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Transnational conversations: a Web pedagogy.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

The authors discuss their experiences teaching an international distance learning class on cultural globalization that linked classrooms in the US, Singapore, and India.

Introduction

In the spring of 2002, the two authors worked with a third colleague and team-taught an interdisciplinary class on globalization and contemporary American and Asian culture. Such team-teaching is not, in and of itself, all that remarkable. What was remarkable was that the three of us taught our class simultaneously at three different schools located in three different countries: MIT (Cambridge, MA), the National University of Singapore, and the Center for the Study of Culture and Society in Bangalore, India. Many college instructors today would like to incorporate both Web technology and international perspectives into their classrooms, but are sometimes put off by the perceived difficulty of doing so. In this article we explain how we used the Web to teach this international distance learning class--and how it was easier to do than you might expect.

Our course, "Transnational US-Asian Culture," combined face-to-face interaction in the classroom with online learning. Each instructor ran a traditional discussion-based class at their home institution, in which the students read, viewed, and listened to a wide array of primary and secondary material, discussed them in a seminar-style class setting, and wrote papers and gave oral presentations. The Web-based component consisted of an online discussion forum in which three classrooms came together to exchange views on the course material.

The key to our course's success lay in the close tie between its subject matter and its use of technology. The interactions among students located in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the US complemented the pedagogical aims of a course on US-Asian cultural interaction. This integration of subject matter and technology is pedagogically critical. In an age when students and faculty often feel pushed to use technology for the sake of using technology, we wanted to make technology work for us in sensible, effective, and logical ways. Our students were committed to the discussion forum because by participating in these transnational conversations, they became part of the very phenomenon they were studying.

Putting the Course Together

When Christina Klein of MIT began planning a class on globalization, she mentioned the idea of collaborative teaching to Ashish Rajadhyaksha, a prominent scholar of Indian cinema at the Center for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS) in Bangalore, who was visiting the MIT campus. When he expressed enthusiasm for the idea, Klein sent inquiries to the National University of Singapore (NUS), where she had previously attended a conference, and to the graduate American Studies program at Doshisha University in Japan, where she had earlier delivered a lecture. Doshisha was unable to...

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