Nancy Aarsvold has taught Norwegian for more than 20 years. She has a B.A. degree with majors in English and Norwegian from Pacific Lutheran University and an M.A. in Scandinavian Studies from the University of Minnesota. In 1980-81, she studied at the University of Oslo and then returned to Norway every summer for the rest of the 1980s. During that time, she attended the Oslo International Summer School twice and worked as a teacher for American students in a Norwegian summer language program in Sandane in western Norway. In more recent years, she has traveled to Norway almost every year to collect materials for her textbook project, record audio from native Norwegian speakers, and lead study tours. With specialties in curriculum development and instructional technology, Nancy has been involved in developing a variety of Norwegian language materials, including the NorWords Norwegian lessons via e-mail, the KlikkNorsk CD-ROM, an online workbook for the novel Naiv.Super by Erlend Loe, and most recently Sett i gang I: An Introductory Norwegian Curriculum (textbook / workbook / glossary). Currently Nancy is exploring the use of social software, such as weblogs, to document events and instruction in the St. Olaf Norwegian department (Hva skjer?), to create electronic student portfolios in her courses (Skriveverkstedet), and to develop online listening exercises with audio clips of Norwegian daily news (Ukas lydklipp).
This photo shows Nancy with her daughter Tina on the top of Mount Fløyen in Bergen, Norway.
