Cross-Cultural Collaboration
Students in my class Power, Space and Pleasure are currently working on their Paper 3 assignment. There's some more info as well as context on this assignment below.
But first I want to thank Alyssa and Christine for this wonderful opportunity to collaborate. I am very excited that the students taking my National University of Singapore (NUS) class are getting the opportunity to post their ideas for papers to the Stanford Cross-Cultural Rhetoric blog.
In particular, I am looking forward to two things: the comments NUS students will post on their overseas peers' thoughts, and the comments Stanford and Örebro students will be posting on NUS students' ideas. This will give participants the chance to interact with other people taking writing classes, in other parts of the world, and in diverse institutional settings. Though I am pretty sure we share many fundamental rhetorical and other principles, it is certain that differences will emerge.
This shouldn't be surprising, given that we speak different languages when we speak about writing. Thus NUS students use terms such as 'motive' and 'stitching' with which Stanford or Örebro students may not be familiar, at least not as regards what NUS students and instructors mean by these terms. Similarly, NUS students may not be very, or even at all, familiar with terms such as 'ethos,' 'pathos,' and 'logos.' Broader cultural differences will also come into play. Though Singapore is culturally quite diverse, and NUS has many international students from South-East Asia and further afield, further diversity can only be a good thing.
The paper assignment on which students are currently working asks them to write an eight to ten page essay in which they "close read any THREE OR MORE texts in order to present an argument on any topic that concerns space as it relates to power and/or pleasure." The NUS students, all of whom are freshmen, are right now brainstorming ideas with classmates in small collaborative blogging groups. Each of these groups (there are nine groups of 2-3 students, altogether 24 students spread across two sections) is busy preparing a collaborative post due on the CCR blog by Friday November 2, 5 pm Singapore / Hong Kong / Beijing time (that's 2 am Friday morning Pacific Daylight Time!). Once they've posted to the blog, students will over the next week or so be reading as well as commenting on the collaborative posts by their NUS peers, as well as posts by Stanford and eventually Örebro students. And Stanford / Örebro students will be reading and commenting as well. This should provide a marvelous opportunity for various cross-cultural exchanges!
As will be apparent from the description of the Paper 3 assignment, its emphasis is very much on close reading, analysis, and argumentation. Students write three papers for this class, and the particular paper on which they're working at the moment is the final one. In the first paper, students were asked to construct an argument that works analytically with a single source. This semester, writers could focus on either an interview with Michel Foucault entitled "The Eye of Power" or an extract from Zygmunt Bauman's Globalization: The Human Consequences that offers a critique of Foucault's thoughts on the Panopticon. In the second paper, students were asked to relate two sources from the syllabus to each other. They might either critically use concepts from one source to help illuminate another (we call this 'lensing'), or they could write a paper that compares and contrasts two sources and seeks to illuminate the relation between them. Writers could use either or both sources they'd already been working with, and / or further sources discussed after the first paper, e.g. The Truman Show, George Orwell's 1984, a film version of it, and so on.
The final paper, the one on which they're currently working, asks students to engage with three or more sources, so this builds on what was expected in the previous assignments. Students may be working closely with some of the sources I've mentioned, while others may focus on texts from Singapore (films, a play, academic essays) that we've been discussing recently. Others may end up working mostly with sources from outside the syllabus. But all of them will make use of at least two sources from the syllabus, a requirement imposed in order to encourage critical reflection on issues discussed thus far in the class.
I believe that the students in my class are looking forward to this cross-cultural collaboration a lot, and so am I. We do hope that this will lead to further projects and future cooperation.
Comments
Hi Johan!
Welcome to the CCR blog! We are so much looking forward to this collaboration. In Orebro we will start our CCR class on 12 November and then have our last classes on 14 and 16 January, in which our students will present their research papers about rhetoric and cross-cultural communication. It will be a great opportutnity for our students to have this possibility to collaborate with your students during the course. Also, if you would like to have a marratech connection with Orebro some time during the course that would be very interesting. Perhaps students could present to each other their ideas on what they are going to write about? And get some feedback on that.. Some time in December? 17th for example? Let´s keep in touch! So much looking forward to our cross-cultural rehtorical collaboration!
All the best
/Eva
Posted by: Eva Magnusson | October 31, 2007 03:14 AM
Hi, I am a student at Stanford, and I found this post very informative! It was great to hear about specific cultural differences like the difference in vocabulary. I don't know what "stiching" is, and hopefully by the end of this project we will become more familiar with the language and rhetoric of eachother. I also think it would be fun and beneficial to hold video conferences with students from your school and the school in Sweden. I look forward to more collaboration between our universities!
Posted by: Stephen Scheele | November 5, 2007 10:45 AM
Hi Johan!
I'm thrilled to see how the students have responded to each other through this cross-cultural rhetoric blog forum. And yes, Eva, I hope the Swedish students will look at this blog once they start class on Nov 12!
Snaps to Steve for commenting here about the whole process. Yes, it would be ideal to bring together students from all three countries -- Steve, we will try to make this happen!
In the meantime, here at Stanford, we've learned so much about different approaches to writing/rhetoric/research at both Orebro and National University of Singapore -- and now, in these blog posts, we are seeing how students communicate "in their own language" as the posts move forward into dialogue.
I'm so glad to be part of this
Alyssa
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