It Takes a Village: A faculty development workshop on creating online assignments that promote civil justice cognitive development using intercultural understanding techniques
Submission Type
75-minute Hands-on Workshop
Abstract
In the wake of dramatically shifting political and social realities, there have been active discussions in faculty forums and at conference on ways to help students become more adept at navigating complex social and political issues. This workshop will take these ideas to the next level by giving faculty an opportunity to apply these ideas to their own online classes. We will begin by describing a grass-roots approach to promoting a culture of intercultural understanding at Shenandoah University in which an ad hoc group of staff and faculty came together to offer (both face to face and online) workshops to the campus community. This has led to a paradigm shift in the way the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology describes online learning activities for individual, cooperative, and collaborative student work when doing faculty development. While the immediate goal is for students to appreciate how identity shapes our learning and decision-making processes, we expect beneficial “side effects” that will help students develop skills and strategies to avoid polarizing issues, to find common ground, to avoid “group think,” and to make fact-based decisions. This 80 minute workshop will first describe our navigating intercultural workshops and then offer a toolkit of ideas for online activities and easy to use technologies to support intercultural understanding that may be applied broadly across the humanities and social sciences. Participants will be asked to bring assignments from their classes that might be adapted. We will then spend time working on these assignments in small online groups and then share and assess ideas.
Session
Workshop
Location
Thomas 102
Start Date
5-17-2017 1:00 PM
End Date
5-17-2017 2:20 PM
It Takes a Village: A faculty development workshop on creating online assignments that promote civil justice cognitive development using intercultural understanding techniques
Thomas 102
In the wake of dramatically shifting political and social realities, there have been active discussions in faculty forums and at conference on ways to help students become more adept at navigating complex social and political issues. This workshop will take these ideas to the next level by giving faculty an opportunity to apply these ideas to their own online classes. We will begin by describing a grass-roots approach to promoting a culture of intercultural understanding at Shenandoah University in which an ad hoc group of staff and faculty came together to offer (both face to face and online) workshops to the campus community. This has led to a paradigm shift in the way the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology describes online learning activities for individual, cooperative, and collaborative student work when doing faculty development. While the immediate goal is for students to appreciate how identity shapes our learning and decision-making processes, we expect beneficial “side effects” that will help students develop skills and strategies to avoid polarizing issues, to find common ground, to avoid “group think,” and to make fact-based decisions. This 80 minute workshop will first describe our navigating intercultural workshops and then offer a toolkit of ideas for online activities and easy to use technologies to support intercultural understanding that may be applied broadly across the humanities and social sciences. Participants will be asked to bring assignments from their classes that might be adapted. We will then spend time working on these assignments in small online groups and then share and assess ideas.