Meet Ben—Russian professor, University Provost & Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at Fairleigh Dickinson University (NJ)...and co-author of the upcoming ��Vlog book (due out this fall!): Compassion in Action in the World Language Curriculum

“Teaching a language means opening up our students’ hearts by helping students learn about the perspectives of people from other cultures."

The Start of a Teaching Journey

In the first month of my study of Russian, my instructor, the late and much-loved Emilia Pavlovna Hramova asked me to come into her office where she told me: “You can go as far in your study of Russian as you want.” At that moment, I began to think about changing my major—and I changed it. And then I began to think about earning my doctoral degree to become a professor of Russian. And I did that, too.

This tiny moment of encouragement from my teacher opened up for me a world of opportunity that I had never imagined. I try to be that kind of educator for the undergraduate and graduate students I work with as well as that kind of mentor for educators at earlier stages of their careers.

Career Highlight

When I was teaching advanced Russian at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, I had a course in which students watched films in Russian and then worked in pairs to retell the narrative of the film from different characters’ points of view, recording themselves and reflecting on their discourse. It turned out to be an extraordinarily powerful learning experience for my students who not only improved their Russian language skills, but observed—in their journal entries shared with me—that they were using more connecting words and phrases in their English language speech as well.

This experience helped me see clearly what so many of us say about world language learning: Studying a second or third language helps us improve our proficiency even in our native language!

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On Being an ��Vlog Member

Early in my career I participated in an OPI (Oral Proficiency Interview) Workshop. That experience changed how I heard my students speak Russian and led to changes in the way I teach. A few years later I became an OPI trainer, and that experience brought me into contact with a broader range of OPI trainers who had a huge impact on how I think about language acquisition and world language education. I am profoundly grateful to all the mentors I met through ��Vlog, and now I try to help others seeking to find their way in our field.

Moreover, as a world language educator who also serves as a provost, I use our World-Readiness Standards and Proficiency Guidelines to help faculty in other disciplines reconceptualize their curricula with an emphasis on the breadth of the dimensions of learning (World-Readiness Standards) and observed performances and products (Proficiency Guidelines).

Using Language Outside the Classroom

Between college and graduate school, I worked for two years as a translator and interpreter in Moscow. That experience provided me with opportunities to observe how native speakers use the language in many different environments, both personal and professional, both with ethnic Russian citizens of the USSR or Russian Federation as well as with citizens of the USSR or Russian Federation who are not ethnic Russians. This helped me grow not only as a speaker of Russian but also as a human being.

Now I help students use their Russian language skills to grow their information literacy and critical thinking skills both in relation to their study of Russian and Russia and, more broadly, how they understand, interpret, and evaluate the information they encounter in their personal and professional lives.

Advice for Next-Gen Teachers

There was a time in my career when I expected every one of my students to approach the study of Russian with the seriousness of intent that I had at their level of study. This is, however, not frequently the case, because before the end of my first semester of studying Russian I decided I wanted to become a professor of Russian and approached every single language learning task as something to be accomplished with nothing short of perfection.

I learned to approach my students based on their goals and aspirations, not mine. I stopped focusing primarily on errors of performance in my students’ work and started focusing instead on fostering student communicative success—which depends on intercultural understanding and intercultural citizenship—and on joy in the learning process. I encourage all my colleagues to make this transition sooner than I did!

On Teaching a Language

Teaching a language means opening up our students’ hearts by helping students learn about the perspectives of people from other cultures. For me, as a professor of Russian, especially during the Russian Federation’s war against Ukraine, this is terribly important. Most importantly, I want my students to use their language learning experience to become compassionate, respectful, and kind to people from all backgrounds.

Get inspired by even more Educator Spotlight profiles in our growing archive of member testimonials! Then explore all the resources available via ��Vlog membership.

Know an amazing ��Vlog member whose teaching journey we should feature next? We invite you to share our Educator Spotlight submission form with them.

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Benjamin Rifkin

Meet Ben—Russian professor, University Provost & Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at Fairleigh Dickinson University (NJ)...and co-author of the upcoming ����Vlog book (due out this fall!): Compassion in Action in the World Language Curriculum