World Cinema: Intercultural Teaching in the
Global Lounge
By Brynn Sun
Flipped classroom session “World Cinema” has been covering different movies representing different cultures and it is happening right in FJU. Because of COVID-19, UNESCO points out that the closure of schools is impacting 60% of the world’s student population. There are almost 200 countries that closed schools, depriving 1.5 billion people of the education . Most instructors now teach online, and Flipped Learning Review points out that the increase of international interest in flipped learning has reached a new high in June 2020.
In a flipped classroom, certain materials or tasks will be given to students before courses begin to meet face-to-face and they are asked to complete them independently. This fall, flipped learning in the English Department comprised a total of four sessions at Global Lounge on Thursday nights. Each session, there were two instructors from the Intercultural & Flipped Foreign Language Classroom MA course, teaching foreign students and local students on campus about intercultural communication via several films representing different countries including Coco (Mexico), Measuring the World (Germany), Spirited Away (Japan), and Mean Girls (America). Two instructors from two different sessions, Joy for Coco and Candice for Measuring the World, describe the flipped lessons.
In a flipped classroom, certain materials or tasks will be given to students before courses begin to meet face-to-face and they are asked to complete them independently. This fall, flipped learning in the English Department comprised a total of four sessions at Global Lounge on Thursday nights. Each session, there were two instructors from the Intercultural & Flipped Foreign Language Classroom MA course, teaching foreign students and local students on campus about intercultural communication via several films representing different countries including Coco (Mexico), Measuring the World (Germany), Spirited Away (Japan), and Mean Girls (America). Two instructors from two different sessions, Joy for Coco and Candice for Measuring the World, describe the flipped lessons.
World Cinema Coco Session in the Global Lounge, photograph by Brynn Sun
Flipped learning has its advantages and disadvantages. Students in Taiwan are not used to sharing their opinions openly. Moreover, the instructors both believe that they need to provide more time for pupils to discuss and engage, and they were quite nervous since they didn’t know how the students would react. Nevertheless, the sessions both had positive feedback on the AR game.
Organizing materials and making sure students understand challenging texts in order to provoke brainstorming and raise questions, making good use of technology to design resources that engage pupils and showcase different cultures, and establishing expectations in order to let students know what they must accomplish so that they can go through a more comfortable process of learning since they have clear instructions, are the challenges and benefits of flipped learning. Flipped classrooms are nowadays no doubt a new generation of pedagogy that changes the sage on the stage to the guide by the side.
Organizing materials and making sure students understand challenging texts in order to provoke brainstorming and raise questions, making good use of technology to design resources that engage pupils and showcase different cultures, and establishing expectations in order to let students know what they must accomplish so that they can go through a more comfortable process of learning since they have clear instructions, are the challenges and benefits of flipped learning. Flipped classrooms are nowadays no doubt a new generation of pedagogy that changes the sage on the stage to the guide by the side.
Instructor from Spirited Away giving lecture to students, photographed by Joy Wang
How would you describe the students who participated in your course?
C: Students are actually quite conservative; they are extremely shy when it comes to expressing their own opinions.
J: We had some international students joining the discussion and they made the whole activity interesting. We discussed some different perspectives towards life and death in different cultures, and everyone was willing to search for the related ideas. That was what we expected. If only we had more time to discuss or develop a more focused lesson, we would have seen a more active and effective discussion.
How did you design the activities so that students would participate?
C: I designed many discussion sessions and an AR game to encourage them to express themselves and also to start brainstorming about “cross-culture”. The content of the AR game actually reviews the plot of Measuring the World, and fortunately, it attracted students’ interest!
J: The objective of the lesson was to let the students understand more about the festival, and to reflect on our cultures. Thus, we reserved some time for students to discuss in groups and asked them to share their opinions. To be honest, we forced them to engage in the activities. Besides the traditional teaching material and activities, we used multimedia and integrated them into our lesson. For example, we used Pear Deck, an interactive add-on tool in Google slide, and asked students to take out their phones to answer our questions. We got positive feedback about other multimedia used in the lesson, the AR game designed by students of other courses. Students were excited to explore the world in that AR game.
Were there any obstacles you encountered during the session?
C: I don’t really know how to distinguish whether the students like the activity or not since they are too shy.
J: It took me too much time to prepare for the activities, and I was exhausted. Everything was new to me, and as the first session of World Cinema, I had no idea how the activity should be. Looking back on it, my lesson plan has room for improvement. It could be more student-oriented and discussion-based. We wanted to cover many themes, so it took away students' discussion time. Despite this point, the event was a great experience for me.
C: Students are actually quite conservative; they are extremely shy when it comes to expressing their own opinions.
J: We had some international students joining the discussion and they made the whole activity interesting. We discussed some different perspectives towards life and death in different cultures, and everyone was willing to search for the related ideas. That was what we expected. If only we had more time to discuss or develop a more focused lesson, we would have seen a more active and effective discussion.
How did you design the activities so that students would participate?
C: I designed many discussion sessions and an AR game to encourage them to express themselves and also to start brainstorming about “cross-culture”. The content of the AR game actually reviews the plot of Measuring the World, and fortunately, it attracted students’ interest!
J: The objective of the lesson was to let the students understand more about the festival, and to reflect on our cultures. Thus, we reserved some time for students to discuss in groups and asked them to share their opinions. To be honest, we forced them to engage in the activities. Besides the traditional teaching material and activities, we used multimedia and integrated them into our lesson. For example, we used Pear Deck, an interactive add-on tool in Google slide, and asked students to take out their phones to answer our questions. We got positive feedback about other multimedia used in the lesson, the AR game designed by students of other courses. Students were excited to explore the world in that AR game.
Were there any obstacles you encountered during the session?
C: I don’t really know how to distinguish whether the students like the activity or not since they are too shy.
J: It took me too much time to prepare for the activities, and I was exhausted. Everything was new to me, and as the first session of World Cinema, I had no idea how the activity should be. Looking back on it, my lesson plan has room for improvement. It could be more student-oriented and discussion-based. We wanted to cover many themes, so it took away students' discussion time. Despite this point, the event was a great experience for me.