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Category: Cross Cultural Issues

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Scholar 2.0

  By admin February 20, 2022 February 20, 2022 Critical Pedagogy, Cross Cultural Issues

I write, or rather add, this post to share an argument that I wanted to make for a decade and finally did at the international conference “Entangled Englishes in Translocal Spaces,” organized by University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh, Center for Language Studies and the Department of English and Humanities in October 2021.

In the presentation, I covered:
1) how do we counter the global hegemony of English? and, (for the purpose of)
2) how do we make knowledge valuable for society?

Here is a video of it on YouTube.

And below is the text form—


Continue reading

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Expats and Experts [Republica Repost]

  By admin June 3, 2019 November 2, 2022 Cross Cultural Issues

Published Sept. 11, 2018

Diaspora scholars shouldn’t use criticism as a default position in scholarly conversations, especially if the larger objective is to develop better understanding of issues, create more opportunities for contribution, and foster relationships between scholars/institutions in and outside Nepal.

Earlier this summer, an august group of Nepali scholars from across North America had gathered in Toronto, Canada, for a conference focusing on higher education in Nepal. The presentations were diverse, the conversations rich, many stories about long-term commitment and significant achievements of Nepali scholars and experts quite inspiring to listen to. I was delighted to read positive reviews of the conference and profiles of diaspora experts in the days and weeks that followed. I cannot overstate the importance of networking and sharing of ideas among Nepali diaspora scholars in a major world region where there are some great universities. The diaspora Nepali community must be lauded for organizing such events. And I am excited to learn that more academically focused conferences are taking place among Nepali diaspora scholars, including conferences at home that bring local and outside experts together. Continue reading

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A MOOC Delusion

  By admin September 29, 2017 November 2, 2022 Critical Pedagogy, Cross Cultural Issues, MOOC, Teaching with Technology

Why Visions to “Educate the World” are Absurd

This essay was published by the Chronicle of Higher Education in July 2013. Since the original link is broken, I’ve posted a copy here.

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Internationalization of Education: Neoliberal vs Humanistic Affordances

  By admin March 30, 2017 March 30, 2017 Critical Pedagogy, Cross Cultural Issues, International Students

Some time ago, while I was teaching a first-year writing course that only had international students, after a good class discussion about the importance of writing courses like that as a place to learn some of the fundamentals of American higher education, one student followed me to my office to say how inspired he was by the discussion. But then he added, with tears in his eyes, that he was dropping out of that summer course. After finding out how much the course would cost him during the summer term, he had talked to his parents in South Korea and decided to not take it.

Since the advent of what is called the “global turn” in Writing Studies, our scholarship, programs, and pedagogies have been increasingly focusing on internationalization as a critical educational goal of higher education that we are well positioned to help advance. This interest has manifested particularly in the discourse about multilingualism, translingualism, transnational writing research, and cross-cultural communicative competence. I strongly believe that, as writing teachers, we are an egalitarian, progressive, and sensitive community of scholars who appreciate what our students from around the world bring to our classrooms—how they continue to teach and inspire us—how all students benefit from the increasingly globalized classrooms. Continue reading

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My “GWID” Conundrums

  By admin February 11, 2017 February 11, 2017 Cross Cultural Issues, International Students, Transnational Issues

When I taught the graduate-level writing in the disciplines (or “GWID,” as I call it) course last summer, which had a lot of nonnative English speaking (NNES) students, I faced a lot of conundrums. How much time should I allocate to help students with basic writing skills in an advanced writing course like that? Especially when NNES students seek help with their “language,” should I insist that they instead learn how to situate their writing at the advanced level and in their specialized research/scholarship? Should I challenge them to focus on higher-order issues in their writing even when they tell me that their advisors recommended/required the class to help them “fix” what are essentially lower-order concerns? Am I missing something because I am looking at things from my own discipline’s/profession’s perspective and failing to appreciate other points of view as much as mine?

 

– – – – – – – – REPOSTED FROM RhetComp@StonyBrook – – – – – – – – Continue reading

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Bad English, Good Ideas: Redefining Quality in Scholarship

  By admin December 1, 2016 March 4, 2020 Critical Pedagogy, Cross Cultural Issues, English Lg Teaching, Multilingualism, Transnational Issues

After reading a new monthly issue of blog posts by a group of English teachers in Nepal earlier today, I had to get off my chest something that I’ve wanted to for a long time and pour it into a blog post. So, here it is, especially for friends and colleagues who have been told that you can’t produce good writing without perfect English or that good scholarship needs to meet a certain standard of quality and rigor and whatnot. The standards are usually local (often cast successfully as global and objective for a long time), they’re highly political (used for maintaining structures of privilege), and most of those who maintain the systems of privilege probably believe that it is all meritocratic (so, don’t be too upset with them!).

Scholarship and the Global Peripheries

The word “scholarship” brings to my mind another term, “scholar,” or a highly learned individual who writes to produce new knowledge, who publishes in prestigious venues, and whose ideas lead and shape his [yeah, I still can’t get rid of the male image in my mind] academic discipline. Growing up in one third world country (until high school) and then living and working in another (for more than a decade), I also never considered anyone in those parts of the world as producers of new and significant knowledge in the academic fields that I studied.

In fact, I still struggle in my mind to think about regular teachers (especially those in the developing world) as scholars and writers in the same way as those whose manuscripts qualify among the five or ten percent of total submissions made to established journals in their respective fields at the few global centers. Deep in my mind, the ideas and experiences of people in the global peripheries—outside of the hallowed institutions of knowledge at geopolitical and cultural centers where there are more resources, opportunities, and the power to define what counts as significant—don’t seem to carry as much value, even for their own contexts, even for their own work and lives.

So, yes, I am confessing that I can’t help feeling that the work of the five or ten percent of those who get published at the global centers (and that group is not “them” for me, I am part of it, however poorly, as I write), those who have doctoral degrees and are usually tenured at prestigious universities, those who have made it to the top of the professional ladders … best determine what counts as genuine scholarship. I automatically imagine that the extreme minority of seeming geniuses as the standard bearers of quality, novelty, substance, and significance with regard to content, method, and professional practice in any field. Continue reading

Tagged   multilingual, translingual
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MOOCing a Meme: Contexts Matter

  By admin October 19, 2016 October 19, 2016 Critical Pedagogy, Cross Cultural Issues, MOOC

When I first learned about massive open online courses, the truly massive xMOOC types, I thought, OMG, now I too can finally educate the world from the convenience of my laptop and the high speed internet that I have. In fact, I had just bought a new MacBook Air at the time. And, being a writing teacher, I wanted to teach writing, because, you know, everyone in the world needs to “write better.” Perfect.

What I needed in order to get started was a course banner, especially an image that would represent the kind of writing that I teach, “academic” writing.

“Academics” has to do with wisely thinking through existing knowledge and generating new ideas, so I thought the best image to represent it would be, oh, yes, the “owl”!

However, before I settled on the owl and slapped a big wise owl image at the top of the screen, I wanted to take a quick moment to ensure that most (if not all) students/ participants from around the world would get my point when they see my course banner.

Five minutes of Googling led to another five, then an hour, and finally after three full hours of reading what I found about the owl as a symbol, I was discouraged. I lost my confidence in the power of my laptop, as well as my years of experience teaching while tethered to one particular context at a time. I sat there, face-in-palms, somewhat glad that I didn’t use a local metaphor to claim to convey a particular meaning universally. I was glad I knew how to Google.

Continue reading

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Pragmatics of Global Citizenship

  By admin September 12, 2016 November 2, 2022 Critical Pedagogy, Cross Cultural Issues

Undergraduate Education and the “Pragmatics” of Global Citizenship—or, What I Look Forward to Learning at the Annual Meeting

Reblogged post, written for the Association of American Colleges and Universities blog on Jan 25, 2012

Shyam Sharma, University of Louisville

When I look at the description of events in the schedule of the AAC&U Annual Meeting this year, images of my undergraduate students cross my mind. I begin to think about what use my students from the English 101 class in fall 2007 (my first semester of teaching college writing) made of the “critical thinking skills” that I taught after they left my classroom. I wonder if my students from the advanced writing course that focused on global citizenship last year continued to “pause to look at two more perspectives” before beginning to argue and defend their own positions. The events in the schedule represent big and often abstract ideas emerging from the experience and wisdom of scholars who are intellectual leaders in higher education. But when browsing the themes and descriptions in the schedule, my mind turns toward the students from the past and students I will teach in years to come. Has my teaching helped them become productive citizens in their communities and work? How much am I helping them become the digital and global citizens that they need to be today? What else do I need to do in order to shoulder the responsibilities of an effective educator of the twenty-first century—and what does it mean to be an effective teacher today in light of the changes, challenges, and opportunities that are created or complicated by the forces of economic crises around the world, advancements in information technologies, and the growing interdependence of knowledge (and other) markets around the world? I will be seeking answers to these questions in the many exciting discussions that I look forward to attending at the AAC&U Annual Meeting in Washington, DC.
Continue reading

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8 Things About MOOCs–

  By admin June 15, 2016 November 2, 2022 Critical Pedagogy, Cross Cultural Issues, Teaching with Technology

While reading this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, I thought about a similar number of things about MOOCs that many people in the media and the mainstream MOOCosphere seem either unable or unwilling to learn:

1. There is no such thing as MOOC, only many types of MOOCs, with many kinds of them making the original acronym sound very funny.

2. If “nearly half of registrants never engage with any of the content,” then it’s time to stop touting the “total number” of people who click on the “sign up” button.

3. If people signing up for multiple courses are most active, but even those lose interest after taking the sixth course, then there is probably something about online and massive courses that has failed to bring about magic solutions to the “crisis” in education. Continue reading

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Context as Lens — [Republica Repost]

  By admin April 5, 2016 November 2, 2022 Critical Pedagogy, Cross Cultural Issues, MOOC, Republica

 To communicate effectively in an increasingly globalized world, we must understand others through the lens of “context” rather than “culture.”

“I am a Chinese citizen but I don’t have very high expectation of this place,” said a young man, as I joined a line outside the Chinese Consulate in New York City last Friday. Many people in line—most of whom were there to apply for a visa, like me—seemed tense, with some vocally complaining. “I hate this,” said another, without specifying what it was that he hated. The line was moving forward fairly quickly and the weather was pleasant. Continue reading

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