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History |
History of the GCC
Russian Club
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Russian Club was founded in 1993, but it's history began earlier. When the "cold war" with Russia ended, Russian language education in the US declined rapidly — a 30% to 50% decrease from 1990 to 1994 (Data from survey by Johns Hopkins Hopkins's National Foreign Language Center). Also, passing foriegn language courses was no longer a requirement for getting many college degrees. While the supply of Russian language students declined, jobs for professional Russian translators increased. Since 1987, Dr Story introduced and tested some of the latest teaching techniques for her Russian classes — night, conversational, shorter, workbooks, audio and video tapes, then a club in 1993. In his 2007 book: Russian in Arizona: A History of It's Teaching, Dr. Lee B. Croft, Arizona State University, presents biographies of all Russian-language teachers in Arizona and summarizes the Club's history on pages 109-110: [Dr. Joyce Story] decided to ...
just concentrate on doing anything it
took to just "keep Russian alive".
Dr. Story has tried various approaches to keeping it alive. In 1993, Dr. Story started the College's Russian Club. She says she "wrote the constitution, got it going, and served as the faculty advisor for several years." Various other people served for years, but today the club is "defunct." While the club was operating. Dr. Story got some much appreciated help from a local Molokan descendant, Andy Conovaloff, who "created a web-page for the club which absolutely blew the socks off everybody on this campus involved in club web-pages." (Story) Even with the club no longer existing at the school, Conovaloff has maintained this now online club, which has evolved into a club called the "Global Community Russian Club, Arizona" (http://www.russianaz.org/GCCRussianClub/index.html). Dr. Story imparts that his site presents to the people of Arizona, "everything that is going on in Arizona that concerns Russian." Story commends Conovaloff for his marvelous efforts in starting the website and to this day, doing "an absolutely fantastic job of keeping everyone informed of Russian activities in the state of Arizona." (Story) The home page for his site is <www.russianaz.org/GCCRussianClub> or one can get there by simply going to <www.russianaz.org>. (This organization is "temporarily independent of the Glendale Community College" as of November, 2004) The first GCC Russian Club meetings were small — attended by 5-8 of Dr. Story's students. Meetings were held in the Student Union Council Chambers on the first Saturday of the month during regular school sessions. They held the December meetings as a Christmas party at her home. Several retired people took Dr. Story's new conversatinoal Russian class, and one, Anastasia, donated $300 to help launch the Club. This helped to fund the design and printing of a new Club logo on tee-shirts in 1996. Dr. Story served as advisor for 10 years, from 1993 to 2003. She tried to recruit other faculty or staff to help as club advisors. First David Rodriquez, a GCC Librarian, volunteered to co-advise the Club in 1998 for about 2 years. Then Dr. Story recruited recruited Lyle Walcott to replaced her in Fall 2002. This history is in-progress ... |
 The Club was organized by Dr. Joyce Story who got her Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literature from Indiana University. Between 1964 and 1990 she lived and studied in Lenningrad (1 year), Moscow (5 weeks), and Kiev, Sochi, Krasnodar and Volgograd (1 week each). She lived in Alaska for 10 years, and when she moved to Arizona began to study Spanish. In 1987 she was hired by GCC part-time to teach Russian, then full-time in 1990 to teach Russian and Spanish. She sometimes remarked that she really loved teaching Russian, but mostly taught Spanish because more students enrolled in Spanish — "How did this happen?"  Russian Club T-shirts were designed and printed in 1996 with the new logo. The Club debated logo letters and the shirt layout for months then put all variations to a vote.  David Rodriquez |
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