Teaching Xchange

It's the first week of school. What do you expect? A project!

Okay, maybe that's not what you expect but it's what I got. With a short turn-over time of just a few days, this project - finding a way to increase the internationalization of UVA - went from conceptualization to the poster-building stage to grading.

Now, there are a few obvious benefits to such a project in the first week of school. First, I got to meet 5 of my classmates.  Second, we got to see how the class was structured a little with class discussions and review of our work. Third, we had enough time to figure out where the poster board was in the bookstore without freaking out about a project that was due the next day.

Perhaps more importantly, we went through our own version of the engineering design process, learning what does and does not work the hard way (or the easy way when we found out what did work). Our group seemed typical in that we started by trying to define internationalization and, in attempting to do so, trying to define the problem.

Having a better idea for the dual nature of internationalization with the spreading of UVA to other places and the bringing of the cultures of those other places to UVA, we started to throw out ideas. What about a business relationship with a foreign company? How about bringing more international students to UVA? Why does everything else look so much like study abroad?

Realizing that there were pros and cons to basically every idea we could throw out (yes, even my ideas had a couple of cons), we had to come up with some way to agree on which ideas were "better." Unknowingly, we had stumbled upon the step of creating criteria. Feasibility, how wipe-spread the impact would be, how big/long-lasting the impact would be on those involved, cost (you had to know that one was coming), and how innovative the idea was - these were the most important criteria we came up with.

After listing many, many potential solutions, we agreed upon the idea of a teaching exchange in order to deeply impact the people who would go abroad to teach but also to have a widespread, albeit less significant, on those students and faculty who do not choose to go abroad by bring another culture into their classes. Of course, the next meeting, we had to re-agree on this idea and re-clarify the points. All the same, we got the poster designed by splitting up into teams - one team to design the poster and the other to finish up the bullet points.

Overall, I (and hopefully the rest of the people on my team) had the nice experience of being on a team where every team member wanted to contribute. We finished the poster. We learned that research is important and that we should have done more and cited it. And, of course, we got our first college experience with an engineering design challenge.