Tag Archives: UCLA

Family, Featured

Want to Learn Amharic? UCLA Offers Summer Classes for High School Students

Tadias Magazine
By Tadias Staff

Friday, April 13, 2012

Los Angeles (TADIAS) – Enrollment is now open for the summer UCLA language classes for high school students who speak, understand and or hear Amharic at home and want to learn to read, write and expand their listening and speaking skills.

“It is not a foreign language program and it is not a second language program,” Kathryn Paul, UCLA’s High School Heritage Executive Director, said in a promotional video. “It is specifically designed for heritage language students.” Other courses include Arabic, Armenian, Persian, and Russian.

The program targets students whose households speak primary language other than English. “Heritage students grow up learning a language at home, which is their family’s language and there are lots of heritage language speakers in Los Angeles,” Ms. Paul said. “What happens is that in Kindergarten they start learning English and pretty quickly English is the dominant language. Their [home] language proficiency is stuck at basically a four-year-old’s level.” She added: “We begun to recognize that there was a group of students that were coming to UCLA that did not fit anywhere, that they weren’t beginners or they weren’t intermediates, so we started this high school language classes to give these students an opportunity to study their family’s language and culture.”

Ms Paul noted that the program also allows the students to receive high school credit. “We have negotiated with most of the school districts that the number of hours we teach are equivalent to one year of high school credit,” she said.

The classes will be held from June 26- July 26, 2012 on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays from 9:00am- 12:30pm along with afternoon tutorials at the UCLA campus. The cost is $150.
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Learn more at www.hslanguages.ucla.edu. For general information, call : 310.825.2510 or email: hslanguages@international.ucla.edu.

Family, Featured

Amharic for High School Students – Summer 2011 at UCLA

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Am​haric Classes
By Agazit Abate

Published: Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Los Angeles – The Center for World Languages at the University of California, Los Angeles is offering Heritage and Foreign Language classes for High School students this summer 2011 – including for students who speak and/or understand Amharic at home and want to learn to read and write in Amharic or to develop their speaking and literacy skills.

The classes will be held from June 28- July 28, 2011 on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays from 9:00am- 12:30pm along with after lunch tutorials at the UCLA campus.

The languages currently being offered are Amharic, Armenian, Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Italian, Persian and Russian. The language classes are specifically designed for heritage language students. This typically means that the student heard the language at home throughout their childhood, but was educated primarily in English. In addition to our heritage language classes, the center is now offering beginning Italian and Russian for any interested high school students.

The need to produce multilingual citizens in our society is evident. The need for our heritage classes in particular arose out of the realization that there were a group of students entering university who wouldn’t fit in either a beginning or an advanced foreign language class. Our heritage languages are also less-commonly taught languages and therefore high school students often don’t have access to formal schooling in their home languages. For this reason, our classes look specifically at their needs as heritage learners and seek to help them develop literacy in their home language while they are in high school so that by the time they continue their language studies at the University level, they can place into advanced language and literature courses.
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Enrollment is now open at www.hslanguages.ucla.edu. The fee is $150 and students may earn up to one year of High School foreign language credit.

For general information, contact Agazit at (310) 825‐2510 or cwl@international.ucla.edu.

Cover Image:
Students attend Amharic language lessons run by Washington D.C.’s Ethiopian Community Center. (Photo: Tadias File)

Art, Events, Featured

LA Premiere Of Teza To Honor The Late UCLA Professor Teshome Gabriel

Above: The late Dr. Teshome H. Gabriel, a long-time Professor
at UCLA and an authority on third world & post-colonial cinema.

Tadias Magazine
By Tadias Staff

Published: Friday, September 10, 2010

New York (Tadias) – Haile Gerima’s critically acclaimed movie Teza, to be premiered in Los Angeles on Monday, September 13th, will also honor the late Teshome H. Gabriel, a long serving Professor at UCLA and a leading international figure on third world and post-colonial cinema. Dr. Teshome died suddenly from cardiac arrest on June 15, 2010. He was 70 years old.

Dr. Teshome was born in Ethiopia in 1939 and moved to the States in 1962. He began his academic career at UCLA in the early seventies. According to the university’s Newsroom: “A pioneering scholar and activist, Gabriel had taught cinema and media studies at TFT since 1974 and was closely associated with UCLA’s African Studies Center.”

“He was a brilliant, gracious, elegant and generous man,” said Teri Schwartz, Dean of UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television. “Teshome was a consummate professional and a truly beloved faculty member at TFT…he will be greatly missed by all of us.”

Dr. Teshome earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Utah and a Master’s and a Ph.D. from UCLA, where he would eventually became a tenured professor at the world-famous School of Theater, Film and Television.

He also served as the Founder and Editorial Board Member of the Amharic publication Tuwaf (Light), an Ethiopian Fine Arts Journal, from 1987 to 1991. Dr. Teshome is also the co-editor of the 1993 book Otherness and the Media: The Ethnography of the Imagined and the Imaged and most recently the author the book Third Cinema: Exploration of Nomadic Aesthetics & Narrative Communities. He is quoted as describing his work as that of an activist scholar: “What I am seeking to do, I would say, is validate the notion of the academic citizen, by which I mean an academic who has some relationship to the wider communities that surround us and which overlap with other arts and disciplines.”

Nicholas K. Browne, Vice Chair for Cinema and Media Studies was quoted by UCLA Newsroom as stating that: “Teshome’s work had three main themes. He focused on the unique styles of films made in the non-aligned nations of Latin America and Africa (the “Third World”), the issues of relating and representing ‘the other’ (that is, people not like us), and the unique situation of filmmakers and scholars who have left the countries of their birth and occupy and reflect on their marginal, in-between place in the world, a more and more common situation in a global world of the 20th and 21st centuries.”

The event – slated to be held at the Billy Wilder Theater in Westwood Village – is sponsored by UCLA Film & Television Archive and features a discussion with Director Haile Gerima following the screening. The evening’s co-hosts include filmmakers Billy Woodberry, Charles Burnett, Michie Gleason, as well as Ellias Negash – a long-time personal friend of Professor Teshome- among others.

If You Go:
The Los Angeles Premiere Screening of TEZA
in honor of the late UCLA Professor Teshome Gabriel
Discussion with Haile Gerima following the screening

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2010 7:30 pm
Billy Wilder Theater in Westwood Village
courtyard level of the Hammer Museum
10899 Wilshire Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90024

Tickets $10 at www.cinema.ucla.edu
Box office opens one hour before showtime

All proceeds from this screening will benefit
the Teshome Gabriel Memorial Scholarship Fund at
the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television

Click here for more details:

Cover Image: Dr. Teshome H. Gabriel. Photo credit – UCLA Newsroom.

Related past videos:
Watch: Haile Gerima discusses independent film making at Teza’s opening in New York City

Video: Watch the Trailer