Teaching practice – Professional Teacher training

Overview

After completing the course the student:-

– is familiar with diversity studies on the field of media education and understands the main ways of thinking about social and cultural diversity

– is familiar with and able to critically explore the main concepts of diversity studies such as multiculturalism, social cohesion and super diversity

– is able to analyze media contents related to diversity and multiculturalism- can apply knowledge gleaned from the course readings to the case at hand and to extend that understanding to cross-cultural, comparative contexts. 

Contents

Through lectures, course readings and assignments students will get acquainted with contemporary debates and challenges in exploring cultural and social diversity in media. 

 Methods

20 hours of lectures and collaborative learning and teaching.

 Requirements

Active participation in lectures and exercises and a learning journal.

My take on the course planning and implementation

I identified that students need to learn five concepts in this course. Social Diversity, Cultural Diversity, Multiculturalism, Social Cohesion, and Super diversity. Overall, in this course students needed to know why diversity in media matters.

To accomplish this objective I planned my courses with student-centered approach in mind. As this is a lecture course I prepared some lecture slides. The course was face-to-face at the beginning but then COVID-19 occurred and half of the course was then done online using ADOBE CONNECT.

The course description and interaction with the students as well as for submitting of the student assignment I used MOODLE platform provided by the University of Lapland. I knew how moodle worked in theory before this course started. I never used it in practice before so I had to contact help desk and they provided me some basic videos on the moodle platform. With the help of help desk I was able to use moodle for the course. I used moodle to distribute lecture slides and receive student submissions. I used moodle aslo to communicate with students using its forum options.

The first two classes were face-to-face and the remaining three classes were on Adobe Connect. The face-to-face classes were very intense as there were lots of group and pair work followed by reflections, feedback and discussions for experiential learning purposes. As an example I gave students a lecture on what social diversity is and then I send them in smaller groups to find out examples of social diversity and examples should be from student’s own countries of origin. After some time the groups then return to share their findings, then reflect on the process which followed by deeper discussions. Students did this same process for all the concepts listed above one by one. At the end of face-to-face days students reflected on the whole days events by discussing in  larger group. This was a summary of the whole day which helped them learn from each other and at the same time manage to get enough material for their learning journal.

The learning journal is their final assignment in which they will discuss all the concepts, events and things that they have learned and reflect on them. To help them write this journal I gave them a model called 4Rs.  It is a reflection model that helps students to understand reflection and then write it properly.

After day 1 students were divided into two groups and were given task for day 2. The task was to find out about children in social and culturally diverse media. We used FISH BOWL METHOD. In day 2 after the fish bowl method presentation students did reflection and discussion. The remaining part of the day was used again to find out remaining concepts multiculturalism, social cohesion and super diversity. The method was same as in day 1. First they worked in small groups to find out more and then shared their findings in the class with others followed by group reflections and discussions. Finally they were given final task for this course apart from learning journal. The task was again a group work to find more detail as well as analyze and explore multiculturalism, social cohesion and super diversity with examples. Due to COVID-19 university went into lock down and like every other teacher I had to move to online teaching. So, I had to change this group work into individual work and I also assigned students to find out only one term. To do this I divided the three concepts equally to the individuals. In the online class students then presented one by one these concepts. Each concepts was repeated at least three times. This way students were able to show different aspects of these concepts and we were also able to hear examples from different countries related to these concepts.

In the final two classes students shared their learning from their learning journal. I did this because I wanted them to continuously write their journal and do not leave the journal for the last day of submission. Students were all prepared to share their learning in the online session as I expected.

Now during this course some students were not able to show up for certain days. So, individually I assigned those individual students who were absent on certain days with some extra tasks such as making video presentations. I left it on them on how to do so. Some students video taped themselves on their mobiles and reflected on tasks or used presentations with voice overs to make videos. Two students did not show up to many classes and they did not ask me to give them tasks. The original course teacher might have to deal with these two students. I will wait for them while I am giving my grades and if they contact me during this time then I can discuss with course original teacher to work things out. Other than that I am done with the course successfully and all the students except two have passed the course.

For the assessment of the course I used the following criteria

 After I assessed and graded students on my own I also discussed my grades with the supervising teacher. We both discussed students individual grades and came up with the final grades. After assessment was done I wrote feedback for each individual and I will email my students their feedback once the grades are published. 

Reflection

This is the first course in my field of studies. I have a master’s degree in Media education and this course was part of media education.

I did not feel any pressure in preparing, executing and finalizing this course. I was given the course material from the previous year but it was not focusing on the course objectives. Therefore, I made a decision on my own to focus on the course objects and then I was able to divided these concepts: Social Diversity, Cultural Diversity, Multiculturalism, Social Cohesion, and Super diversity and organize group work as mentioned above. As the course was made in student-centered way i was confident that students will be able to find out and teach each other these concepts. This was based on my previous course experience that I organizes for my PhD data collection.

Students were able to find out a lot more information and shared it in the classes and honestly i learned a lot more from them about these concepts than I could do on my own.

I had to organize different tasks for students who were absent and I did expect that to happen in this course. It is very common that students do not show up or had overlapping with other courses. So again based on my experience from previous teaching and also as a student I was prepared for these kind of situations. Therefore, I did not ask help from the original course teacher during this whole course and I did the whole course independently. I had a supervising teacher and I did discuss course content with her and received some feedback which helped me improve my teaching.

I was planning to use videos in the class to help students learn the concepts. My supervising teacher suggested not to use YouTube videos in creative commons are not mentioned. All the videos that I chose to use in the class was without creative commons. In my experience it was fine to show such videos in class but I chose to not use the videos. Instead I gave the students another task to watch the videos and reflect on them. This helped me to achieve my goal of using videos to teach the concepts. I mention this here because I want to point out that I am open to change and I am good in taking feedback and change my plans according to the situations. The other change was a transition to online during the course. I had an option to just give students an essay to write and skip online meetings. I did not do that as I wanted students to still learn from each other through out the course. In my opinion I was able to keep student learning from each other in each class both online and face-to-face.

I also kept my self calm and gave plenty of time for students to interact with each other and ask questions. Here is how I asked questions and go answers from each and every student. I gave them time and I did not move on unless everyone spoke. So, in my classes there will sometimes be a silence for few minutes where I have asked a question and now I am waiting for an answer. By keeping myself quite puts a pressure on the students and then someone breaks the silence by starting to answer my question and it keeps on going till everyone has said something. So, keeping my self calm and using extra time helped me to engage the students. This is also based on my previous experiences.

If I have to do the course again I will not change much about the course content or my teaching method. I will improve my teaching lectures though. This time I was not able to speak without looking at my material. It was mostly definitions but after this If I get to teach the course again next year I will be more prepared to speak without using slides. this will help me to make more eye contact with the students and interact better with them. Also I will try to use my own examples from my country because this will help me to get better understanding of the topics.