Transformative Dialogues: Teaching and Learning Journal
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Podcasting as faculty development medium and method: The story of a podcast series showcasing teaching excellence in higher education
Get PDF“We are here for research but also for teaching”: Exploring the Impact of Graduate Student Teaching Assistantships on Professional Development and First-Time Teaching Experiences
Get PDFPerpetual Translation: Conveying across Cultural Contexts the Languages and Practices of Student Voice and Pedagogical Partnership
No full textIn this Personal Reflection I use the metaphor of translation to illuminate processes of linguistic and metaphorical transformation I have experienced over the course of my career and across multiple countries. My recognition of the need for such translations originated in the context of student voice work within an undergraduate secondary teacher preparation program in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States. It deepened through my embrace of pedagogical partnership work within educational development and consultation in higher education contexts around the world. The metaphor illuminates my own and my colleagues’ efforts to convey the languages and practices of student voice and pedagogical partnership across cultural contexts as we strive to support inclusive and responsive pedagogical practices. My experiences in England, Italy, and Aotearoa New Zealand serve as illustrative examples of these efforts and the processes of translation required and inspired by them. Translation captures the simultaneous suspension and engagement, the distance and proximity both necessary for and intended by the work of trying to connect across differences. It captures that way we carry what we know across linguistic and cultural divides, find new ways of naming it, and become new versions of ourselves through all these processes
Addressing Food Insecurity via a Participatory Approach to International Service-Learning: An Opportunity for Soft Skill Development
No full textTo be successful in society, today’s students need opportunities to learn through experiences and about other’s cultures and beliefs. During a study abroad program to Scotland, students from the [University] had the opportunity to work with current college students at a local university and teach primary age students about agriculture and environemental science topics. The participants in this study, were from three colleges across the university and had seven different majors. Participants were asked to complete a reflective journal each day of a seven-day long service learning study aborad trip. The participants found that the service learning study abroad program helped them learn about the Scotland culture, break down cultural stereotypes, observe growth in their peers, create lasting friendships, take new risks to push themselves outside of their comfort zone, and had a positively altered perception of the Scottish culture. The results of this study provide evidence the students wo engage in meaniful dialoge and reflection show potential to have their values and beliefs altered. This experience can have a positive impact on participants involvement and participation in social change movements once they return home. Further research needs to investigate the impact that group meals have on this development of peer relationships and the impact that has on their perceptions of culture. 
Virtual exchange between cross-cultural teams: A sustainable path to the internationalization of college courses
Get PDFConsidering that only a small percentage of students can afford the cost of study abroad programs, it is important to appreciate how collaborative projects that link classes from geographically distant places can be organized at no cost for students and institutions. The umbrella term for this type of collaborative projects is “virtual exchange.” While a certain degree of diffidence for virtual exchange initiatives is due to difficulties of integrating these projects with traditional syllabi and uncertainties on how to evaluate students who collaborate in cross-cultural virtual teams, the benefits for students have been widely documented. Among the most dynamic organizations that promote cultural exchange are the INTENT consortium (through the Unicollaboration platform at uni-collaboration.eu) and the TAPP network. These organizations have promoted the creation of projects that have helped students develop intercultural competencies, communication skills in English as a lingua franca, and digital literacy. Importantly, projects like those developed through Unicollaboration or TAPP are not hampered by red tape and bureaucracy, and represent a more sustainable path to the internationalization of a wide range of college courses. Finally, virtual exchange initiatives foster global citizenship, intercultural awareness, and cosmopolitan open-mindedness in times characterized by a resurgence of petty nationalism and particularism
Intercultural Technology-Based Collaboration: Engaging U.S. and South African Pre-Service Teachers in Virtual Research Teams to Generate Solutions to Local Environmental Issues
Get PDFIn order to inform teacher preparation practice, a social studies faculty member at the University of North Carolina Wilmington (Wilmington, NC USA) and a science education lecturer at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University (Port Elizabeth, South Africa) designed on online exchange between PSTs enrolled in their respective methods courses. Goals of this virtual online exchange included: (1) to engage students in a collaborative learning experience whereby they share personal stories, information and resources about their cultures, geographic regions, local environmental issues; 2) to reinforce students’ content knowledge and skills in the natural and social sciences in an authentic way; and (3) to model how students may implement international exchanges in their future classrooms with children. While tentative conclusions might be drawn on the effectiveness of cross-cultural collaboration to generate solutions to local environmental issues, this study suggests that other factors, such as instructional design, student motivation (intrinsic and external), online persistence, available technologies, time zone difference, and the role of instructors, need to be addressed before meaningful collaboration between class groups in different countries should be attempted
Shouldn’t We Expect More From Case-Based Learning? The Transformative Potential of Multidisciplinary Frameworks in Sustainability Education
Get PDFThe case study method is not new: cases in their real-world context have been used not only for research but also for teaching in different disciplines for many decades. Multidisciplinary collaborative teaching and learning frameworks, however, can contribute to the development of sustainability case-based education in rather innovative ways. This short paper examines more particularly the transformative potential of a co-taught course based on a range of selected case studies and whose main feature consists in involving instructors and students from various educational backgrounds and two different higher education institutions, namely : Uppsala University in Sweden and The University of Tokyo in Japan (hereafter, respectively UU and UT)
Critical friendship revisited: The complexities of graduate student advising across cultural contexts
Get PDFIn this paper, I reflect on challenges of graduate student advising across a cultural/institutional divide between a comprehensive regional university in the US and an expanding research university in Ethiopia. This is a field-based report rooted in my recent experience as a Fulbright Scholar in Ethiopia in 2015-16 and contextualized by the rapid expansion of graduate education in Ethiopia. Methodologically, I take a hybrid approach, blending autoethnographic and narrative moments with analysis based on higher education policy literature. My purpose here is to tell a small story as a window into a larger story about the expansion of higher education in Ethiopia and the epistemological tensions involved in the work of critical friendship in graduate advising across cultures. 
