Teaching Philosophy

Here's the link to my teaching philosophy statement. You can read it if you like, but the only thing I would like to preface it with is: IT'S ONLY 2.5 PAGES!! I'm so proud of that because, as I'm sure you all have already noticed, I tend to be a bit wordy...

Teaching Philosophy Statement: Teaching with Technology

Technology is so NIFTY

This is my first attempt at using Microsoft Word 2007 to publish a blog post. I've never actually tried it before and I just noticed today that it could be done. I don't really have much to say since I haven't completed revising my Teaching Philosophy, but I just wanted to test it out. It's very neat: it works like an FTP client in the sense that it allows you to enter in your username and password, and then publish directly from Word, so you don't even have to upload the document. This is really cool because you can write blog posts at times when you are not connected to the internet and then upload them later. That also allows you to save blog posts on your computer in case, for example, the internet dies tomorrow and all of that lovely work (or more importantly, all those procrastination tools) you've done disappears. If that does happen, you can still have "hard" copies on your computer to later make even "harder" copies out of. I think it's a novel idea and I love the potential of it…we'll see how I feel about it after this first post.

Just FYI….

Intercultural competence: can we teach it?

I want to start by saying that having the discussion with my chat mates in last week's class got me really interested in this topic. I think it's incredibly intriguing, and I think it's unfortunate that it, by nature, resists testing. One of the things that we discussed in our class at UF was whether or not it is possible to teach intercultural competence. I think that we, both as teachers AND as students, have this idea that teaching culture involves mainly being exposed to the PRODUCTS of the target culture (food, music, film, etc.), but one of the most interesting things we talked about last week in our class was how much language is involved in learning intercultural competence.

I made the comment, and I still hold it to be true, that language is inherently linked to culture, since it is intrinsically the primary means of transmitting culture from generation to generation and between natives and non-natives. Because of that fact, I find it hard to believe that we can teach culture without necessarily including language as a main component. I also mentioned that when I think of the times that I have experienced cultural misunderstandings, they have most always been linguistic in nature...but that of course is only my personal experience.

One other thing I want to mention in this relatively short post is the importance of the concept of recul in learning intercultural competence. I have always said that student motivation is one of the most important things in language learning, and recul is a perfect example of that. I believe that in order for a student to, first, reach that "third place" where s/he is able to analyze and compare aspects of the target culture to their own they must first be very motivated and prepared to accept the information.

I have much more I could say, but I'm very tired from a long trip today (I'm in NYC at the CUNY conference, check it out), and I'm posting only what is still swimming around in my head...desculpe.