American College Classroom Research Articles

Teaching about Gender and Politics of the MENA: Undermining Bias and Introducing a Framework

As instructors, we are quite familiar with students coming to our classes loaded with preconceived notions. For instance, some believe that male instructors are better at math, while others think that markets, if left on their own, will produce wealth for everyone. Teaching about gender and politics of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region at an American college is no different. Students come to class rarely knowing the basic facts, history, or culture of the region, mostly because the K–12 educational curriculum in the United States does not typically cover the MENA region. However, students’ lack of formal education on the MENA region does not mean they are unexposed to its issues, which are frequent topics in American media. Unfortunately, students often hold misconceptions and deep biases about women, culture, and politics in the region, and these misconceptions impair the learning process by acting as a “psychological block” for the students. As Haddad and Schwedler (2013, 211) put it, “our years of teaching undergraduates have taught us how images of harems, pyramids, and desert warriors wielding sabers on camelback still shape many Americans’ perceptions of the region.” This essay discusses some of the challenges that instructors teaching gender and politics in the MENA region face in an American college classroom. No single course can eradicate old paradigms and prejudices. However, this piece proposes some strategies for effective teaching about gender and politics of the MENA region.

Popular Culture as Pedagogy : Teaching “Il Canto di Ulisse” from Dante to Jovanotti in the American College Classroom

This article explores the challenges of teaching Dante’s Divine Comedy to contemporary American college students. In particular, the study addresses the role of subtext that the “Canto di Ulisse” plays to rap-pop artist Jovanotti’s song “Bruto” (Album : Buon Sangue, 2005) and to director Emanuele Crialese’s film Terraferma (2011). It further argues that the gap between “high” and “low” culture can be bridged by adopting alternative pedagogical tools (e.g., blogging, Twitter) to be used in the classroom.

Doeslaïcitétranslate to the American classroom?

This essay reflects on the relevance of French laïcité for the American college classroom. It begins with a discussion of philosopher Catherine Kintzler’s radical interpretation of laïcité as a theory of political association that takes the classroom as its model. According to this view, the autonomous learning contingent on doubt and self-correction that ideally occurs there is the basis for an egalitarian and collaborative production of knowledge, a model of a res publica. The essay then turns to legal scholar and philosopher Anthony Kronman’s analysis of classroom conversation and the “ethics of depersonalization.” It considers the extent to which these notions can be viewed as American translations of Kintzler’s laïcité. The essay concludes with a reading of American essayist Ta-Nehisi Coates’s bestselling 2015 memoir as an endorsement of the autonomous abstract individual, the linchpin of republican universalism, laïcité, and liberal education.

The Times, They Were A-Changin': Exploring the Interstate Oratorical Contests of the 1960s

Since 1874, a handful of American college classrooms have hosted generations of students practicing the art of oratory. Throughout the intervening decades, students involved in the Interstate Oratory Contest have, to varying degrees, addressed the compelling social, political, economic and educational issues of their time. When one considers the shifting socio-political landscape of the 1960s, this decade seems a far cry from the rhetorical contexts that gave rise to speeches for the previous nine decades. Did stock issues give way to Woodstock issues? An analysis of the Interstate Oratory winning orations from the 1960s raises numerous questions. To what extent do the speeches reflect the emerging notion of student empowerment? How are the compelling social movements of the day, such as the Civil Rights Movement, the Women's Movement, and the Anti-War Movement, reflected in the discourse of the decade? Do the 1960s' orations signal the generic properties observed by previous researchers?

COPUS-based Observation and Analysis on Chinese and American College Classroom

COPUS-based Observation and Analysis on Chinese and American College Classroom

Instructional immediacy in the Chinese quantitative reasoning classroom

AbstractThe present investigation examined instructor immediacy behaviors, students' perceptions of those behaviors, and student math anxiety in Chinese classrooms. Consistent with the American college classroom, a simple causal chain was anticipated in which instructor immediacy behaviors positively induced a psychological response to immediacy, which had a negative influence on math anxiety. Study 1 tested this model in the Chinese college classroom and the model failed. It was speculated that perhaps given the high testing admission standards of Chinese colleges (i.e., the GaoKao), that Chinese college students were a biased sample of only students who had learned to manage their anxieties. Thus, in Study 2, the model was retested among junior and senior high Chinese students. Among junior and senior high Chinese students, the model fit well.

Comic books in the American college classroom: a study of student critical thinking

American college literature classes often have objectives and outcomes to address needed real-world skills, such as critical thinking, but the methods to teach and measure these skills has been considered outdated. Comic books, as a type of multimodal literature, are perceived to connect to real-world reading and writing better than traditional ‘text-only’ literature; furthermore, comic books are gaining educational merit as their use in the classroom has increased in the twenty-first century. Using a mixed-method embedded design, this study explored how comic books engage critical thinking in a group (N = 17) of American college literature students and how this critical thinking compared to critical thinking engagement in traditional (no images) literature. The study suggests that comic books engage student critical thinking at levels equal to or greater than traditional (no images) literature.

Editor's Note

Editor's Note

Impact of affective variables on Korean as a foreign language learners' oral achievement

While research on affective variables abounds in the foreign and second language acquisition literature, few studies have examined the role that learner affect plays in learning a less commonly taught language (LCTL) such as Korean. This study examines potential relationships between affective variables (i.e., motivation, anxiety, linguistic self-confidence, and risk-taking) and oral achievement in a KFL (Korean as a Foreign Language) North American college classroom setting. The results showed that learners' achievement was positively correlated with linguistic self-confidence and risk-taking while negatively associated with anxiety. A positive correlation was also found between motivation and linguistic self-confidence. Anxiety was negatively correlated with linguistic self-confidence and risk-taking. Among the four affective variables investigated, only risk-taking was identified as a significant predictor of student achievement in oral skills. Findings suggest that (1) learners' affective states play a significant role in learning an L2 that is non-cognate with and distant from their L1 and (2) effortful and frequent attempts of risk-taking should be particularly emphasized to enhance learners' achievement in L2 oral proficiency.

Encountering China: Contexts and Methods for Teaching Chinese Politics in American Classrooms

This article explores the use of student-centered learning activities when teaching Chinese politics in American college classrooms and discusses the importance of context in those activities. In particular, the article explores how classroom context, including student identities, and student exposure to diverse, often conflicting “political identities” in course material emerge during different “encounters”—a Cultural Revolution poster exhibition, a simulation about the Three Gorges Dam, a Cultural Revolution role-play, and a problem-solving session involving factory workers. The article argues that encounters, which encompass in-class activities, such as problem solving, simulations, and role-play, enhance student engagement with course material, improve student retention of historical and contemporary political knowledge, and encourage critical thinking and peer collaboration in a student-centered learning environment. The article concludes that learner-centered teaching is significant because as the world becomes more complex, the knowledge and skills acquired through student-centered activities in politics classes are highly relevant for the future of self-organization, social interactions, and institution building.

The Crossing Borders Program: Increasing Intercultural Competency via Structured Social Interactions

Increasing diversity in American college classrooms and recent trends toward globalization require professors to teach more creatively in order to encourage students' face-to-face intercultural interactions and resulting competencies. At a commuter campus with a heterogeneous student population, a series of large-group activities and small-group dialogues between American and international students resulted in satisfaction and growth for a majority of American participants. Areas of self-reported growth primarily involved intercultural competencies, including knowledge of, attitudes toward, and skills when interacting with others from different cultures.

Resolving International Teaching Assistant Language Inadequacy through Dialogue: Challenges and Opportunities for Clarity and Credibility

Guided by Giddens’ structuration theory, this study highlights structures that both enable and constrain nonnative English-speaking teachers and students in American college classrooms. Before international teaching assistants (ITAs) step into their American classrooms, several semishaped class structures are already in place: students (mostly American) possess most mainstream American values and practices; students may avoid getting to know their ITA because they may feel that they will lose “power” to an individual not part of the primary (American) culture; students may possess negative stereotypes of ITAs because of unpleasant prior experiences with ITAs who struggled with the English language; and, more generally, students may possess intuitive doubts about an ITA's ability to clearly communicate the course content. In essence, students’ initial perceptions of ITA clarity, credibility, and language inadequacy coexist as constraining social structures that face ITAs in American instructional settings. Turning these structures into enabling mechanisms that smoothly facilitate the teaching and learning process poses a vital issue for ITAs. This study examined the effects of ITA self-disclosure of English language inadequacy on teacher clarity and credibility. Results indicate that an ITA's dialogic attempt to resolve language inadequacy has negative effects on student perceptions of classroom clarity. However, the findings point toward important benefits for enhanced teacher credibility for ITAs who use a dialogic approach to resolve language inadequacy. Theoretical and pedagogical implications and areas for future research are discussed.

Sport and Society in the Middle East: An Alternate Narrative of Middle Eastern History for the American College Classroom

On February 10, 2008, Egypt won its record sixth African Soccer Championship. In cities and villages large and small, Egyptians poured into the streets to celebrate their victory, with their cheers...

Achievement goals and discrete achievement emotions: A theoretical model and prospective test.

A theoretical model linking achievement goals to discrete achievement emotions is proposed. The model posits relations between the goals of the trichotomous achievement goal framework and 8 commonly experienced achievement emotions organized in a 2 (activity/outcome focus) × 2 (positive/negative valence) taxonomy. Two prospective studies tested the model in German and American college classrooms. The results were largely in line with the hypotheses. Mastery goals were positive predictors of enjoyment of learning, hope, and pride and were negative predictors of boredom and anger. Performance-approach goals were positive predictors of pride, whereas performance-avoidance goals were positive predictors of anxiety, hopelessness, and shame. The results were consistent across studies and robust when controlled for gender, GPA, social desirability, temperament, and competence expectancy. The research is discussed with regard to the underdeveloped literature on achievement emotions and with regard to the motivation and emotion research domains more broadly.

The Current Condition of Visual Communication in Colleges and Universities of the United States

This paper is a discussion of the current condition of visual communication in American colleges and universities. In doing so, it analyzes the importance of visual communication and the unique epistemic power it possesses, and describes to what extent current academic practice has learned the lessons of the past so that it has become well equipped to deal with current needs in modem colleges and universities in the US. Particularly examined is the effectiveness of visual aids and computer-aided instruction. Besides, this paper also explains that visual communication is a dialogicalprocess where the way students perceive and understand their environment is influenced by their knowledge and experience of visual communication, and that visual intelligence has become a central part of academic culture. Finally, this paper provides some insights on the visual in American college classrooms for the decades to come.

Revisiting the Relation Between Teacher Immediacy and Student Learning in African American College Classrooms

This article represents an early, successful, partial replication and extension of Neuliep's (1995) immediacy study in the African American college classroom. Results show that African American students perceive their African American instructors to be more immediate than their European American instructors. Significant positive correlations between immediacy and cognitive and affective learning measures were found in classes taught by both African American and European American instructors, but the correlations between immediacy and affective learning were significantly greater for the African American instructor sample than for the European American instructor sample.

Please Speak Up: Asian Immigrant Students in American College Classrooms

AbstractInformal conversations and structured opportunities for oral communication help international students overcome barriers to improving their academic language skills.

Decoding ESL: International Students in the American College Classroom

In Decoding ESL, Amy Tucker extends current research and theory on contrastive rhetoric to study ESL students tackling the art and skill of writing and reading literature. For her, contrastive rhetoric is not a matter of comparing usage in the native language for explanations of mistakes in English. Contrastive rhetoric must include information about the two cultures, about expectations and other sociocultural variables that influence and affect communication. Each chapter investigates successive stages in the attainment of college skills in a second language, from the absorption of grammar structures and expository patterns to encounters with American literature. Along the way, the book considers the overriding concerns of current composition practice and theory: issues of learner motivation, syllabus design, collaborative classroom techniques, revision strategies, reading/writing connections, and communicative contexts of discourse. Tucker pursues a neglected area of study, arguing clearly and strongly that ESL students should develop their own responses to what they read. Her students engage in a range of communicative tasks, including interviews, class discussions, journal writing, and essay and revision assignments. Her discussions of the students' work prove how careful analysis of language can help you understand not just that one student, but many. Sample syllabi show how you can do the same.

Cultural inclusion in the American college classroom

Cultural inclusion in the American college classroom

The Syntactical and Grammatical Characteristics of Business German Language: A Methodological Problem

While the past decade has witnessed an unprecedented demand for and astonishing resultant growth in enrollment in the area of German for business and professional purposes, there has been minimal progress in the development of appropriate materials for the teaching of these more specialized language skills in the American college classroom. Indeed, while the United States presently represents the largest single market for such courses, what little movement there has been toward the development of sophisticated materials for fairly wide dissemination has, until recently, occurred largely in England or in Germany. Materials developed in England' have, for numerous reasons, only limited usefulness in American classrooms, while materials developed by German pedagogues exhibit an entirely different set of problems.2 Recent American contributions to the business German textbook market, i.e., Doris Merrifield's Deutsche Wirtschaftssprache fur Amerikaner (New York: Wiley, 1985), and Lore ArmaleoPopper and Harald Braun's Business German Right From the Start (New York: Langenscheidt, 1985) represent a welcome step in the right direction, in that they have been developed specifically for the American classroom. The authors of these texts are to be commended for their ex-