanish is often relegated to a subordinate status in American society. Both within institutions and society, English monolingualism is often perceived as the national norm. To this effect, it is often the case that Spanish as a minority language is impacted so that it is lost among and within generations. This is primarily due to the implementation of educational policies that, not only target bilingualism, but also contribute to the devaluation and marginalization of Spanish. Therefore, as educators and speakers of Spanish it is vital to challenge the devaluation and marginalization of Spanish, and one way to accomplish this is through incorporating critical language awareness in heritage language pedagogy. In heritage language pedagogy and through critical language pedagogical framework, the classroom should serve as socio-political space to bring the students' and communities' experiences to the center of the classroom (Leeman, 2005). This presentation focuses on the different ways of implementing media in a Spanish heritage language classroom to develop students' critical language awareness. This is achieved via an online module that introduces real-world examples of the consequences of language subordination with the goal of exposing students to critical thinking of hegemonic ideologies. This module is divided in four parts: 1) English positioned as the prestige language, 2) monolingualism presented as the "norm," 3) the societal impact of the classification of "minority languages" and 4) linguistic prejudice and subordination. In doing so, this module contributes to students becoming agents and critical thinkers of language in society who can deconstruct, challenge, and advocate for the validation of Spanish in the U.S.

The Children of Föhrenwald, a Jewish Shtetl from the Post-Holocaust Displaced Person Camp, are Reconnected through an Interactive Documentary Project and a Virtual "Living Monument" in the Newly Designed Handy-Memorial App (June Owens)

Oral histories have been conducted on Föhrenwald Children and their suffering in refugee camps after World War II and the Holocaust for a very long time. It is a crucial matter that has affected many lives since 1945. To talk about the Föhrenwald Children in depth, many of David Boder's research and used similar methods have been cited for further analysis. Also, two of the Föhrenwald Children were interviewed who lived together and grew up in the same camp. Föhrenwald Children faced agony, distress, and even happy childhood memories daily in their 'specialized' camps known as 'Displaced Person' (DP) camps. These were only two of many untold stories hidden in the homes of various Föhrenwald Children. Hence, creating an interactive documentary: a "site-specific" virtual "living monument" in the newly designed Handy-Memorial app where historical accounts are accessible and oral histories experienced. An interactive online platform creates memorials that will be available for everyone worldwide to connect more easily and share information, stories, and objects. These first-hand stories will enable historians and those in the education field to conduct better research and educate the next generations to come. Owens is creating an original interactive digital content across many platforms (tablet, mobile and the Web). Owens is in the production phase of her Interactive Documentary about Displaced Persons camps in West Germany from 1945-1952 to what life looks now in 2017. She is representing and creating reality in digital environments that will open new ways to allow people to co-create and collaborate. She is exploring memory, identity, and documenting everyday life. Owens is specifically interested in Jewish cultures, memories and eye-witness accounts and identities in the 40's to what it is now in 2017 in Germany. Testimony thus far indicates that the Displaced Persons camps today are unknown and forgotten. It is important to know what happened to the survivors, or those who came in the survivor's place, after the Holocaust. Owens will create a new historical record by making photographic images, text and video/oral interviews in Germany where Displaced Persons camps were once located. History of the past, along with publication of rare documents that have never been published and/or are difficult to access, will be shared through the creation of an Interactive Documentary. The form of digital storytelling gives others opportunities to co-create, learn, discover, explore, archive and collaborate.

Diagnosing Depression: Building an Open-Source Tool for Mental Health (Michelle Morales)

Developing an easy-to-use open-source tool to support the timely and accurate diagnosis of depression may lead to a significant increase in appropriate treatment, particularly in regions underserved by health care. Through my work on OpenMM, an open-source tool, I will show how multimodal feature analysis can complement advances in natural language processing and human-computer interaction in order to improve the likelihood of successful diagnosis and treatment. Depression is a serious mental health issue that affects millions of people globally. The World Health Organization estimates that by the year 2020, depression will be the second largest cause of burden of disease worldwide. Due to the variation in how depression presents itself within each person, it is difficult and time-consuming to diagnose. Since diagnosis often relies on a clinician's assessment, it is also subjective. Moreover, many under-served regions have severe shortages of clinicians who can make the diagnosis. Even in areas with well-developed health systems, less than half of those suffering from depression receive treatment. Given advancements in hardware and software, coupled with the explosion of smartphone use, possible health care solutions have begun to change and interest in developing technologies to assess mental health has grown. Researchers in natural language processing and human-computer interaction have made significant progress in building systems to automatically detect depression, but many challenges remain. One major challenge is determining which features, from which modalities, are most successful in training an algorithm to make a correct depression prediction. In an ideal world, researchers would provide the machine with the same streams information a clinician receives, e.g. multimodal features (video, audio, and language). However, multimodal features are extremely time intensive to engineer as they involve multiple data sources as well as expertise across modalities. In order to facilitate and promote multimodal research in computing and mental health, I present OpenMM, an open-source tool for multimodal feature extraction, which is available for download (https://github.com/michellemorales/OpenMM). This demo will outline OpenMM describing each of its components in depth. The demo will walk through each modality (video, audio, and text), explaining how OpenMM analyzes and extracts meaningful features from each data stream. The demo will also explain how to download, install, and run the tool. Lastly, I will show how OpenMM can be used to build a system to detect depression as well as highlight our system performance, which is 76% accurate in detecting depression.