Oscar 2024

This presentation reports on “travel-reading” as an approach to teach Asian literature. Travel-reading was a humanities grant project and implemented in a summer study abroad program in Taiwan in 2022. Reading Interior Chinatown worked as a pedagogical mechanism that helped students stay thematically engaged with a text while abroad. Students strategically interpreted and evaluated what they heard and saw in the country in comparison with their reading and developed an evolving framework that enabled them to appreciate differences, examine their beliefs, challenge the stereotypes that they had held about East Asian people, and reflected on how the invisibility of certain minorities can affect our consciousness and distort reality in our society.

This session examines how to teach the Holocaust through French Literature in Translation with a study abroad component as well as interviews with Holocaust survivors. The session examines the curriculum and how to integrate various disciplines in order to further delve in the content. Furthermore, the session examines how students performed on a pre-test and post-test of the content and how the impact of integrating the curriculum allowed for further development of knowledge.

Intercultural communicative competence (ICC) plays a critical role in language learners’ growth and success during study abroad. The Chinese Flagship Culture Initiative (CFCI) aims to design cultural materials and embed them in the development of pragmatic and intercultural competences in intermediate and advanced proficiency Chinese learners. The presenters share results from a needs assessment survey identifying areas of weakness in their cultural preparation, podcasts in which students reflect on their study abroad experience, and new cultural materials developed to address current gaps and strengthen students’ ICC. Feedback on the materials from teachers and students as well as effective instructional strategies for using CFCI materials are also discussed.