April 13 (R) A climate for the Internationalizing learning

Crystal LC Huang
22 hrs ·

Wanna obtain a Passport to Global Citizenship? Wanna get a piece of peaceful mind to flourish internationally? Wanna join??

Designing an International Education Curriculum/program (or "internationalized" curriculum) in the age of omnipresent social media? Once upon a time, it was one of my oldest and wildest dreams !

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16You, Crystal LC Huang, John Berg and 13 others
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Crystal LC Huang If education (I mean, the authentic type) cannot bridge the diversity among languages, symbols, values, beliefs, technologies, past-n-future of different populations, and the rest, then what else can ??
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Crystal LC Huang I have had the privilege to meticulously make much of my thinking, doing, presenting, and demonstrations embedded with internationality invisibly - or the so called "positive hidden-curriculum" :D through my teaching career for last 20 years, but never got it reified into an interdisciplinary curriculum...
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Jo Neverdahl Hayes I am interested!!
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Today's panel discussion of the Conference for the Internationalizing curriculum.

4/13 (R) 2017

Seminar Title:  “The Voice of Faculty and Staff”      
Date:  Thursday, April 13, 2017    
Time:  1: 45pm -3:00pm    
Room:  BEC 103A,  Casper Conference Center

Discussion:
The panel mediator:

Instructors across all technical college disciplines are interested in learning strategies about how to infuse global themes into their course curriculum. What are some unique experiences you had as a faculty member or community member that you can share with other WTCS faculty or staff members to help them better understand what it might mean to be globally aware?

Crystal's sharing:

Thanks for the invitation for this sharing event.
Perhaps, I can use two metaphors to share my experiences regarding how I infuse the global themes into my course curriculum. One is called the Imperfect Guinea Pig Effect and
the other one is the Hidden Treasure Island Idiosyncrasy.  
Are you curious to know?
Which one you prefer me to go first?  

Be aware, one episode is very arrogant, and one is extremely humble. 

Let me begin with the latter, the arrogant one: the Hidden Treasure Island Idiosyncrasy. For this example, in fact, I am not a good candidate to share, because, I am just damn lucky. Hope that you don’t get jealous of me, or blame me!

I am endowed with many privileges to teach courses, such as, Sociology, Diversity Studies and Art Appreciation, of which, by nature embedded with multiple global themes which may look like a Treasure Island, easily for me to hide (be aware of the following arrogant, shameless report card):
1. my cross-cultural experiences, 
2. multi-lingual strength and "non-strength",
3. multiple perspectives of the World views from my previous career
    in education, politics (almost ran my own campaign for public offices and glad,
    I did not go for that route),  journalism, and military services
    (currently, a retired Captain) outside America.
4. life philosophy: I grew up with my 9 siblings and both my parents were
     "illiterate",  who never got a basic elementary educational opportunity during
    Japan's occupation of Taiwan.
    These experiences facilitate me well in the 2-year college setting
    to resonate most of our students social-class background.
    Compared my teaching experiences of two 4-year universities to the current 2-year,
     I could empathize more of most my students'  socio-economic conditions, and
     accommodate my pedagogy accordingly.
    By the way, in my life journey, there was one stop that I served in the Military
    for 8 years due to a national crisis looming on Taiwan.
    Serving in the military and teaching Sociology and Art, sounds odd enough on the
    political-ideological spectrum, but, again, they just provide rich first-hand
    experiences to sharpen the ideological understanding. This part of journey
    also serves well to the topics such as gender learning theories and
    the relevant gender-role education, or so-called "role modeling" effect.
5. a multi/inter-disciplinary academic background: for situational (keep marketable)
    and reluctant (such as debts) reasons, Crystal ended up with 5 majors: Sociology/
    Social Psychology, Socio-political science, Art Education, Learning Technologies,
    and Military Education, and 4 minors :Computer Science, Journalism, Studio Art,
    and Women's Studies in my academic journey.
    (yaa, probably ended up with 1.5 Ph.Ds, 3 Masters, and 1.75 Bachelor degrees
     to facilitate me to teach at a tech college).
     In short, my formal-personal continuous-education and
     professional development is still on going, and going...plus the informal ones.
6. passionate personality for teaching domestic and global justice, 
7. energetic shocking pedagogy, 
9. the endless resources drawn from my Art world with multi-cultural and
    international themes in my drawings, calligraphy, paintings, ceramics, sculptures,
    and the post-modern art, integrated into the course contents.
10. multi-lingual, self-made teaching materials in poetry and songs… and so on.

(A couple days ago,  I just shared a Japanese song tied to global war fare related to global stratification in Sociology.)

These are invisible ingredients, idiosyncratically and naturally infusing in my daily teaching when interacting with students. For example, this week, the key theme of my sociology was about global stratification/inequality. It is naturally to share some of my stories as a child-laborer to tie to the notion of free-trade vs. fair-trade and Wallerstein's global economy when the 2^nd wave of globalization swept through the Four Asian Little Dragons. The story-telling is an interesting and effective way to vividly provide the first-hand experiences and opened  it for debate and discussion.

As to my diversity class, this week was about more than 50 shades of social-cultural-political ideologies (such as, racism, sexism, genderism, classism, ageism, ableism,  social Darwinism, neo-Nazism, nationalism, patriotism, many kinds of hybridism between capitalism and socialism, all sorts of Anarchism, the gradation among liberalism and conservatism...etc.) from all over the world, and each student used social media or physically interviewed people based on what they learned to make connections with individuals different from themselves and tied their learning and understanding to their future career paths. Not to mention my Art Appreciation class - there are enormously artistic creativity and events happening every minutes every second without boarders or boundaries, particularly in the fields of how artists use images to voice and critique the imminent issues and crises around the globe.  These are some examples of infusing global or international themes into my pedagogy and curriculum to raise the awareness of the current global issues and trends.

But these embedded components tend to be invisible to students. Based on student surveys, abut 1/3 of students are able to detect my hidden endeavors.

So for this invisible treasure island pedagogy, or if you like, call it as  "value-added" hidden curriculum, 3 effects might happen to students if they want to get into the treasure island:
1. their ears need to be attentive,
2. make their eyes more observant, and
3. and added it up with the curious or critical mind to delve into the contents and the instructor, because, as I mentioned that I was the first non-native-English-speaking faculty (NNESF) ever hired in 2003 after CVTC had been established since 1912 (note 1).

The 2^nd pedagogy is so called the Imperfect Guinea Pig Effect (this, reminds me of an inspiring movie titled: Front of class (2008) which depicts Brad Cohen who, despite being challenged by Tourette's Syndrome at a very young age, defies all odds to become a competent teacher). 


Thinking of Brad Cohen's case,  I  appreciate the opportunity and privilege to be adventurous in America. Facing my students, talking to local folks, watching out every bit of grammar on the daily basis, as mentioned above regarding NNESF, here I will give more details about it -  I started my A.B.C when I was in Junior high school in Taipei, taught by my Taiwanese teachers, learned as my 3rd language. So, often time, the article, prepositions, tense, gender...etc. which don't exist - necessarily, in my native language, plus enunciation, intonation, tempo, sentence structures, spelling, and a manageable, cute (not acute) accent...etc. in 7/24 fashion (yes, even in my dreams !) might keep me away from the potential Alzheimer's marauding !  Hope this part of my experiences will not scare other employers away in hiring people who have the similar conditions like mine, in particular, teaching Social Sciences that heavily rely on verbal/communicative capacity. 

The above mentioned "nice to have" linguistic endeavors probably consume more than 60% of my daily teaching energy. As to the "have to have" content delivery of my course 
works, is less complicated and much more enjoyable. Who would be skeptical that I am not endowed with tremendous privilege to be a risk-taker or a dare-devil adventurer ??

I tend to remind students today that they might not be so lucky as I because, I am hanging around with 99.9% of students, instructors and staff on the daily basis, who speak beautiful, standard Midwest English that make my job less complicated.

We understand the general missions of the 2-year colleges are to serve the regional communities. But as the rapid changing demographic trends with more diverse customers or clienteles in prospect, students need to be prepared for such trends. Our graduates will serve very much diverse customers than I am currently doing at this regional school. In the foreseeable future, these prospective customers or clienteles might think, act, believe, talk, and prefer things very much like me. So I tend to offer myself as students’ Imperfect Guinea Pig, because I am just luckily endowed with many natural uniqueness, differences, or "imperfection" in terms of diversities that they will encounter in their future career, such as the different way of expression like mine, my unique accent, my idiosyncratic type of communication, body languages, gesture, belief, in addition to the conventional race, ethnicity, gender, class, religion, nationality…etc. diversity themes embedded in me.

Perhaps, my presence per se (note 2) as a "Imperfect" Guinea Pig  in the classroom could boost students’ confidence?  99% of  my students can speak standard English which, I think, is better than I do, since English is my 3rd language as mentioned in the previous section.

My presence in the classroom also exposes students to the multiple global or diverse themes in every class session, because, they need to have the attentive ears, observant eyes, and the curious or critical mind to engage with a faculty who is totally different from themselves in every aspect of their lives, and this is a great opportunity for them to experiment multiple ways of probing and learning.

Again, I estimate that the other 1/3 of students could get it and appreciate it.

As to the last 1/3 of student population, depending on situations individually.

My conclusion is that as a minority, international faculty member, my presence and endeavors at my work setting and communities, might create a double-privilege to students and myself : my privilege to teach, and student's privilege to be taught/facilitated by me, and this can be my personal perception, or biases.

Thus, if a college has the courage to hire, there will always be educators having the courage to teach and teach will all their heart and soul with extra values added to the curriculum, to the community, to the larger society to enhance stakeholders and students’ global awareness and learning outcome. Otherwise, why they choose this tough calling with other international and multicultural qualities which are highly demanded in the international job markets.

------------------------------------

Note 1: About some unique experiences of being a non-native English speaking instructor (NNESI), as I posted on my social media, LUCKILY enough, I was the VERY FIRST NNESI hired in 2003 through a new College Dean who was from Twin Cities, Minnesota, sitting on the hiring committee. Later I realized it was quite an unusual event to hire instructors or personnel outside the school system. The conventional way for hiring is through internal familiarity or "in-bred trust".   The reason I mentioned him was that right 6 months before my 2nd try, I applied the same position but with a very different hiring committee (later I found that the old Dean had served this school for more than 25 years, and the rest of committee members had the similar seniority within the school system), and I was not offered the position, due to many known and unknown reasons. But, I did not change much during those 6 months, but the lucky star suddenly shone on me for my 2^nd attempt, which I appreciated very much.

Note 2: I had another privilege to teach at UW-Stout during 2001 to 2003. There was a time with 3 semesters in a row that I was the only minority in terms of race, age, class, faith/belief, nationality, languages in the classrooms.