Transcription
Salam everyone. I am San D from Jordan. I teach English language and literature at YUK University. My students are foreign language learners, and they are eager to develop their English and connect with the world in general. As you listen to me now, it is around 1 to 2 a.m. in my time zone. Thanks to technology, I am delighted to join you via this recording. It is an honor to speak at the AAC andu meeting and to share this platform with my esteemed colleagues, Veronica, Christine, and Eunice. I really want to thank them for inviting me to collaborate on this inspiring initiative: fostering Global Democratic engagement through COIL.
I want to talk about my COIL experience. My journey with Collaborative Online International Learning, which is called COIL, began three years ago when Dr. Eunice Murza reached out to me with an invitation to participate in a COIL initiative. I filled out the form, and I changed the way I approached teaching and learning forever. This started three years ago. Dr. Eunice Murza partnered me with Dr. Laura Zimmerman from Shenandoah University. So we implemented COIL mostly asynchronously, with at least one synchronous session to foster connection. These sessions allowed us to model how to use the platform, access syllabi, discuss objectives and activities. We introduced ourselves to our students by sharing cultural artifacts and encouraged them to do the same. From there, they worked in cross-cultural teams on shared projects. They discussed childhood memories and how they shaped their identities. They spoke about their personal definitions of success and gave us their examples. They also analyzed and discussed a lot of different forms of social media. Basically, we learned about each other's cultures. When we talk about culture, we talked about holidays, we talked about food, sports, and social gatherings, and so on.
Through these partnerships and the shared projects that our students worked on together, they learned a lot. I would like to tell you a lot about the learning they experienced, but before that, I'd like to share a video that myself and Dr. Laura and her students prepared together. So this is my artifact; it's a dress which was gifted to me by my parents as one of my marriage gifts. This dress was supposed to replace my childhood thobe, which had been burned in a fire. I love my thobe very much because it reflects my heritage. The cultural artifact I chose is my great-grandmother's journal. Nana actually loved to write. She loved to write about the natural world and about the small things. She even had a pen name, FVV Zor. I don't know why she chose that. But my name is Clara, and my cultural artifact is my mom's auction house back home in Warfield, West Virginia. And this auction house is just a really big part of our family history. I remember my mom worked so hard to start this business, and we were all just so proud of her when she opened it. The cultural artifact my grandmother gifted me is a horse; it represents power.
And now I'd like to share with you some of the benefits that I have noticed were developed in my students. So what I realized is that they learned about each other's cultures, and they learned to respect each other's cultures, to value differences in culture, and to even change some of our culture if it's something that is not that beneficial. And to learn more about our cultures. Some students did not really know much about some aspects of their culture, and because they wanted to share their culture with people who don't know anything, probably, about their culture or enough, or don't have the right information about the culture, so students had to dig deeper into their cultures and learn more about them and then be able to share them with people that come from a different culture.
Let me say another important point is that our students, in general, we discovered, built skills or developed skills they already had. They became better listeners. They also developed their communication skills in general. They became more patient, more empathetic to each other. They learned how to work in a team with people that are not from their country, not from their time zone, not from the—that don't share the same language or the same culture, which is really great. Some of these students were very shy, and they kind of became less shy, mainly about even issues that they shouldn't even be shy about. And one of the most important qualities that students developed, in a very quick time, is confidence. They became more confident, a lot more confident than before.
COIL also allowed students to think globally and act responsibly, and not think only according to their culture or according to their religion or to their, let me say, the practices that they're used to practicing. So it changed these people into global citizens, you can say. I also can say that some students went on a journey of personal growth. I had students who were very introverted; they didn't even want to deal with people from their own class, you know. And so, through COIL, they were able to discover that their technique was not really a healthy technique and that collaborating and working with others is something very healthy and beneficial. And they changed as people.
Another important point is that our students were able to correct misconceptions they had about each other. Through media, sometimes the false narratives and the false stories about, whether it's the Americans or the Arabs or Muslims or Jordanians, spread in a way where it really does not reflect the truth about these people. I mean, one person might have done something that isn't so good, or it's not something that we are proud of, let me say, whether it's from the American side or the Jordanian side, and it gets generalized in a way where people think every Jordanian, every Arab, every Muslim, every American does this. And so, through COIL, students were able to confront and correct false information about each other's cultures, religions, practices, and so on.
I would like to read to you some of the reflections on COIL that my students gave me. Um, says, "Connecting with others outside of our culture is easier than we often think if we genuinely try." So this is something that she thinks now about COIL and about dealing with people from a different culture. Listen to what Abdullah has to say; he says, "COIL for him was a window into a larger world." Y says, "This experience was an invaluable lesson in understanding and coexisting with others." Leila says, "COIL shaped me into someone who is qualified for a future job." And Ahmed Abini says, "Because of you, I had one of the best experiences of my life."
I'm sure that most of you would like to know if there were any challenges that we faced. Of course, there's nothing perfect in this world, and setbacks are a part of life. However, I would say that whatever problem we faced, we would deal with on the spot, and we would have a solution ready for next time when we implement COIL or include COIL in our class. Let me tell you some of the funny things, or some of the setbacks, or some of the challenges that we faced. One of them, of course, is the time difference; we are facing it at the moment right now, and so that's why I'm unable to take part in this meeting live. Another setback is that one of my students said that they felt disrespected or not taken seriously sometimes because of the differences in culture. Sometimes we would think that people acting in a certain way or saying something different that we are not used to saying is a sign of disrespect, so we would address these issues right away, on the spot. Without the great people from Shenandoah University, COIL would not have been successful, and our students wouldn't have had this great opportunity to work and to develop the different kinds of skills that they have developed. At the end, I would like to say, let's all join forces to make this world a more peaceful and friendly place to live in. Mame goodbye.