Learning Scenario
Students will learn about proximics - the use of space and touch and how it affects behaviour, communication, and social interaction between and within culture(s). The topic will be covered over three contact lessons (primarily the middle one), with the experiential element primarily occurring outside of class prior to students receiving formal instruction on the topic.
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Audience
The learners are Japanese sophomore students at a small liberal arts college. Students likely to take this optional course will be those going for study abroad semesters at several universities in English-speaking countries.
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PART 2
Social experiment assignment: Students conduct their interviews, taking notes on how people reacted when their personal space was infringed upon. They could try touching the other person as well. This part of the project thus includes concrete and active experimentation and reflective observation, and as they do more interviews, abstract conceptualization as well. They will likely relate to the experience on an emotional level. |
PART 3
In class: (A) Students share in groups their experiences. More reflective observation and abstract conceptualization takes place here. Unfortunately, I predict that as Japanese, most students will not have been as obtrusive as I as a teacher wanted them to be for this experiment, which further necessitates for (B) the showing of a video depicting how a similar experiment conducted by a Brit without the typical Japanese 遠慮 (translated as "hesitation" or "holding back") might look. A second video adds the intercultural element to the concept of personal space.
The students are then given a reading to address in class about how proximics affects intercultural communication along with some vocabulary worksheets. This reading covers E.T. Hall's concepts of public, social, personal, and intimate distance, and explains how some sample cultures differ with regard to these concepts. |
PART 4
Assignment: (A) Students watch one or two amusing videos to see how cultures can collide in regards to proximics (like the one from HSBC Bank below). (B) Students do vocabulary work via worksheets and Quizlet. (C) Students answer comprehension questions based on the reading. (D) Based on their social experiment, the reading, videos so far, and interactions with the teacher and each other in class, students prepare their answers to questions requiring some inductive reasoning and reflection. They will prepare for discussion next class also by preparing to share any personal proximics experiences they might have had or can imagine having with people from other cultures.
HSBC Personal Space from allaboutcom on Vimeo. |
Part 5
In class: (A) Students ask vocabulary questions to the teacher, then with a partner review their answers to the comprehension questions on the reading. The teacher takes the questions up with the whole class. (B) In pairs and/or groups, students share their reflection question answers and personal experiences while the teacher circulates and answers any questions that come up. Both (A) and (B) are forms of formative assessment. (C) Students perform an exit comprehension check in multiple choice format as a type of formal assessment) on socrative.com (an online student response system) designed by the teacher. Students who do not perform well are encourage to seek help from the teacher or peers. (D) After assigning homework (see PART 6), the next section or unit can be started (time permitting). |
PART 6
Assignment: On flipgrid.com, students share a culmination of what they have learned in a video recording. They must summarize the salient points of the reading, how they felt in their experiment and how they think they made others feel, and what they should keep in mind when interacting with people for whom norms of distance and touch are different from their own. They should also respond with another video recording to the recordings of three + other classmates. This last activity for the section is a capstone assignment, and therefore also a form of authentic, summative (and also formative) assessment. Students demonstrate learned vocabulary, their understanding of concepts, and how and to what extent they reflected upon the experience(s) and emotions they had in their learning process. Hopefully they will show evidence of having increased their capacity to critically assess their own cultural lens in the area of proximics. |
Labeled for non-commercial reuse by K. Kirk
In activities above, learners engage in scaffolded (Bruner) cycles of activity, reflection, reading, watching, and discussion. Educational philosopher John Dewy is known for having said that people do not learn from experience but rather learn from reflecting on experience. This is why the social experiment was placed earlier in the lesson plan breakdown. Students have to reflect on and construct their own understanding of their experience, which is deepened with assistance from from the discussions, readings, and video - hopefully all in Vygotsky's proximal zone of development. Overall, social “experiential learning is aligned with the constructivist theory of learning” in that the “outcomes of the learning process are varied and often unpredictable” and “learners play a critical role in assessing their own learning” (Wurdinger, 2005, p. 69) Upon reflection, while PART 2 in the assessment stages above is a form of experiential learning, the lesson plan can also be seen as project-based learning because of all the additional activities and the final capstone assignment.
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The behaviorist style of learning also figures when students interact with vocabulary learning tools online, which takes the form of multiple choice, matching, and fill-in-the-blank type activities, and also bursts of gamification occurring through Quizlet (races, asteroid game, etc. - Students could asynchronously compete with each other for high scores or speed and were rewarded with congratulatory praise). Although the learners' age combined with the course content might place them in the category of andragogy, Japanese learners are typically a few years behind their western counterparts in many spheres, so behaviorist approaches are actually effective - learners tend to be "younger" and still very much extrinsically motivated. That said, their upcoming sojourns abroad would also intrinsically motivate them to learn.
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