In a recent meeting for DePaul’s ongoing series of GLE (Global Learning Experience), professor of Italian Caterina Farina Mongiat suggested facilitators of GLE might gain valuable insights from the field of intercultural communication to prepare for coordinating cross-cultural interactions between student cohorts.
Though conceptualizing what to apply from an entire scholarly field is difficult to do when also planning the logistics and curriculum for a GLE course, we can try to start somewhere with an accessible application. As a student of TESOL studies and now intercultural communication at the Illinois Institute of Technology, I have started by looking at W. Barnett Pearce’s (2005) initial work on the coordinated management of meaning (CMM). The context for Pearce’s work, though now dated, parallels our present challenges in engaging meaningful intercultural discussions, even within an academic space: global nation-state relations, misunderstandings of the cultural and social other, conflicting faith-based and cultural values, among the many complexities that cannot all be accounted for here.
Emails, I get emails. Lots of them. Most of which are requests from faculty for help with their courses in D2L, and most of those are about courses that were designed in the absence of—or refusal of—input from an instructional designer (someone, shall we say, like yours truly). And most of the issues for which those emails plead help could be easily avoided by following some simple guidelines. So, in the spirit of making life simpler and less stressful for everyone involved with online, hybrid, or web-enhanced courses, I offer some suggestions:
Sidewalk cut-ins. Elevators. Buttons that open doors. If you’ve ever been out and about in a wheelchair, used a dolly to move furniture, or pushed a baby stroller, you know to look for and use these things. But the fact is these innovations are relatively recent and were not mandated until the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) became law in 1990.
I’ve recently gotten into a “maker” mindset, becoming more and more interested in the concept of makerspaces, hackerspaces, and generally improving my ability to make, repair, or upcycle the things I use on a daily basis. Besides using my wife’s broken laptop charge port as a big impetus to learn to solder, or installing various Linux distributions on various old computers or single board computers I have, I’ve been spending time watching YouTube channels of various makers or Linux podcasts. One thing I’ve noticed is that the video production of these channels is often very good, even when they seem like shoestring productions.
In today’s colleges and universities there is an emphasis on developing students with critical thinking skills. This soft skill is less about memorizing a path and more about being able to adapt and apply knowledge in new situations. If this is true, why then do we continue to teach in ways that don’t allow students to explore? How have we gotten to a place where our students seem to be less and less comfortable in ambiguous situations?
After students watch an online lecture, what do they know? What do they think they know? How do you know what they know?
Like any mom of teens, I am trying to pull my 13-year-old son away from his game console and get him to try something that I think would benefit him for his growth—something like reading!