Barbara Bird is a CC Professor, Italian language program coordinator at College of Southern Nevada. She possess expertise in higher education, teaching, literature, university teaching, esl and 29 more skills. Colleagues describe her as "Barbara Bird is a dedicated and highly skilled professional who likes being constantly evolving in her teaching, knowledge, and specialized field of inquiry. I can attest she is a conscientious and responsible educator. As well, Barbara adopted the MLA 2007 concerns that literature courses should be enmeshed with pedagogical scaffolds that help improve language proficiency, through project-based and experiential learning, for example. Barbara successfully defended her dissertation on Monday, January 13, 2014, titled: No “burning desire” to study Italian literature: Motivation and procedural display in a third-year Italian course. The study indicates the challenges language and literature instructors meet when some of their students chose to learn the language for the academic basic requirement rather than on the basis of their intrinsic motivation. How to motivate these kinds of students? The study addresses issues that are up-to-date and relevant to many higher education instructors. I most strongly recommend Barbara as an outstanding language teacher, with a profound perspective on what life-long learning really means. Feel free to contact me if you had any questions: ftochon@education.wisc.edu"