This article considers the culture of learning communities for effective teaching. A learning community is defined here as an environment where learners are brought together to share information, to learn from each other, and to create new knowledge. The individual student develops her/his own learning by building on learning from others. In a learning community approach to teaching, educators can ensure that students gain workplace skills such as collaboration, creativity, critical thinking, and problem solving. In this case study, it is shown how an active learning community, introduced into a blended teaching environment (face-to-face and virtual), effectively supported international undergraduates in the building of knowledge and workplace skills.
Tag: International Students
Internationalizing General Education from Within: Raising the Visibility of Heritage Language Students’ in the Classroom
This article analyzes the findings of a pilot project conducted in 2008–2009 as a partnership between University Studies, Portland State University’s interdisciplinary general education program, and the University’s Russian Flagship Language Partner Program. The project proposes a new approach of integrating non-English speakers’ language skills, culture, and life experiences into classroom activities of general education courses. By engaging the students as facilitators in the exploration of their own cultures and languages, the project offers a model of enriching collaborative student teaching and learning that could be applied to various interdisciplinary courses.
Mentoring International Teaching Assistants: A Case Study of Improving Teaching Practices
While there exists a considerable body of research focusing on international teaching assistants’ (ITAs’) linguistic, sociocultural, and instructional challenges, less is known about the successful developmental trajectories of this group of international educators of American students. This research aims to fulfill this research gap using a case study approach (Yin, 2003). The study involved ITAs from STEM majors in six collaborative mentoring sessions prior and upon video recording of three lessons taught by the ITAs to undergraduate students. The mentoring sessions were designed to facilitate ITAs’ reflections on their teaching with the use of structured protocols to help guide the discussions. All the collected data were analyzed using content analysis (Miles & Huberman, 1994). The results highlight the incidents of professional growth exhibited by the participating ITAs during their actual teaching. This study also tracks the ITAs’ reflections on teaching through the mediational dialogues (Vygotsky, 1978) with the mentor. Finally, the paper discusses lessons learned through launching a mentoring project with a group of ITAs.
Poetic License: Using Documentary Poetry to Teach International Law Students Paraphrase Skills
In this article, I show how the study of the poems of Charles Reznikoff – a 20th century American lawyer – helps teach the critical art of paraphrase to International law students, lawyers from The Temple’s LLM Program. Scholars have acknowledged the difficulty of teaching paraphrase to students from civil law countries, acknowledging that it too often results in patchwriting or mere recitation, drained of any text-based policy analysis. Drawing on the fields of ESL, Composition, and Legal Writing, I show how the study of the poetry helps my student learn US-style legal writing. We use the poetry of Reznikoff, who, during the 20th century, wrote poems about reported cases in which race played a dominant role. The students summarize Reznikoff’s poems into prose form and reported cases into poetry. Moving from one genre to another enhances the students’ paraphrase skills, which they then apply to a modern search and seizure problem raising the issue of racial profiling. The students now demonstrate improved paraphrase skills and are more familiar with policy analysis – skills that will greatly enhance their ability to practice law. Students in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences – any field that values critical thinking and writing – will also benefit learning these skills.