Insights into Teaching and Learning Featured Articles
Fall 2016 In this issue: Bystander Intervention: Establishing a Community of Responsibility Engaging the Learning Adult Putting Students in Charge: Adapting the “Reacting to the Past� Pedagogy to Existing TCU Courses
Nada Elias-Lambert
Bystander Intervention: Establishing a Community of Responsibility
Marla McGhee
Engaging the Learning Adult
Sarah Robbins
Fostering Global Learning at Home: Facilitating Course-based Intercultural Experiences
Creating Community and Engagement in an Online Environment Fostering Global Learning at Home: Facilitating Course-based Intercultural Experiences
Bystander Intervention: Establishing a Community of Responsibility Nada Elias-Lambert
Department of Social Work
In 1996, Jane Tompkins called for a more comprehensive view of education saying, “We are educators of whole human beings.� Given the rise of campus sexual assault and national legislation about sexual violence prevention and intervention on college campuses, her statement has never been truer. TCU faculty members interact with students on a daily (even hourly!) basis, and as a result are in a position to recognize, discourage, and prevent a culture that enables sexual violence. As a TCU faculty member, social worker, and activist in the sexual violence prevention movement, I think it is critical for faculty to understand the role they can play in helping prevent sexual violence on campus. TCU is moving forward with initiatives to raise awareness about sexual violence on campus as well as to educate the campus community about what role each person can play in changing the current cultural norms that enable sexual violence to continue. One of those initiatives is the Bystander Activation Committee, which is comprised of Student Affairs staff, faculty, and students. The purpose of this committee is to develop, implement, and evaluate a campus-wide bystander prevention initiative at TCU, which will include faculty, staff, and student workshops. The way that bystander interventions work most effectively is to have all members of the community sharing the same message and taking responsibility to prevent and intervene to stop
risky behaviors. It is imperative that faculty work alongside students and staff to help change our current culture that enables sexual violence. Bystanders are individuals who observe violence or witness the conditions that perpetuate violence. They are not directly involved but have the choice to intervene, speak up, or do something about it. They are someone who is present and thus potentially in a position to discourage, prevent, or interrupt an incident. Bystander intervention programs are evidence-based and teach potential witnesses safe and positive ways they can act to intervene and/or prevent risky behaviors. Bystander intervention is the act of feeling empowered and equipped with the knowledge and skills to effectively assist in the prevention of risky behaviors. Bystander education programs teach potential witnesses safe and positive ways they can act to intervene and/or prevent risky behaviors.
Bystander Intervention Training Wednesday, September 14, 2016 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM Smith Hall, Room 104A
Thursday, October 27, 2016 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM Rees-Jones Hall, Room 107
In this session led by Social Work faculty member, Nada Elias-Lambert, faculty will learn the concept of bystander interventions to prevent sexual violence, learn about TCU’s campus-wide sexual violence prevention initiatives, and discuss and practice bystander intervention skills that can be especially helpful when interacting with students in the classroom and beyond.
Register for a workshop.
Bystander Intervention and Sexual Violence Prevention The bystander approach focuses on men and women as bystanders to change social norms in a peer culture that supports abusive behaviors. This approach gives community members specific roles they can use in preventing sexual violence and other risky behaviors, including stopping situations that could lead to sexual violence before it happens, stepping in during an incident, and speaking out against ideas and behaviors that support sexual violence. It also gives individuals the skills to be an effective and supportive ally to survivors after an assault has taken place. Bystander intervention can be something as small as a individual telling his/her friend that his/her sexist language is offensive or as great as a faculty member believing, listening, and supporting a college student who discloses he/she has been sexually assaulted. Regardless of the level of intervention, there are safe ways to help prevent sexual violence on campus. Bystander intervention programs help people recognize healthy and unhealthy behaviors that could potentially lead to sexual violence and how they could effectively intervene before the negative behavior escalates. Bystander intervention can play a significant role in a comprehensive approach to sexual violence prevention. It differs from previous approaches in three key ways: 1. Bystander intervention discourages victim blaming and makes sexual violence a community problem rather than an individual problem. 2. Bystander intervention can play a significant role in a comprehensive approach to sexual violence prevention. When bystanders are approached as allies in ending sexual violence, rather than as potential perpetrators or victims, they are less likely to become defensive.
3. Bystander intervention plays a role in helping to change social and community norms. Bystanders are more likely to engage in pro-social behavior when they are aware that there is a problem and they see themselves as a responsible party in solving the problem. This theory is demonstrated by the situational model, developed by Latane and Darley (1970), which is the most commonly used bystander intervention model. The model outlines the following five steps: 1. Recognize signs that an act of sexual violence may occur or is occurring. 2. Identify that the potential victim is at risk and that intervention is appropriate. 3. Decide whether or not to take responsibility to intervene. 4. Decide the most appropriate and safest way to intervene. 5. Implement the decision to intervene safely to diffuse the situation.
Bystander intervention works at multiple levels of the Social-Ecological Model depicted on the previous page. The Social-Ecological Model addresses the multifaceted interaction between individual, relationship, community, and societal factors that influence all perpetrators, victims and bystanders of sexual violence. Bystander intervention campaigns focus on shifting the social norm to create active bystanders. Steps that organizations can take to change social norms include encouraging help-seeking behaviors among bystanders, adopting policies to encourage bystander engagement, and providing positive feedback to bystanders who effectively intervene to prevent sexual violence. Albert Einstein best articulates the idea behind bystander interventions saying, “The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.” Works Cited Latane, B. & Darley, J. M. (1970). The unresponsive bystander: Why doesn’t he help? New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Engaging the Learning Adult Marla McGhee
College of Education Koehler Center Fellow for Student Engagement
As my Koehler Center Fellowship for Student Engagement draws to a close, I have spent a great deal of time pondering the past two years and considering what I’ve learned along the way. The fellowship afforded me a range of rich experiences: reading from a variety of sources, visiting special purpose schools and classrooms, and facilitating robust conversations among colleagues and peers. As I’ve probed what engages students, what grabs and holds their attention, and what ignites their passion for learning, I keep coming back to the enduring characteristics of adult learning. Andragogy, a theory popularized by Knowles, offers four primary tenets of adult learning (Glickman 51): • Adults have a psychological need for selfdirection;
Fall Faculty Open Labs Mondays - Thursdays from 3:00 PM - 5:00 PM No registration required. Koehler Faculty Lab, Winton-Scott 108
Go to the Faculty Open Lab page for more information.
• Adults bring experience/s that should be accessed in the learning situation; • Adults’ readiness to learn is shaped by a need to solve real-life problems; • Adults want to immediately apply their knowledge. For me, andragogy is particularly germane given that I teach at the graduate level where most of our students
come to the academic setting a bit older and with more lived experiences than our more youthful TCU undergraduates. Perhaps one of the best examples of andragogy-in-action in our program occurs during the final semester of the educational leadership master’s degree plan when students take a course in action research. Action research (AR) is a method that can bring about change in a classroom, work site, or institution. The course provides opportunities to study the theoretical implications of this method while engaging in its practical application. Students learn to distinguish AR from other forms of research, to design an AR proposal, and carry out components by targeting an authentic problem of practice from their world of work. Recent focus areas explored by students include studying student engagement in the intermediate grades, increasing student body participation in rigorous high school courses, studying classroom uses of formative assessments, implementing a restorative justice approach to behavior management, gauging the impact of a Bring Your Own Device initiative, exploring and improving teacher attitudes about students with disabilities, decreasing incidents of student misbehavior, and improving mathematics performance for 3rd and 4th grade students. A comprehensive AR proposal includes an introduction and context description with a rationale for the study, a problem statement or set of research questions, preliminary data to crystallize the root issue and establish a baseline, a review of literature related to the area or areas of study, and, of course, a detailed plan of action, including an evaluation of the action steps—actually quite an undertaking for a single semester. As I watched and listened to students make their presentations in our final class, I marveled at their depth of knowledge and the confidence they displayed about the professional literature informing their work. Multiple
Koehler Event with Michael Wesch: Teaching Upside Down & The Quest for the Perfect Syllabus Three years ago, in the midst of a teaching funk, an anthropology professor decided to use the tools of anthropology to figure out why his class was no longer connecting as deeply and how he could revitalize his teaching. Since then he has been taking his lunches with students and listening to their life stories. He has even done anthropological fieldwork at frat parties, college bars, and midnight life-philosophy discussions on the rooftops of campus. From these studies, he has come to understand that students want more from their college experience than just the tools to make a living. They also want the wisdom to craft a life worth living. How can we craft our courses to speak to this? When we prepare to teach a class, we often spend a great deal of time deciding what we are going to teach, and sometimes how to teach it, but we spend less time contemplating the “big why” of our course, and perhaps even less time considering who our students are and who we want them to become. In this talk, we flip those questions upside down. We will come to understand our students more deeply, revisit our own best learning moments, and use these insights to craft a syllabus that is more than just curated content and speaks to the depth and dynamics of the journey our students are on.
Friday, September 23, 2016 from 11:30 AM - 1:00 PM Kelly Alumni & Visitor Center, Room Cox A Go to the Koehler Events website for more information and to register.
forms of preliminary data, presented in detailed tables and graphs, painted authentic pictures of the targeted needs to be addressed. Action plans were specific, multi-phased, and linked to the literature; they engaged others in the collaborative process of improvement. The enthusiasm in the room was palpable. Students eagerly shared their work, because it was, in fact, their work—action research projects rooted in issues that truly mattered to them. And while my objective was for students to learn action research, they did so while probing their own personal and professional experiences with realtime, meaningful topics. Moreover, their well-crafted plans will provide them opportunities to apply their learning by implementing interventions and strategies designed to ameliorate their selected problems of practice. As I wrap up this study of learner engagement, I sincerely believe—more strongly than ever—that if we craft pedagogy and plan curriculum in ways that tap students’ experiences and interests, and enable our students to envision pathways for applying their learning, we can spark a level of engaged participation that makes them true partners in the teaching/learning process. Works Cited Glickman, Carl D., Stephen P. Gordon, and Jovita M. Ross-Gordon. Supervision and Instructional Leadership: A Developmental Approach. Boston: Pearson, 2014. Print.
Putting Students in Charge: Adapting the “Reacting to the Past” Pedagogy to Existing TCU Courses Mark Dennis
Department of Religion
Scott G. Williams
Department of Modern Languages
This article offers reflections on our experiences with Reacting to the Past (RTTP), an engaging role-playing pedagogy developed by Mark Carnes, Professor of History at Barnard College. RTTP games ask students to immerse themselves in the past as they learn about Ming Dynasty China or Indian Independence, about Athenian democracy or the trial of Galileo. Dennis has been using the China (Confucianism and the Succession Crisis of the Wanli Emperor, 1587) and India (Defining a Nation: India on the Eve of Independence, 1945) games in his World Religions and other courses since 2008, while Williams started using the Athens game (The Threshold of Democracy: Athens in 403 B.C.) after attending a 2013 Koehler Center workshop led by Dennis and Larry Carver (UT-Austin, English). Dennis used abbreviated versions of the China and India games in the spring 2016 semester of his Honors section of World Religions, ending with an extended discussion of Indian independence on August 15, 1947. And just as Williams uses RTTP to help his students look deeply into the time of Socrates, Dennis uses the study of Indian independence to help students understand its aftermath, considering the November 2008 Mumbai attacks and the rise of Hindu fundamentalism in India, among other topical issues.
For a fuller discussion of Dennis’s experience with RTTP, see “Reflections on ‘Reacting to the Past’ in the Classroom,” in the Koehler Center’s Insights into Teaching and Learning (Spring 2013). For his treatment of the legacy of Indian independence, see his “Integrative Pedagogy: A Case Study of the Lasting Legacy of India’s Partition,” in Education About Asia. Williams used the Athens game in an Honors Cultural Visions course titled “The Afterlife of the Classical Greek Tradition after 1945.” In the course, students compare how English and German language cultures rewrite the same shared tradition. The premise of the RTTP game is as follows: Athens had lost the war with Sparta. Sparta abolished the democracy and sponsored a brutal regime of Athenian oligarchs called the “Thirty Tyrants.” A civil uprising ensued; democracy was restored. Each student drew the name of an Athenian and played that role for the duration of the game. In the assembly, students determined what to do with the overthrown “tyrants” and their sympathizers, how extensive to make the democracy, and so on. In its full form, the Athens game could take the whole semester. In this course, it took seven Tuesday/Thursday classes. Williams supplemented the RTTP course book with his own materials, while eliminating several readings from the previous semester’s syllabus; he also replaced a term paper with the Athens game written assignments. Those assignments included students discussing the difficulties of playing the role of an ancient Greek and considering how their own worldview affected that process. Students also wrote a response paper to an article that compared ancient and modern democracy. Student responses have been overwhelmingly positive. In a follow-up discussion, one student wrote, “The Reacting Game was my favorite part of the class and I think it would
Applying Principles of Gamification to your Face-to-Face Class Monday, October 31, 2016 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM Rees-Jones Hall, Room 351 This workshop will address the principle motivators derived from Gamification as it applies to a higher education faceto-face setting. We will discuss various player types you can expect to see in your students and how their specific motivations can be used in the creation of course activities and assignments to promote engagement. Participants will walk away with strategies that can be applied to activities and assignments that will encourage student participation and buy-in.
Register for this workshop. be great to integrate it into other courses as well.” Another wrote: “I really enjoyed that part of the course and I hope as many students as possible have the opportunity to participate in it!” Even after the course was over, they were still enthusiastic about it. Students found the role playing instrumental. One student wrote: “My character’s perspective became something I understood as fact, not something I made up. I learned about the different perspectives on Athenian democracy, both from faction members of the time as well as from my classmates’ modern ideas.” Another student wrote: “Over the course of the game I have found that it is hard to keep my modern day opinions and the opinions of the character separate.” Students also contemplated ancient and modern concepts of democracy. One student wrote: “After completing this exercise, I have a new appreciation
for how a government works and how complicated it is to have a group of individuals agree on one topic. I really enjoyed the whole process of it and gained deeper understanding for the inner workings of Athenian Democracy.” Students had to determine how far to take the idea of democracy and the Athenian ideas of equality and liberty. The assembly discussions were civil but also sometimes raucous. One student addressed the difficulty of social movement: If I’ve learned one thing throughout this game, I’ve learned that it is extremely difficult to establish a government. It seems that each day, we struggle to make any progress because everyone is so stuck in their beliefs and does not allow for compromise. I can only imagine how the founding fathers of America felt when they sat down and tried to make the first constitution of America. This game was also really interesting because even though we were debating about Athenian democracy, I could draw parallels to America as well. Throughout the course, students constantly grappled with how the Classical tradition influences modern cultures as well as how modern cultures shape and rewrite that
tradition in their own image. In playing the roles of others, whether from ancient Athens or China, or from modern India, students journey back into the past to learn about the present, including reflecting on their own deeply held beliefs.
Creating Community and Engagement in an Online Environment Tracey Rockett
Department of Management, Entrepreneurship, and Leadership Koehler Center Fellow for Distance Education
Getting students to connect in the digital space can be a challenge for faculty teaching entirely online as well as for those who are using online tools to supplement traditional classroom teaching. Most students expect that
Join us this fall for Teaching and Learning Conversations: Stacy Grau on September 20: Design Thinking for (Pedagogical) Innovation Jill Havens on October 4: Managing Time In and Out of the Classroom Trung Nguyen and Lindsay Knight on October 25: Teaching & Technology for Students Who Know It All Jean Marie Brown on November 16: Strengths-Based Group Work
Read about the fall topics and Register on our workshop page. Koehler Center Teaching and Learning conversations are delivered by TCU faculty to help enrich the TCU teaching community.
there will be some interaction online, but getting them to truly engage with and learn from the material that we provide online can be difficult. There are some proven ways, however, to stimulate engagement and create a vibrant online community. One critical point to remember is that engagement feeds on reciprocation—if you want engaged students you have to be engaged. So here are a few ways to get students involved in the online educational experience: Connect early and connect often. Norms for engagement are set early, so if you want for students to feel connected to the community and participate, you have to start the process with maximum engagement on your end. I strongly suggest that you respond to each of the students in the first week of using an online assignment. Every time that you respond to their work online, you are reaffirming that you are paying attention and you value their contributions. I also suggest that you continue to connect throughout the semester. While you don’t have to connect at the same rate you did at the beginning, you should still check in regularly to continue to reinforce the sense of community. Provide clear, detailed guidelines for expectations. If online engagement is low, it is often because expectations are unclear. I strongly suggest that you provide very detailed rules for what you expect from students online. For example, I have a list of precise rules for participation on the discussion board that includes information specifying the minimum and maximum length of posts, what constitutes a quality post, and how many posts they need per week, as well as information on what not to post (i.e. trolling not allowed).
Make things as interactive as possible. Students often say that they don’t participate in online activities because they feel like the task is boring or that little attention is being paid to what they are submitting. You can fix both of these issues by creating a more interactive environment. In this case I am talking about interactivity not with the tool but with the professor and one another. You can have students comment on the work of others on many platforms, from the university LMS discussion board to tools like Twitter or Blogger. You can bring interesting examples that students post/tweet about online back to the class discussion. You can even have students take what you did in the classroom to the tool you are using online— such as having students create an infographic about what you discussed in class that day. The more you blend these things together, the more likely students are to immerse themselves fully in the community. Find tools that have a low start-up cost. There are thousands of neat tools being used in education. I have tried many myself and have a few tips about what you should choose. First, I suggest using tools that are free. Second, I suggest that you pick tools that are easy to use so that students don’t get discouraged by the process of learning how to use the tool. A tool that is difficult to learn can quickly kill engagement. Third, even easy to use tools require some investment in learning if they are new to students, so I suggest you point out the benefits of learning such a tool. For example, students use tools that will be valuable in their career or for use in other classes. If you are looking for the tools that many students already use frequently and won’t require a learning curve, you can check out Twitter, Instagram, iTunesU, Pinterest, YouTube, and Vimeo.
Gamification is a great way to step it up. If you are ready to create a more immersive experience, you might want to try gamification. Gamification is using components of gaming (such as rewards and leveling up) to engage and motivate students to achieve educational goals. Gamification can be as simple as giving students points for responses to other students’ posts or for completing online quizzes. Gamification has been so successful in creating engagement and enhancing
TCU Online (Brightspace by D2L), our new Learning Management System will be live for all classes starting January for the spring 2017 semester!
Training
We have lots of training opportunities this fall. • Workshop schedule • Online Videos and Documentation
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learning that many companies, such as Best Buy, Cisco, and Google, are using gamification for training and development. If you’re looking for a good starting point, I’ve listed some of my favorite tools for creating engagement and community below. Twitter: Twitter is easy to use and students can respond to one another. The nature of tweets (limited to 140 characters) frees up time to interact that used to be spent on individual work. Twitter is quick and easy to master and allows you to disseminate information as well as create opportunities for students to interact. TED Ed: You can build a community around TED talks (and other videos) that you pick. You create a lesson and pick the things you want to students to do—they can answer questions (multiple choice and open-ended), discuss the content, and provide links to their own materials. Piktochart: Piktochart is a resource for creating infographics online. The learning curve is a little steeper than for many tools, but I have found that students like to use this in other classes later because they enjoy it so much. Pinterest: Pinterest is great for students who are creating visual material or creating collections. It allows for interaction by liking or commenting on work. Kahoot: While this tool was originally created for K-12 education, it is rapidly being adopted by college professors because of its ease of use and fun interface. It combines gamification and teamwork into one neat tool. If you think that your students are too advanced to benefit from playing a Kahoot game, you can challenge them to create a Kahoot game and have them judge one another.
Fostering Global Learning at Home: Facilitating Course-based Intercultural Experiences Sarah Robbins
Department of English Koehler Center Fellow for Global Citizenship Contributing authors: Rima Abunasser, Amber Esping, Hanan Hammad, Darren Middleton, and Juan Carlos Sola-Corbacho
“Global Learning” often conjures up images of students’ on-site explorations in “foreign” spaces through summer travel or full semesters abroad. Certainly such learning pathways can be productive ones. But my participation in TCU’s Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) of Discovering Global Citizenship has helped me see that some of the most powerful opportunities for facilitating global learning occur through our campus-anchored classrooms. In this, my final report as a Koehler fellow, therefore, I want to shine a spotlight on the work several colleagues have been doing to center their courses in intercultural experiences. This survey of practices will focus on ways of bringing others’ expertise into our classrooms while encouraging students to step outside their cultural comfort zones through research and experiential learning. Darren Middleton’s spring semester offering of “Rastafari and Reggae in Global Contexts” provides a compelling example of his commitment to globalized teaching. One component of the class involved visitors from Jamaica: Barbara Makeda Blake Hannah, a filmmaker, journalist,
and broadcaster, and her musician son Makonnen Blake Hannah. Darren secured support for the Hannahs’ visit from both the QEP Visiting Scholars program and the Honors College Green Chair, which enabled Barbara to serve as this year’s Honors Convocation speaker. Barbara’s convocation talk drew rave reviews, but the students in Darren’s class had a more intensive chance to interact with her. Notes Darren: students were able to put a face … on one of the twenty-first century’s most vibrant, durable and globalized new religious movements. Students discovered that while it is one thing to read about Rastafari from a book and/or to listen to reggae on Spotify, it is quite another thing to engage as well as encounter its revolutionary ethos (spiritually, politically, culturally) in the flesh. The impact of this in-person connection carried over into end-of-course projects, which enabled class members to learn by doing and sharing their own research. As Darren recalls, Students . . . finished their semester with five sessions devoted to “Global Reggae Projects,” where each group of three students researched and outlined (for the class as a whole) how reggae music has traveled the world (UK, Canada, Senegal, Japan, Brazil) and been translated into local words and
Faculty Focus Lunch:
Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Thursday, October 20, 2016 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM Kelly Alumni & Visitor Center, Room Cox C An ongoing Koehler Center initiative is to connect with faculty members across campus; we like to hear about the things you’re doing in your departments, your classes, and your research in SoTL. Getting to know you and your work, as a TCU faculty member, can help us offer the best teaching and development support possible. We’re hosting a lunch with faculty members across campus, and we invite you to join us. Our lunch invitation is limited to a focused number of guests, which will help ensure a comfortable conversation between colleagues. There’s nothing for you to prepare—please just join us to share a meal and some of your thoughts about the scholarship of teaching and learning at TCU.
Register for this lunch.
sounds, which articulate the specific spiritualities and particular politics of fresh cultural contexts. Research has also played a key role in globally-oriented courses taught by 2015-16 Honors Teacher of the Year Juan Carlos Sola-Corbacho. His students are encouraged to hone their researching skills as a way of building knowledge about cultures beyond the US. Reflecting on his lowerdivision offering of an Honors “Cultural Contact Zones” class, Juan Carlos describes how the syllabus took class
members on cross-cultural journeys through scaffolded research experiences: This semester [spring 2016] we took a very long trip in “only” 16 weeks. . . .We began in Belize, where we learnt not only about its history, political system, social structure or difficult economic situation, but also about the famous Belize Carnival, or the Great Blue Hole (largest underwater sinkhole in the world)…. The rest of the semester we continued our trip learning about wonderful places we need to preserve (Galapagos Island in Ecuador or Machu Piccu in Peru), historical characters we need to remember (Fidel Castro, Eva Peron or Alejaidinho), amazing traditions (Fiesta Nacional de Zapote -Costa Rica-, Dia de la Tradicion -Argentina-) or even good recipes to try at home such as “green fig and salt fish” (national dish of Saint Lucia) or “anafres” (traditional Honduran appetizer). Juan Carlos also devoted a good deal of energy to developing a partnership course for fall 2016—one that will connect students at TCU with peers at the University of Debrecen (in Debrecen, Hungary) and tap into one of the recurring strategies that TCU’s QEP initiative has promoted: creating “virtual voyages.” Networking with the QEP’s Discovering Global Citizenship programming also brought global learning dividends to teaching by Rima Abunasser. Invited by QEP committee member James English to link up with a special initiative involving journalist Michael McRay’s study of international reconciliation projects, Rima connected an Honors section of her Global Women’s Literature course to his travels to sites of longstanding cross-cultural conflict that have been working to develop strategies for supporting reconciliation. Rima carefully crafted a syllabus that would
allow her students to go along virtually on McRay’s activist research journey that, she reports, included his interviewing of “peacemakers, activists, former combatants, and politicians in three locations -- Northern Ireland, Palestine, and South Africa.” For maximum learning impact, Rima explains: I modified my existing reading list to include literature from each of the regions he would visit, and I did extensive research on transitional justice and reconciliation.…I requested that [Michael] also film some B-roll footage (walking around, scenery, crowd shots, etc.) and designed the students’ major assignment around the ideas of narrative building and perspective. In small groups, the students were required to edit and produce short documentaries of Michael’s travels. The goal of this assignment was to illustrate how, even with the same raw material, each group would come up with its own narrative, its own perspective on justice, conflict, and reconciliation. Michael was able to Skype in to our classes a few times during the semester. In November, McRay visited the TCU campus, joining Rima’s students in documentary editing workshops and classroom conversations. Two of the student documentaries were screened in a public event that provided a capstone for the course. While the idea of cross-cultural networking tends to connote a voyage out, College of Education professor
Amber Esping encouraged students to look inward through a capstone project for her pilot Honors colloquium on “Resilience.” Blending a commitment to metacognition with an exploration of cross-cultural aesthetics, Amber’s students each spent part of class time for three weeks creating art work grounded in the Japanese practice of Kintsugi. This “art of broken pieces” is an ancient method of using powder and strong resin to repair pottery. Amber explains: In the resulting piece, the damage is not hidden. Rather, the damage is illuminated, honoring the history of the object. Using the urushi resins makes the repaired areas stronger—and arguably more beautiful—than the original undamaged object. This is an ancient, tangible metaphor for the concepts of resilience the students have been learning about throughout the semester, serving as an enduring keepsake to remind them of their own and others’ capacity for resilience. Kintsugi is a painstaking process popular in Japan, but in United States culture we are more liable to throw out a broken dish, or if we do fix it we want the repair to be fast and invisible. Below, see Amber’s students’ public display of their art works:
Learning about yourself by interacting with others from a different cultural background was also a major theme of Hanan Hammad’s spring 2016 Honors course. Her class addressed the same general learning outcomes as SolaCorbacho’s course on the Americas, but her course content focused on a different region—one tied to her research in Middle Eastern studies and her own personal identity. Professor Hammad moved students from studying the history and politics behind current conflicts in Syria and Iraq to interaction with local immigrants from those regions in Fort Worth. Working in pairs, students were assigned to a family who had agreed to serve as mentors for cross-cultural learning; meeting with refugees in their homes, Hanan’s students also made themselves available to assist with some of the complex challenges faced by newcomers, such as navigating public school expectations for immigrant children. In presentations of their learning during the final week of the class, students emphasized a shift in their own identities and socio-historical awareness through their exploration of global issues in a local context. Significantly, when asked to offer advice to other faculty members who might be open to “globalizing” their teaching, Professor Middleton issued an invitation that could have been based directly on the content of his colleague Professor Hammad’s course: Besides underlining the importance of crafting syllabi that stimulate mental migration to different parts of our world, I would say this: The D/FW Metroplex is one of the most culturally diverse areas in our nation, which entails that the world is on our doorstep. Dare to be creative. Think of the many communities beyond the classroom. And then find fresh ways to connect experiential learning to the many resources that live and move around us.
In Darren’s call, set in the context of the rich array of pedagogical initiatives described throughout this report, we can trace the outlines of a shared vision for intercultural education. While each of these talented teacher-scholars embraced a unique approach for promoting global learning, they also drew on a shared aspiration for global learning consistent with TCU’s core values, vision. As the Honors College and the larger university travel forth into new arenas of action represented by exciting endeavors like the new medical school, let’s all still continue to affirm the value of this equally important dimension of our work as educators for the twenty-first century.
TCU Online Power Half-Hour Workshops The Power Half-Hour workshops will prepare TCU faculty to use our new Learning Management System, TCU Online. These workshops will be held throughout October December in Winton-Scott Hall, Room 108, unless noted as a Webinar. Registration is required.
Topics include: • • • • • • • •
Gradebook Adding Modules and Content Using the Attendance Tool Using the HTML Editor Tool Setting up the Assignments Tool Creating Quiz Questions and Quizzes Setting up Discussions Using the Calendar and Announcements
Read about the Power Half-Hour topics and Register on our workshop page.