Hi Vika and Wynne, Thank you for creating our blog, Vika. Would you please go to "Permissions" and grant admin. privileges to Wynne and to me for this blog? We can then post more fully here on our blog. In our phone conversation on Saturday, we discussed our collective presentation. Here are some of the points we covered: We should each plan on talking five to seven minutes for a group presentation that should be 15 to 20 minutes. We should coordinate our three presentations so that the whole presentation is coherent. I will present first, Wynne second and Vika third -- unless you have an objection and you prefer a different order. If we go in this order, here is approximately what I will say: This MA program was established by Mina Shaughnessy and her colleagues in the CCNY English Department in 1975. Initially called the MA in Teaching College English, this program was designed to prepare teachers of English in the heyday of Open Admissions at CUNY. The program helped to formalize and professionalize the preparation of basic writing instructors. The program also prepared teachers of high school English. In 1986, Marilyn Sternglass was hiredto administer this program. She renamed the program The MA in Language and Literacy in order to call attention to core areas of knowledge needed by teachers of English. These core areas initially focused on language study, reading, and writing. Today, for core courses focus on language, second language acquisition, adult learning, and literacy. The program mission includes several programmatic learning outcomes, including "gaining practical experience as teachers or tutors" and "acquiring teaching expertise." (I will pass out a copy of the two-page L&L Mission Statement.) A three-credit teaching practicum allows graduate students to gain experience and expertise as teachers of adult students in both college and pre-college classrooms. In recent years, we have developed a teaching practicum at La Guardia Community College for graduate students who wish to gain teaching experience in GED classrooms and perhaps pursue a full-time professional career in adult literacy education. A graduate of the L&L MA herself, Wynne Ferdinand established this teaching practicum as soon as she was hired as a full-time instructor in the Adult and Continuing Education Division Pre-College Program at La Guardia Community College. (Wynne, in what year were you hired and in what year did we establish this internship?) Since we established this program, X number of students have completed the internship. It has proven highly successful. We guage success in these ways: (1) 100% completion rate for all students who started the internship; (2) Students who have completed the program have all found part-time or full-time teaching employment within a few months of completing the MA; (3) student satisfaction has been very high for students engaged in this internship. Wynne and Vika: We can email a survey questionnaire by Survey Monkey to all the individuals who have completed this LaGCC internship. It is very easy to make up a list of questions on Survey Monkey and to send the questionnaire. What do you think of this idea? I think that reporting on the results of a student satisfaction survey would be a good way for me to conclude this segment. Wynne could then provide details about the Learning Contract that we have developed and provide her own perspective on the issues that arise in coordinating this internship. Vika could then comment on her own experience as an intern, on her portfolio (which could be displayed on a screen in PPT slides after screen shots are captured from the actual online blog. I doubt if we will have internet access. I'll find out. I would like to add a final comment: I will say that the Marilyn Sternglass family established two awards for L&L MA students, one for writing submitted to a graduate course and one for overall merit as a graduate student. I will say that Vika and Wynne each won the overall merit award in two successive years. BG