CATESOL Los Padres 2020 Vision Conference

John Robertson

We invited UCSB’s own Dr. Jan Frodesen, director of the English for Multilingual Students (EMS) program, to be the plenary speaker. After a distinguished career as a leader in many aspects of ESL instruction, Jan will be retiring at the end of the current school year. Jan chose one of her many areas of expertise, Content-Based Instruction (CBI), to create a presentation suited to address the needs of all our local ESL programs, from IEPs to continuing education to college and university instruction. She showed the group many lesson and activity possibilities to be explored with our ESL students in the world of CBI. Jan was honored to be the featured speaker of a CATESOL event, since she has been so supportive of the organization over the years.
 
All presenters of our break-out sessions reported enthusiastically about their workshops, which were well-attended and much-appreciated. Overall attendance for the conference was 73, which included four publishers and two program reps, each of whom set up a table to promote their products. Manning the Outreach and Technical Assistance Network (OTAN) table was our own peripatetic and indefatigable CATESOL president, Susan Gaer, who lives close enough to consider Los Padres her local chapter.
 
Now that the Los Padres chapter has successfully navigated the UCSB venue, catering, and parking systems and knows it can be done, we have the UCSB option on our radar for future events.