Sunday 11:15 - 12:05
TTI 306/7
A Cross-cultural Approach for Teaching Global Issues
Kristin L. Johannsen
Kansai Gaidai University Osaka, Japan
How "global" are global issues? A survey by the presenter found that
EFL learners in Japan, Norway, and the United Arab Emirates have very different
ideas about the world's most serious problems. Teachers working with global
issues in cross-cultural settings risk imposing their own culture-bound
agendas and values. For
instance, students in a developing nation may be less concerned about
environmental issues than their foreign teacher thinks they should be.
A possible solution to this problem is Values Clarification, originally
developed for multicultural classrooms in the US. In this approach, the
teacher acts as a neutral facilitator to help students outline a range
of possible viewpoints on an issue, and then develop and affirm their own
positions.
This presentation will discuss the components of the Values Clarification
approach and describe specific activities for the EFL global issues classroom,
giving examples from units on child labor and space exploration.
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