Creating a successful group project in a Professional Writing course that results in a unified document written by several different people can be quite difficult in a relatively homogeneous face-to-face classroom environment. If an instructor attempts to migrate (Warnock 2009) this project to an online classroom and faces the realities of a culturally and linguistically heterogeneous student body at the same time, many different factors have to be taken into account that require careful planning from the instructor to ensure the most optimal outcome.
In the article “Integrating intercultural online learning experiences into the computer classroom” St. Amant describes some of the challenges instructors face when they work with students from different cultures and provides some practical exercises that can help students to understand all the factors that affect their peers’ performance. According to St. Amant, one of the issues that play a major role is language. To ensure that language issues don’t become a problem in a virtual Professional Writing course, St. Amant provides several strategies for instructors in a different article (2007). First, he states that the standard language of class discussion and subsequent documents should be identified early on to avoid the mixture of different dialects or World Englishes. Furthermore, he suggests that instructors identify ahead of time which students might have a difficulty and provide them with different strategies (such as online tutoring) to remedy these issues. Another suggestion in the article stresses the importance of creating student web pages by each student, so that everyone has a clear understanding of each student’s linguistic background.
In addition, it is also important that students take into account the different cultural expectations associated with communication (St. Amant 2002). These cultural expectations can have an effect on how identities are represented and perceived, how arguments are presented, and how often and with how much formality students communicate. It is crucial, for this reason, that students understand how the different rhetorical styles represented within a group can influence their collaborative writing process and product.
While creating individual web pages may seem like a good idea to get people to know each other, St. Amant does not discuss what type of information should be presented on these pages. Clearly, students from individualistic cultures will post different types of information than those from collectivist cultures. For this reason, I think that instructors using the personal web page idea should create clear culturally sensitive guidelines on what type and how much information students place on these personal websites that would foster cultural diversity without alienating certain students right at the beginning.
This article contains suggestions that are applicable to any writing instructor who has a culturally and/or linguistically heterogeneous classroom, I would recommend it to anyone, and especially those who plan to integrate personal student web pages into their online curriculum.
Warnock, S. (2009). Teaching Writing Online: How and Why?
1 comment:
I found your comment that instructors should be careful about the types of information we ask students to make available to other students via personal pages. I know I usually just ask them to post information about themselves, their major, and their interests in a general fashion. This certainly makes me rethink this approach--I will try to approach even this most basic icebreaker with more specificity.
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