ESF annual report 2001
SUMMARY
The past year saw an
expansion of ESF’s activities in several areas, particularly those related to
the use of Esperanto in education. Steps were also taken to put the
Foundation’s administration on a more professional footing. In the coming year,
increased priority will be given to publicizing ESF’s wider research agenda and
increasing its visibility in the North American academic community.
ADMINISTRATION
Advisory Board member
Grant Goodall was elected to the Board of Directors in May. Goodall, a
professor of linguistics in the University of Texas at El Paso, is also an experienced
instructor in ESF’s summer Esperanto program NASK (see below). The President
(Humphrey Tonkin), Vice-Presidents (David Jordan, Jonathan Pool) and Secretary
(E. James Lieberman) continue in their positions, but the office of Treasurer
was transferred in May from Pool to Lieberman. On a day-to-day basis, the Foundation’s
affairs continued to be managed by the Executive Director, Mark Fettes (now
located in Vancouver, B.C.).
In view of the
increasing complexity of ESF’s affairs, the Board engaged the services of Raffa
and Associates, an accounting firm specializing in non-profit organizations and
based in Washington, D.C. This relationship has
already benefited ESF in a number of ways. The Foundation’s investments remain
in a highly diversified portfolio managed by Quantum Asset Management, a
Seattle-based firm. At the end of the year ESF’s assets were valued at
approximately $3.2 million.
EDUCATION
Summer Esperanto Program (NASK)
For the first time, the
Nord-Amerika Somera Kursaro (NASK), an intensive university-style summer program
in Esperanto, was organized directly under the auspices of ESF. Held at San Francisco State University for 31 years, the
program was transferred to the University of San Francisco campus when SFSU
announced the scaling-back of the summer program to make room for increased
undergraduate instruction in the summer semester. NASK administrator Ellen Eddy
worked with ESF to put together a more modest two-week program in the new
location, featuring instructors Duncan Charters (Principia College), Derek Roff (University of New Mexico) and Grant Goodall (University of Texas at El Paso). While this format
proved successful, attracting 34 participants, ESF intends to reintroduce the
three-week format in 2002 provided that a suitable host institution can be found.
At year’s end, such a contract was under discussion with the School for
International Training in Brattleboro, Vermont.
Pasporto Video
Course
ESF’s largest grant of
the year, $83,000, was awarded in April toward the making of a 15-lesson video
course in Esperanto. Entitled Esperanto,
Pasporto al la Tuta Mondo, the course involves an international team of
actors, an original script, a professional documentary film director, and consultation
with several outstanding Esperanto teachers. ESF’s grant enabled the completion
and marketing of the first 12 episodes, together with a comprehensive set of
workbooks. ESF Board member Grant Goodall has also developed a workshop for
teachers interested in using the series, and a guidebook and training video are
in production.
New Initiatives in
Education
In a first step toward
developing a long-term strategy for its educational activities, ESF brought a
group of 14 Esperanto teachers and educators together in Arlington, Virginia,
in early May, both to attend a three-day conference of the National Council of
Organizations of Less Commonly Taught Languages and to participate in a one-day
colloquium on the educational uses of Esperanto. Both events were very
successful. Among the priorities identified at the colloquium were the further
development of the NASK program, improved training for Esperanto teachers, and
the construction of a web site of educational resources for teaching and using
Esperanto. Support was also expressed for ESF’s ongoing project to develop a
Web-based language learning environment, pursued during the year by Swedish
researcher Henning von Rosen.
Of these four
priorities, the first two were the topic of an intensive planning meeting in Vermont in early October, while
the third became the focus of an international web development project lasting
from July to December. With the completion of this initial phase, the pages at http://www.edukado.net/ include an annotated
catalogue of some 60 textbooks, grammars and other published teaching
materials, to which users can add their own comments, evaluations, and
proposals for new items. Among the features planned for future phases are a
database of downloadable materials and a discussion forum. The site has
garnered enthusiastic reviews from Esperanto teachers in a wide range of
countries.
Berkeley Student Program
ESF’s program of support
for a student-taught Esperanto course at the University of California at Berkeley continued into its
third year. The course teachers, Lana Shlafer and Stelet Mina Kim, both come
from bilingual households (Esperanto-Russian and Esperanto-Korean). Over 30
students have taken the one-semester course since Shlafer and Kim began to
teach it in the winter term of 2000, and in the most recent term they found it
necessary to restrict enrolment. ESF provides funds for teaching materials, a
modest scholarship for the teachers, and training opportunities such as this
year’s education colloquium in which both Shlafer and Kim participated.
INTERLINGUISTIC RESEARCH
Although ESF received a
number of research proposals for funding during the year, none was judged
sufficiently relevant to the Foundation’s priorities to receive support. In Russia, Aleksandr Melnikov
continued, under a previous grant, to gather and analyze materials on the ways
in which the culture of Esperanto’s community of speakers is reflected in the
lexicon, phraseology and stylistics of the language. ESF also helped to support
the publication of a major collection of essays in interlinguistics, Studoj pri Interlingvistiko / Studien zur
Interlinguistik (see below) compiled to mark the 60th birthday
of the noted interlinguist Detlev Blanke. The complete volume is now available
on the ESF website at http://esperantic.org/librejo/dbstudoj/index.htm
.
From July to December,
under its intern program, ESF supported Swedish student Jennifer Palmgren’s research
on Esperanto as a lingua franca in Africa. Palmgren, who had
previously researched Zulu urban identity in South Africa and the role of Swahili
as a national language in Tanzania, learned Esperanto,
interviewed European Esperantists about their contacts with Africans, and
traveled to several towns in Tanzania to meet members of the
local clubs. Her report highlights the difficulties that long distances and
widespread poverty place in the way of Esperanto’s spread on the continent, as
well as the persistent lack of materials and teachers that hampers even a
widespread lingua franca such as Swahili.
STRATEGIC DIRECTIONS
During
the coming year or two, ESF expects to continue the progress noted in this
report on renewing and activating its Board of Directors, streamlining its
administration, and developing its educational programs. In order to fulfill
its original mandate, however, it particularly needs to improve its visibility,
and the visibility of interlinguistics and Esperanto studies as significant domains
of research, in the North American academic community. At year's end, a number
of initiatives towards this goal were underway, including the rewriting and
publicizing of the Interlingual Research Grants, the relaunch of Esperantic Studies as an electronic
research bulletin, and ESF-sponsored panels and presentations at a number of
conferences in linguistics and communication studies.
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