Suchergebnisse

As long as one lives within the confines of a single culture it is difficult to achieve cross-cultural awareness. Multiculturalism is often simply the tolerance of a dominant culture for minority cultures. Cross-cultural awareness is a state of mind in which one is alert to alternity, the existence of others possessing different & equally valid worldviews & ways of life. This can be acquired living within or alongside other cultures, when one's own & others' strangeness become readily apparent. Culture shock involves just such a realization. The challenge for the teacher of international relations is to convey the possibility of alternity to students in the classroom. After all, international relations are above all about the interaction between communities possessing separate identities & autonomous wills. The article discusses ways of cultivating cross-cultural awareness, comparing the difficulties of doing so in a society under siege -- Israel -- with the greater scope available in the cosmopolitan setting of an elite American university. 17 References. Adapted from the source document.

ABSTRACT
Human rights, ethnic conflict, democratization, colonialism, and development—many upper-level political science courses contain content that is understood differently across cultural contexts. Equipping students to appreciate diverse perspectives on these issues is a challenge that requires creative pedagogical strategies, regardless of whether all students come from the same region of the United States or the class has more than half international students. Professors in both environments have the complex task of guiding students to navigate disparate viewpoints. This article demonstrates the pedagogical potential of an integrated approach to student-led class modules based on a two-semester experiment using a Global Politics of Human Rights course at a small liberal arts college with a large population of international students. One section of the same course was taught in each semester with identical course material but with two different sets of student participants. After situating the challenges and the strategy within the growing literature on active learning, the article provides basic details of the pedagogical approach and three examples of the modules. It concludes with methods for assessing the effectiveness of student-led class modules.

Abstract
Speaking a foreign language implies more than knowing its vocabulary and grammar. As such, teachers of foreign languages should keep this in mind and consider also other aspects than the ones mentioned. Attention should be paid to pragmatics and cultural issues, among others. The present essay aims to highlight the importance of raising foreign language students' awareness of national and international linguistic and cultural behaviours. It describes briefly the field of cross-cultural pragmatics, focusing on speech acts and their culture-sensitive features. Then, it turns to one of the most important types of speech acts, namely compliment exchanges. Taking into consideration the key role played in cross-cultural communication by the appropriateness of compliments and their expected answers, the article proposes several activities to do in class in order to (1) raise students' awareness regarding the importance of compliments for successful communication, (2) present them the usual patterns, topics, and cultural particularities of compliments, (3) familiarise students with possible communication threats, and (4) provide them with possible strategies to answer compliments. The activities are not restricted to students of foreign languages in general but are recommended also to those studying specialised subjects in foreign languages, such as communication, translation and interpreting.

Introduction to the Teaching Across Borders Issue

This paper introduces a method of doing and teaching East Asian philosophy transculturally. The method underlies a pedagogy that has proven successful with students from diverse international backgrounds studying primarily in English, which suggests its potential for the wider scholarly community. The method centres on the practice, or gongfu, of doing philosophy with classical Chinese texts. The gongfu approach emphasizes the skill of interpreting and analysing texts within the context of the traditional works themselves. We have found that this skills-based approach to analysis bears much philosophical fruit. It does so, moreover, without subordinating the texts, their ideas, and their arguments to other more academically predominant frameworks. Or in more positive terms, it allows and encourages students to critically philosophize with the early Confucian and Daoist texts on their own terms, and to then creatively bring those unique insights and perspectives to bear on contemporary life. This paper first introduces the gongfu approach to doing and teaching Chinese philosophy and its distinctive characteristics. It then contextualizes the value of this method through critically examining the nature of Chinese philosophy and how we can do Chinese philosophy in English. (How Chinese is it, and in what ways?) Throughout I offer short case studies from our program. I conclude by highlighting its promise as a mode (or valuable component) of transcultural philosophizing and briefly reflect on some reservations one might have.