IU Foreign/Second Language Share Fair

04/06/2026

Thank you all for another successful Share Fair! Thank you to all our attendees, presenters, committee members, faculty advisors, and the CeLT support staff. And an extra special thank you to our co-chairs Sarah Kim and Melissa Lapalus for their tireless work puttnig together this event, and to our keynote speaker Dr. Jeff Holdeman for his inspiring talk and longstanding contribution to the Share Fair and language teaching community. We hope to see you again next year!

03/30/2026

As the Share Fair organizational committee is working hard this week to prepare for yet another phenomenal event, we would like to direct your attention to our keynote speaker, Dr. Jeffrey D. Holdeman, teaching professor in Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures.

As our longstanding faculty advisor, Dr. Holdeman has played a central role in guiding and sustaining Share Fair as a tradition within the IU language teaching community. He has helped maintain continuity in our organization, meticulously edited our promotional materials, provided key feedback and advice, and recruited many individuals who have gone on to chair Share Fair and take this experience and training to their career in academia. We very much look forward to bringing him out in the spotlight this year to hear his amazing insights on classroom policies that make a difference.

03/23/2026

Countdown to this year's Share Fair is starting! Join us for a lovely Friday afternoon of sharing language teaching strategies and classroom policies that help empower language learners and instructors. We have lots of fun stuff planned!

01/26/2026

Announcing the Spring 2026 rendition of the IU Foreign/Second Share Fair!

Proposals accepted NOW!

Follow the QR code or go to https://iu.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_3mUY6yDTJxCFClM to apply to present!

Any graduate student or FLTA who teaches or has taught a foreign language at IU is welcome to apply.

Have questions or wish to volunteer for our committee? Please visit https://shfair.indiana.edu/ or email us at [email protected].

10/20/2025

Screenshot from our semester's FIRST meeting of the Share Fair Organizing Committee last Friday! Interested in helping but unable to make this meeting? Please contact [email protected]! We are always welcome to new volunteers!

10/14/2025

Just a reminder that this initiative is still ongoing and is spearheaded by Share Fair's former co-chair Jane Gilbert (who has taught for IUHPFL many times as well)!

Advocating to bring back IU's beloved high school study abroad program.

10/10/2025

It's that time of year again! Time to get the gears going in preparing for the next Share Fair! If you are a language-teaching graduate student or FLTA here at IU, please consider joining the Share Fair Organizational Committee. You can commit as much as or as little as you would like. If you are interested, please fill our your time availabilities here: https://www.when2meet.com/?32903884-cb2XA

If you have additional questions or concerns, please contact our co-chairs Sarah Kim ([email protected]) or Melissa Lapalus ([email protected]). We look forward to hearing from and working with you!

09/25/2025

The Share Fair Organizational Committee is thrilled to announce our new co-chairs, Sarah Kim and Melissa Lapalus.

Sarah is a PhD. student in Second Language Studies. She first joined our committee during the 2024-2025 academic year, where her assiduous work on our communications team quickly proved transformative to what had historically been our committee's weakest link. Her stated vision as co-chair is to let broader audience know about the event and try to get presenters from less commonly represented languages and cultures.

Melissa is a Ph.D. student in Literacy, Culture, and Language Education. She first joined our committee during the 2021-2022 academic year, while she was pursuing her Master's in French Instruction. Melissa has been a part of Share Fair three times as co-organizer and twice as presenter, and her exemplary dedication and initiative have been integral to our event's excellence in years past. Her stated vision as co-chair is to grow our community of language instructors and continue to build a great relationship between all instructors.

Please join us in giving a warm welcome to Sarah and Melissa. Stay tuned for additional updates on how YOU can get involved!

09/06/2025

Hello again, fellow language enthusiasts! The number of shares that we received for our last post (regarding the initiative to save IUHPFL) was phenomenal! It gives us hope that as a community, we still care deeply about the future of language education. It gives us hope that we care enough to do our part to preserve our legacy of excellence. This is why we would like to draw your attention to another, broader, initiative, to save the languages at IU, initiated by a faculty member in the IU Department of French and Italian.

https://rb.gy/vb0cur

*IU's language programs are unique.
*IU's language programs are valued.
*IU's language programs are vibrant.

The very fact that Share Fair and our close collaborator the Center for Language Technology (CeLT) exist is testimony to this fact. Without IU's phenomenal language programs, many of us would not be here today. For many of us language students and teachers, the opportunities given to us here at IU were things that we could have only dreamed of. IU alone was able to make them a reality.

The number of language majors and minors we offer, the events offered to language learners, the professional development opportunities for language instructors, the student-faculty bonds in the language learning community, and the existence of special programs like the Summer Language Workshop, language flagship programs, and IUHPFL—these are things unseen in the vast majority of university campuses today, and they are what make IU's language programs stand out among others of its type.

If you, too, care about the future of IU's language programs, please sign (if you have not already done so) and share with your circle of language enthusiasts and language supporters, or even just any friend or family member who cares to see IU maintain its excellence. IU thrives on its language programs, and there is so much that we stand to lose.

08/28/2025

Hi everyone! We hope you're having a wonderful first week back! The Share Fair team is in the middle of reorganizing in preparation for the new academic year. In the mean time, we would like to direct your attention to an initiative spearheaded by one of our former co-chairs (who is also a four-time IUHPFL instructor and associate instructor/course coordinator in the Department of French & Italian) to bring back IUHPFL.

IUHPFL (IU Honors Program in Foreign Languages) is a high school language immersion program that has been a longstanding tradition among the foreign language community at Indiana University and in Indiana at large. In its 60+ years of existence, it has transformed the experiences of high school students, given invaluable professional development opportunities to Indiana University language instructors, and forged a vibrant and diverse community of language students and instructors. Many IUHPFL alums go on to major in languages and pursue careers in international studies, cultural studies, and translation and interpretation. Many even become language instructors in their own right. They cite IUHPFL as an integral and formative part of their career, that has opened their eyes to the full spectrum of what it means to be human, through the lens of language.

If you, too, care to maintain this program, please fill out the survey below or in the QR code and express what IUHFPL means to you. Note that you do NOT have to be an IUHPFL alum or instructor to fill it out, just someone invested in the fate of language instruction and our language-learning community.

https://forms.gle/vgVCDv2EKfd5P9UB9

Want to do even more to help the fate of the language learning community? Please also consider signing the petition below (separate from the IUHPFL survey) to save the languages at IU, initiated by a faculty member from the Department of French & Italian.

https://rb.gy/vb0cur

Many thanks to those who have already expressed their support for these initiatives, to those who have helped spread the word, and to our friends and colleagues in the IU Department of French and Italian for their immense and noteworthy dedication to language instruction.