New RAILS Lessons on Kazakh History and Culture
The project team for the new RAILS lessons on Kazakh history and culture includes: Shannon Donnally Quinn, Michigan State University; and Aselle Almuratova, Karen Evans-Romaine, Lidia Gault, Gulnara Glowacki, Dianna Murphy, and Iuliia Raiklin, University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Funding the new RAILS lessons on Kazakh history and culture is through the Russian Flagship Program at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, supported by a grant from the Language Flagship of the National Security Education Program in the U.S. Department of Defense.
Original RAILS Lessons
2021-22 Updates to Original RAILS Lessons
The RAILS lessons were updated in 2021-22 by Shannon Donnally Quinn, Michigan State University, with University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate students Lidia Gault and Isabella Palange. Karen Evans-Romaine (UW-Madison), Dianna Murphy (UW-Madison), Benjamin Rifkin (Fairleigh Dickinson University), Victoria Thorstensson (Nazarbayev University), and Anna Tumarkin (UW-Madison) consulted on the updates. Updates to the RAILS lessons were supported by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Russian Flagship Program.
Original RAILS Project Team (2003-6), and their roles at the time were:
- Principal investigator: Benjamin Rifkin, formerly on the faculty of UW-Madison, now Dean of the Maxwell Becton College of Arts and Sciences, Fairleigh Dickinson. University
- Project manager: Dianna Murphy, now director of the UW-Madison Language Institute and co-director, Russian Flagship Program
- Project assistant: Shannon Donnally Quinn, now Associate Professor of Russian and Technology Specialist, Michigan State University
- Project assistant: Nina Familiant, now Lecturer in Russian University of of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
- Project assistant: Victoria Thorstensson, now Lecturer in Russian, Carleton College
- Project assistant: Daria Vassina
Original RAILS Project Advisory Board
Mark Beissinger, University of Wisconsin-Madison
David Danaher, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Fran Hirsch, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Olga Kagan, University of California-Los Angeles
Frank Miller, Columbia University
Rebecca Oxford, University of Maryland
Paul Sandrock, Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction
Elvira Swender, American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages
Additional outside reviewers
Anne Gorsuch, University of British Columbia
Manon Van de Water, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Elena Nikolaevna Shchepina, Saint Petersburg State University
We especially thank Olga Kagan for her careful review and editing of the original RAILS lessons, and the following individuals, without whose contributions the original RAILS project would not have been possible:
- Galina Aksenova, theater and film historian and critic and former Associate Director of the Middlebury College Russian School, who conducted and filmed interviews with experts and prominent public figures in Russia and the U.S.
- Marina Goldovskaya, one of the world’s most accomplished documentarians, who helped us to obtain permission to use excerpts her films Solovky Power and Children of Ivan Kuzmich in our project and shared her personal memories and experiences through two video-taped interviews and many personal conversations;
- Sergei Khruschev, Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University, for sharing personal memories about his father Nikita Khrushchev, and for providing a unique perspective on his father’s legacy.
- Alexander Prokhorov, Department of Modern Languages, College of William and Mary, who shared recollections of his grandfather, and his family’s experiences after his grandfather was interviewed for the film Solovky Power.
Films
Use of excerpts from the films Solovky Power and Children of Ivan Kuzmich in the RAILS lessons is courtesy of Goldfilms.The original RAILS project was funded by 3-year (2003-06) grant from the International Research and Studies Program, International Education Programs, Office of Postsecondary Education, U.S. Department of Education.
Technology
The original RAILS lessons were created with the Multimedia Annotator and Multimedia LessonBuilder, authoring software developed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The updated (in 2022) RAILS lessons were created with Pressbooks and H5P.