WHAT DOES 黄老师 hope to help STUDENTS learn through these projects?
WHAT DOES 黄老师 hope to help STUDENTS learn through these projects?
the goal of the critical virtual exchange initative
A key learning outcome in this world language curriculum is decentering one's assumptions about other cultures and navigating cultural differences of all kinds, which aligns with UNESCO's sustainable development goal of promoting peaceful and inclusive societies, the leading intercultural competence models (e.g., Kramsch, 2011; Byram, 2021), world language standards (ACTFL, 2017), as well as the emerging Transformative Language Learning and Teaching paradigm that encourages change in learners’ perspectives (Leaver, 2021).
As a language educator, I constantly ask myself, how can I cultivate global citizens who are able to challenge prior assumptions and promote understanding of cultures at the local scale?
Perspectives, especially stereotypes, are hard to eliminate (Borghetti, 2013) and the world language curriculum is often tied to nation-states, neglecting the diverse localized cultures, which may reinforce cultural stereotypes. For instance, a popular Chinese textbook in the US, introduces Chinese food culture by categorizing staples as being consumed in the south (rice) or the north (noodles, dumplings, Chinese steamed bread), overlooking the rich culinary practices found within different cities and towns in both regions. Such an essentialist representation of culture inadvertently reinforces stereotypes. How can my students learn about those plural local cultures and mindsets when national cultures overshadow the varied localized ones?
To address this challenge and facilitate learners at all proficiency levels to challenge assumptions, I adopted a critical approach of virtual exchange.
Virtual Exchange (VE) is a pedagogical approach which involves the engagement of groups of learners in extended periods of online intercultural interaction and collaboration with partners from other cultural contexts or geographical locations as an integrated part of their educational programmes and under the guidance of educators and/or expert facilitators (O’Dowd, 2018). The benefits of VE are the development of foreign language competence, intercultural skills, digital literacy (Helm, 2016) and prepare learners for the globalised digital workplace (Crawford, 2021). Furthermore, VE is an internationalization at home approach that copes with the inability to offer physical mobility or study abroad programs (Beelen & Jones, 2015)
Critical VE responds to the inadequacy of a monolithic formation of VE and goes beyond superficial comparisons of cultural differences within nation boundaries. The critical VE experience aims to illuminate different cultural products, practices, and perspectives at the local scale, challenging students' prior assumptions about China, and conventionalized ideologies of China as a singular nation, culture, and language.
Huang Laoshi's collaboration with Jingjing An, lecturer of English from Tianjin university of Technology has lasted for 8 terms since Fall 2020. These critical VE projects are semester-long projects ranging from 6-week summer term projects to 15-week spring/fall semester projects. In these past 8 terms, BU participants have generated about 800 hours of video zoom conversations in Chinese and English, more than 300 informal email exchanges, about 1600 reflection journal entries in Chinese and English, and about 300 digital storytelling projects in Chinese. Students from Tianjin University of Technology have generated an equal number of video conversations and about 300 reflection journals. BU course participants included Chinese college students from BU, high school students, professionals, and students beyond the Boston area. The student body from Tianjin University of Technology 天津理工大学 exhibits both the majority group (Han people 汉族) and ethnic minority groups (e.g., Uyghurs 维吾尔族, Man 满族, Gan 赣族, Yi, 彝族).
In the novice to intermediate levels （LC111-LC112OL-LC211), students participate in critical place-based VE to navigate diverse localized cultures: Students can demonstrate their intercultural and linguistic competence through pre-VE preparation (listening/reading interpretation mode of communication tasks), weekly VE online video meetings (interpersonal communication tasks based on unit goals), post-VE written reflection journals (intercultural reflection) and an end of semester multimodal storytelling project which are shared with the larger community (presentational communication).
In LC319 Chinese through intercultural communication （LC319 实用汉语：跨文化交际）, I implemented critical cultural hypothesis refinement project-based VE in LC319 to cultivate critical perspectives. Students have conducted a culture stereotype/hypothesis refinement project to obtain the learning outcomes of the course: interpreting authentic reading/listening and cultural materials, interacting with native speakers appropriately as well as explaining diversity among products, practices and how it relates to perspectives in both written and oral forms. The project begins with learners’ initial statement of stereotype/assumption about Chinese culture, followed by online research about the topic, VE meetings, and discussions with multiple Chinese native speakers, and ends with a reflection to either reject or expand original assumption and the creation of an artifact shared with the public audience.
Students in advanced level media Chinese class (LC420 新闻汉语：互联网时代的中国) engage in a critical news editing project-based VE to develop global citizenship and examine media bias. Together with their native speaking partner, through selecting, summarizing, discussing multiple reports from different sources (western and Chinese media) in both English and Chinese, students are provided with the opportunity to demonstrate global citizenship outcomes (1. identify media bias 2. compare peer opinions and challenge your assumptions) and advanced language skills (1. interpret news and authentic materials; 2. summarize, orally or in writing, news in your own words; 3. support your points of views with evidence).
the goal of the linguistic landscape fieldwork
Linguistic landscape is referred to as “the language of public road signs, advertising billboards, street names, place names, commercial shop signs, and public signs on government buildings” (Landery & Bourhis, 1997, p.23). In the Modern Language Associations’ 2007 report, it says “The language major should be structured to produce a specific outcome: educated speakers who have deep translingual and transcultural competence… One possible model defines transcultural understanding as the ability to comprehend and analyze the cultural narratives that appear in every kind of expressive form”. (Geisler, et al., 2007, P.234-245 ) This statement confirms the significance of including linguistic landscape as one of the language and transcultural learning inputs.
Linguistic landscape fieldwork is a vehicle for learners to understand the interplay between local space/place, multilingualism, translanguaging and the community members.
By having students explore the Greater Boston area’s linguistic landscape and compare it with the linguistic landscape in the communities in China, I hope to cultivate competent transcultural speakers who can interpret spatial literacy (a missing component in our current curriculum) and understand ethnic and linguistic diversity in both the city they live and the local communities in China. Multilingual learners with diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds can bring into the linguistic landscape based virtual exchange their unique funds of knowledge, and collectively construct a transformative transcultural learning space.
What is virtual exchange?