The New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC) is seeking bilingual volunteers to offer legal aid to low-income new immigrants. They are looking for volunteers who are fluent in Spanish, Farsi, Dari, Bangla, Arabic, Korean, or Mandarin. This provides a valuable opportunity for students interested in pursuing legal careers (but note that this volunteer position is unpaid). The volunteer program is scheduled from September 2032 to June 2024. See below for more information. Here is the link to the application form: https://www.tfaforms.com/5078012.
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Prof. Luis Guzmán Valerio has published a translation of the essay ““Ritual in Body and Word: Poetry Written by Afro-Colombian Women” by Angélica Hoyos Guzmán in the latest issue of Latin American Literature Today. Congratulations, Prof. Valerio.

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With five other sister CUNY institutions and the New York City-based Kennedy Children’s Center (https://www.kenchild.org), the Education Program at LaGuardia Community College received a $200,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Education to develop courses in early childhood special education (ECSE). The partnership, which will be led by Borough of Manhattan Community College, will include Bronx Community College, Kingsborough Community College, Hostos Community College and LaGuardia Community College and aims to increase the number of teachers who are certified to teach early childhood special education classes.

The ECSE associate-degree programs that the community colleges will develop include provisions that allow students to transfer, without losing any credits, to a bachelor’s degree program at Brooklyn College, which prepares early childhood teachers to work with students with disabilities. The partnership also will provide a career pathway for teacher assistants and paraprofessionals currently working in the field, helping to address a critical shortage of ECSE teachers, as well as a scarcity of male teachers in the field.

For more information, contact Prof. Michele De Goeas-Malone, Program Director of Education Program at LaGuardia Community College, at mmalone@lagcc.cuny.edu / 718-482-6050.

Men Teach is a program Mayor de Blasio created to recruit minority male teachers to teach in the city’s public schools. While males of color make up 43% of students in the city’s public schools, only 8.3% of the city’s teachers are Black, Latino or Asian.

To help increase the diversity of the city’s public school teaching force, the city is providing financial and academic support to students who are interested in becoming teachers.

To be accepted into the Men Teach program applicants should have completed 12 credits towards an associate’s degree with reasonable GPAs.

The application link is https://nycmenteach.formstack.com/forms/nycmt_application_fall_2023. The application deadline is Friday, September 15th, 2023.

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The NYS Unified Court System offers an intensive 20-hour internship program to bilingual students in Fall 2023. Interested students must be proficient in the English language as well as a second language, and interested in pursuing or exploring a career as a court interpreter. During the internship, students will learn about court interpreter ethics, the three modes of interpreting, the structure of the courts, different case types and lessons from a day in the life of a court interpreter.

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LaGuardia’s Adult and Continuing Education is offering a non-credit course on legal interpreter course in Fall 2023. This course is an outcome of several years of collaboration between LaGuardia’s Modern Languages Program and the NYS Courts System, with which some of the CUNY campuses ran the court interpreter internship program in the past few years.

This legal interpreter course is designed to prepare students for the NYS Court Interpreter examination (https://ww2.nycourts.gov/COURTINTERPRETER/ExamInformation.shtml). Candidates who passed this exam will be eligible for available staff interpreter positions within the New York State Registry of Per Diem Court Interpreters and can provide interpreting services, on an as-needed, freelance basis. Per diem court interpreters are paid $220 for a half-day (up to four hours) or $385 for a full day.

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For those who are interested in pursuing an academic career (e.g., teaching at college or university) in Linguistics. CUNY Graduate Center is hosting an open house for its Linguistics Program on Thursday, October 19, 2023.

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