Posts filed under 'Asymptote Educational Arm'

Spring News: A new educational guide, two paid Special Features, and a final call to join our team!

Whether you are an educator, a translator, or a potential volunteer, check out the following opportunities to be a part of our mission!

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Calling all teachers: the Spring 2022 Educator’s Guide is now available for download here! Whether your purview is high school or university students, we invite you to visit the Asymptote for Educators web page to discover new ways to bring translation into your classroom. With writing prompts and reading suggestions galore, this free resource based on articles from the Spring 2022 issue will be sure to spice up any literary discussion. Share the wealth with all your educator friends and be sure to fill out this survey to give us feedback. In this age of division, we can all play a part, however small, to foster empathy across cultures. Grab a copy of the new Educator’s Guide now.

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Considering a career in world literature? Then you should know that Asymptote provides the perfect training ground! (Former team members have gone on to take up positions at Penguin BooksDalkey Archive, and Words Without Borders.) And now is the perfect time to apply! We’ve just entered Phase II of our mid-year recruitment drive—concentrating on editorial and marketing roles this time. Among the newly available openings are Visual Editor, Nonfiction Editor, Social Media Manager, and Assistant Director of Outreach. If you’d like to join us behind the scenes, check out the newly available positions and apply today. READ MORE…

Teach This—Banned Countries Special Feature

Simon Fraser University’s Cristina Serverius on Understanding Identity in Oral Storytelling Traditions

Welcome to Teach This, Asymptote for Educators’ answer to the current issue’s Banned Countries Special Feature. We believe that the classroom is the perfect setting for young people to be exposed to diverse, contemporary voices, both allowing them to challenge their assumptions and to engage them with living literature… a conversation in which their own voices matter. To that end, Asymptote for Educators has launched this weekly blog series in which global educators share how and why they would teach the feature’s articles. We hope you and your students enjoy!

Are you an educator with your own lesson plan ideas? Teach This – Banned Countries Special Feature is currently open for submissions. Email education@asymptotejournal.com for more information.

While the work of Ubah Cristina Ali Farah is always situated between two cultures—Somali and Italian—it provides a point of access for students to learn about oral traditions, because despite the author’s long residencies outside of Somalia, these traditions remain present in her writing. Their ubiquity is testament to the very nature of oral stories, which creep into our lives unannounced and perhaps unnoticed, and travel with us. This is how they survive; this is how we survive.

The activities below focus on Ubah Cristina Ali Farah’s use of the Somali oral tradition and the question of personal identity in the context of stories that are passed down and retold, and which have become part of the socio-cultural fabric of our being. Besides offering an introduction to these topics, the lesson provides practice for analysis of a literary text and use of a secondary source to enrich our understanding of literature.

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What’s New with the Crew? A Monthly Update

From World Poetry Day to PEN competitions, we've had a busy month!

One quick piece of housekeeping news before our regular update! First, thanks to 98 wonderful backers, we’ve raised $13,547 so far toward our project to showcase new work created in response to Trump’s #MuslimBan. (Read the interviews given by our editor-in-chief at The Chicago Review of Books and at the Ploughshares Blog.) With only 7 days left to contribute to our fundraiser, we’ve unveiled a secret perk just for blog readers like you: for $100 apiece, you get first dibs on autographed books from writers like Junot Díaz and Yann Martel, who also stand with us against the travel ban! Fancy your own autographed copy of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao while also supporting frontline efforts to reverse Trump’s travel ban (20% of all proceeds of this fundraiser will go to the ACLU and Refugees Welcome)? Want to help keep Asymptote around beyond 2017? Wait no more: Throw in your support for our fundraiser today!

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Educational Arm Assistant Anna Aresi conducted and translated interviews with Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie and Italian translator Giorgia Sensi as part of Mosaici‘s feature for World Poetry Day, which can be read alongside Sensi’s translations of five poems by Jamie.
 
Editor-at-Large for Romania and Moldova Chris Tanasescu (MARGENTO) has published an article entitled “Community as Commoning, (Dis)Placing, and (Trans)versing: from Participatory and ‘Strike Art’ to the Postdigital”  ​in the latest issue of Dacoromania Litteraria.  One of his performances from the CROWD Omnibus tour in 2016, featuring 100 writers from 37 European countries, has recently been released by Forum Stadtpark in Austria.

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