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The Elements of Great Teaching

Counteracting Global Ignorance with Synchronous Online Learning

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Bringing web-based technology into the world religions classroom is often destructive. It’s wrong because the web technologies easily foster the worst kinds of tendencies that erode what is good about general education. The adoption of the web into religious studies teaching must adapt the technology towards properly-considered competencies for general education. I will propose and justify one means of doing just that.

Intercultural Competency

How does the world religions course serve general education? One way is to promote intercultural competencies. Learning about the religious lives of people from around the world can establish students’ abilities to face differences at-home and abroad in a manner that is considered, viagra reflexive and constructive.

Courses in literature, pharmacy fine arts, social sciences and philosophy can do likewise, but religious studies exposes students to dynamics that potentially engage all them. Intercultural competency is something more than appreciation, however. Intercultural competency requires the demonstrated ability to acknowledge difference, reflect upon the form of that acknowledgment, and then act in relation to both.

One Click and They’re Gone

Think of most web-based technologies. Are they synchronous or asynchronous? In other words, do they involve interactions with others in real-time, or do they function largely without real-time interaction? Blogs like this one, Facebook and Twitter are asynchronous. So too is a Learning Management System (LMS) like Blackboard Learn or Moodle.

Despite a capacity to function nearly in real-time, they are at best like stop-motion claymation or a child’s flip-book: a series of formed changes against a set background. All continuity in such cases depends upon the user’s continued input, such as clicking on the next hashtag, graphic, icon or blog byline.

One click and they’re gone. The intercultural stakes are high when the web makes otherness and difference matters of convenience. Asynchronous web-based technologies destroy intercultural competencies. No different from ordinary commercial Web 2.0 interfaces, they render students as end-users who can choose to stop or ignore through simple gestures and clicks. Placed in teaching environments without strategic consideration of what competencies they promote, online teaching at best promotes intercultural passivity and at worst promotes global ignorance.

Global Ignorance

Global ignorance, based on Thèrése Laferriére’s research (2005, 191), is threefold:

  1. Ignorance of cultural diversity.
  2. Ignorance of collaborative skills.
  3. Ignorance that an idea or thing can be improved.

Using the web to teach world religions means encouraging students to surf across the web’s vast media for ‘interesting examples’ barely redresses the first of these. Merely knowing difference is ‘out there’ is inadequate for learning how to engage others who differ from oneself. Accomplishing all three requires awareness of being encountered by others. Student mobility traditionally did this, but at great cost. I propose that real-time, web-based synchronous interactions part of the alternative.

Synchronous Interactions

Bringing individuals and even entire rooms of people into real-time contact with students is a means of scaling-up intercultural exposure. Such interactions, perhaps via Skype or videoconferencing equipment, cannot be so easily ‘clicked off.’ This isn’t LMS stop motion. It’s engagement by a face or faces who can see the students seeing them.

My students have real-time web-based synchronous experiences with classrooms and researchers on other continents. The technology is adequate to have individuals call each other by name, and call out others’ prejudices, misapprehensions and disagreements. Preparing a lesson plan with the other teacher or guest enables pedagogically-rich active learning. Someone in Mozambique can guide students through a think-pair-share activity with my students in Montreal, or, I can team with a teacher in Moscow to conduct a real-time debate with our classes. Religious issues are among the pre-eminent pathways for students to experience actual, and sometimes intractable, cultural differences.

A Lived Situation

These students do not interact with infinitely reproducible, streamed media packets that aesthetize and trivialize difference. Videoconferencing is much different than stumbling through images, sound files and web-pages. My pedagogically-strategic deployment of the web compels students to face a lived situation that I structure for them to develop their intercultural competencies:

  1.  Experience and understand cultural diversity.
  2. Actively engage collaborative skills amid cultural difference.
  3. Find ways to improve things and ideas amid cultural difference.

This is a one-time, real experience whose singularity is gone once the link is turned off. The development of intercultural competencies requires real and tangible engagements with people who are different from oneself. This is most likely to happen in real-time, and it happens often with religious issues. Such adoptions of the web into religious studies teaching adapt educational technologies toward competencies for general education

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Nathan R.B. Loewen is currently a visiting scholar at the University of Alabama’s Center for Instructional Technology, and he is a professor in the departments of humanities and religious studies at Vanier College in Montreal, Quebec. Nathan also manages the Virtual Team-Teaching Network, which connects culturally and geographically separated classrooms for real-time learning experiences. His research on teaching seeks to adopt and adapt web-based technologies to help teachers enact pedagogies of active learning, universal design, and internationalization. As a scholar of religious studies, Nathan’s publications focus on globalizing discourses within the philosophy of religion and analyzing the intersection of religious studies and development studies.

About Nathan Loewen

Comments

  1. Brooke Lester says

    Nathan, you’ve had quite a positive experience with synchronous global interaction. My own school has some ideas about creating, in some courses, activity units that are created and accomplished in collaboration with partner schools outside the U.S., so I read your post with interest.

    Have you had any good experiences with asynchronous learning, or mainly negative? I wonder if asynchronous engagement can provide opportunity for some students, after having “acknowledged difference,” to “reflect upon the form of that acknowledgment,” before going on to “then act in relation to both.” That is, “one click and they’re gone…to integrate the difference they’ve experienced and reflect on it substantively.”

    It’s encouraging to see that some of the challenges of synchronicity (e.g., time zones, requirement of broadband and equipment at each end) can be dealt with in order for students to have the kinds of perception-changing learning experience you describe! (Goes off to look over Elementary Hebrew syllabus and calculate time zones…)

     

  2. nathan loewen says

    Thanks, Brooke, for your insightful question. The structuring of the synchronous learning experience I described can and should have asynchronous components. I plan to write more about this. In brief, collaborations with your partner or resource person can create deeper learning by having students prepare for and/or reflect upon their global learning interaction. For these purposes, a more user-manageable and yet closed/secure LMS like Moodle, Prezi or GoogleDocs is more useful than a platform like Facebook. Moodle particularly makes possible invitation-only participation by persons beyond your class in easily-marked formative activities such as forums, wiki building, sharing sounds or images and reviewing each other’s work. All of this additional interaction is usually asynchronous. However, I would strongly suggest mixing the use of Web 2.0 tools into your synchronous lesson plan. I see great value in observing – as well as evaluating – students who talk to distant peers or a resource persons, and then experience their new colleague’s interactions on a forum, wandering around a Prezi, or typing on a shared GoogleDoc. Since this happens in class the students do not click away.

    As for your mention of logistics, well, this is a whole other blog post! I really hope to share the workflow I developed in order to support a ‘smooth’ global learning experience. Thanks!