2025

Multilingual literacy experiences support educational equity by building community, respecting the legitimacy of multiple languages, and nurturing culturally diverse literacy practices. However, due to English’s dominance in U.S. public spaces, many children, including multilingual children, see, hear, and speak only English in public. In predominantly white, monolingual public spaces like New Hampshire, highlighting multilingual books requires shifts in practice that go beyond adding new books to the shelves because monolingual teachers and librarians cannot conduct read-alouds featuring non-English languages. One solution is to invite multilingual adults to perform read-alouds. However, our research has found that many multilingual adults are apprehensive about reading out loud. They express fear of public speaking, worry that their English isn’t good enough, and hesitation about conducting a read-aloud. At the same time, our research found that multilingual adults want to engage in opportunities like this to build community and make connections. This proposed project (re)positions multilingual, adult English learners as experts who can increase the uptake of linguistically diverse books in public spaces. Multilingual Book Club is a community program at the local library where children and their families celebrate culturally relevant ways of interacting with books. It is offered in partnership with UNH’s Community Literacy Center (CLC) and Dover Adult Learning Center (DALC).

On September 23, 2025, a small group of Middlebury faculty and staff saved a 1910 Jacquard power loom from the scrapheap. The loom—made by the Crompton & Knowles Company, the premiere woolen loom manufacturer in the U.S. and formerly located in Worcester, MA—had resided in the Rhode Island School of Design’s (RISD) Metcalf Building until 1999, when this much-loved machine was replaced by a new state-of-the-art computerized Jacquard loom. RISD presented the old loom as a gift to the Heritage Harbor Museum in Providence, RI, a building project that was never realized. The loom was then moved from a storage facility in Rhode Island to a barn in Marshfield, Vermont, where it lived until early September, when the owners of the barn said it had to go. To make a long, but interesting, story short: in collaboration with Justin Squizzero, the Director of the Newbury School of Weaving in Vermont, we arranged to have the 2,000-pound loom transported over the mountains and forklifted into an offsite storage facility in Middlebury, where it now resides. In the coming years, as we work to restore and study it, this Crompton & Knowles Jacquard loom will serve as the centerpiece of an expansive, interdisciplinary program that argues for and celebrates the liberal arts. Textile production has always been, by necessity, a collaborative process and it is in this spirit that we shaped the long-terms goals of The Loom Project, which are as follows: 1) to bring together an interdisciplinary group of faculty, students, and community members within Middlebury and beyond, who will teach with and learn from the loom; 2) to build an interdisciplinary weaving and textiles program at Middlebury that becomes a center for learning and community in Vermont and New England; 3) to design a learning space that houses the loom; 4) to mount faculty-student- community co-curated exhibitions centering the loom and the importance of weaving technologies for human survival and expression; 5) to design and build a textile garden to be used for teaching and community programs; 6) to make the loom operational; 7) to publish an open-access, illustrated history and user’s manual for the loom. As we work towards these goals, we will document the journey through a serial podcast and digital archive. The Loom Project will be driven by collaborations between students, faculty, practitioners, and community partners, who will together tell the story of the loom and the broader history of weaving in New England.