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Welcome! My name is Nancy Aarsvold, and I'm a Norwegian Instructor at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. Originally from the state of Washington, I now live in St. Peter in the Minnesota River valley. Most days, I enjoy my commute to Northfield, mainly because I don't see many other cars, only deer and pheasants, herons and hawks. I enjoy living in Minnesota, but I do miss the nature in the Northwest, especially Mt. St. Helens, which is only 40 miles from my hometown of Battle Ground, WA and Cannon Beach, OR, where we usually spend our summer vacations with my family.
This semester, I am teaching three Norwegian language courses. If you would like to see the syllabi, relevant links, and examples of the students' work, I invite you to view the course home pages.
I am also the Faculty Supervisor for the Norwegian House and the Cole Scholarship students. The Norwegian House has seven students living in it, two native Norwegians and five American students who are studying Norwegian. They will be sponsoring several film evenings, discussion evenings, and other Norwegian social events during the year. There are four Cole Scholarship students this year, and they grade papers, and make audio and video recordings for the Norwegian Department. Margaret O'Leary and I are responsible for the Norwegian Department home page, and we are working hard to find Norwegian web sites which fit into our curriculum, create web exercises, publish our students' work on the web, and share our syllabi with other teachers of Norwegian. We have also given several workshops and presentations on the pedagogical uses of the web and multimedia here at St. Olaf and for Scandinavian organizations such as SASS and NorTANA.
I am also working on a Beginning Norwegian textbook, Norsk nå, which is currently being used at St. Olaf College, Augsburg College, and Pacific Lutheran University. I hope to be finished by the summer of 1999. In 1996, Louis Janus and I set up a listserv called NorWord, which sent out daily Norwegian lessons to over 1500 subscribers in 35 countries. The lessons ran for six months, but then we stopped due to lack of funding and time. The previous lessons can be accessed from the NorWord home page. |