What is America? Connecting with Aurora Colorado
Today we are piloting our first cross-cultural rhetoric video-conference WITHIN the US.
Students from Aurora, Colorado are connecting with students at Stanford.
Thanks to Susan Achziger, English Composition Faculty, Community College of Aurora
The task today?
Rhetorical analysis of image of the American Flag - from diverse perspectives! Not only are there diverse nationalities at each institution, but Colorado and California have very different cultures. In addition, Aurora is a small community college and Stanford is a research one graduate university - so what can we learn from each other? How might we better understand America and its diversity?
Comments
We enjoyed our connection today. It was interesting to watch the interaction between students. One of my shy students, a man from Ethiopia, actually spoke about about one of the images. However, the sound connection on Stanford's end was not good, they said, so he was not heard very well. I tried to paraphrase for them, but it's not the same as hearing his opinion in his form of English; it is a valuable opinion, coming from an outside perspective because of his background. He was actually defending Americans more than my American students were, which I found fascinating. I'm anxious to meet with my students again on Monday and get more of a feel for how they thought it went. Thanks to Alyssa and Chris for being open to a domestic partner--as we have a lot of diversity and subcultures within our own country!
Posted by: Susan Achziger | October 14, 2009 12:23 PM