Final Quarter Synthesis Report
Winter quarter is going to be ended! Retrospective from the past ten weeks, we have run nine cross-cultural rhetoric workshops and discussed wide topics ranging from gender issues-the distortion of beauty, economic depression-reflection from the movie of The Take, and political and religious ideologies. Various instructional materials such as international advertisements, paintings, political cartoons, and video clips are well-presented as well.
During these workshops, Stanford students claim that they enjoy listening to very insightful, eloquently-stated opinions about Swedish culture and its interactions with American culture. Although American culture has long been considered an indubitable force in propagating trends across the world, these trends aren't necessarily welcomed with open arms and they still need knowledge to understand a very specific facet of Swedish culture such as janta, which is quite different from the quotidian hustle and bustle of American life. This experience has taught Stanford students to break out of the "American" mindset, especially when regarding rhetoric of different cultures. On the other side, Orebro students state that language barrier is one of the biggest obstacles to launch global communication project. Although they had been worried about their communication skills, with more practices, they are now feeling more confident and comfortable to speak English with native speakers.
In addition to pleasantly recording students’ progress, instructors have also gained new perspectives of running workshops. In order to promote students’ engagement in these activities, we adopt an experimental approach, that is, splitting students into smaller groups, so that most of the groups can work in pairs. However, this change brings to another problem: we need more rooms for groups. We initially placed a couple of groups in the basement and the rest on the first and forth floors. But we found out that with limited IT experts, students in the basement could not get immediate assistance while facing technical difficulties, because most experts were stationed on either first or fourth floor. Then, we decided to move the basement groups to work in open spaces on the first floor. It seemed to work better, but these students, on the other hand, were interfered by other noises. For example, people walk-by would give them curious looks and even a stranger came to pull out their cable for some reason without knowing that they were having a class. This unsolved problem still needed us to tackle in the future.
Furthermore, we understand time constrain in each workshop, so we post the lesson plan and video instruction online in advance, so that students would be able to look into them and come to class with preparation. Some changes have been made on lesson plans as well. We highlight the given time for each activity and condense the contents into one or two pages. Simpler and more elegant the texts are, easier and more enjoyable students will read and follow. Another breakthrough is to deliver Marratech operation skills to students. At the beginning, IT people had to run back and forth to help students switch rooms. Since many groups were waiting, they did not have time to explain the procedures to students. Then, on the middle stage, with better space employment, they could come to each group and demonstrate every step to students, but still students did not have a chance to practice Marratech. Finally, in the seventh workshop, we provided students the manuscript and enabled them to try out themselves. All these reforms are in the hope to lead students to indulge in class activities and be surrounded with a better learning environment.
We are looking forward to see how spring workshops will be going. We believe that all these previous lessons will enable us to get a better understanding of technology incorporation into classrooms and hopefully be a pioneer to propaganda a global communication project with Marratech to the world.