Cohort March 2022: Faculty of Arts – Ruier Yang, Xiaowen Xu, Qian Wang
Project background
In the project, our team aims to identify ways to better integrate international students into UBC’s learning community by re-designing student assessment and interaction in CHIN 483 002. The team plans to design discussion and reflection activities around assessment to motivate international students to speak up in class and thus increase their voices and confidence in learning.
Project details
The international student population is an integral, yet unique, part of the UBC learning community. Due to their different learning experience before coming to UBC and their diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds, international students cannot be treated as a homogenous group. Among this group, students whose previous learning is more significantly different from that of UBC, who speak English as a second or foreign language, and who are new to Western culture may need more academic support. Courses at the 450+ level in the Chinese Language Program have a very high percentage of international students from Chinese-speaking backgrounds.
Among these courses, one section of CHIN 483 was selected as a pilot course for this project. The re-design in this course will be focused on student assessment task delivery. Instead of making major changes to the content of these tasks, discussion and reflection tasks will be added before and after the delivery of the assessment tasks. For example, students could be invited to discuss the relevancy of a task or contribute to the quiz question banks with an explanation of the academic rationale. They could also negotiate to modify marking rubrics based on their understanding of the requirements by adding or deleting criteria or changing the weight of different criteria. Students’ thoughtful participation will be reflected in their grades in addition to their academic performance on the subject matter. CHIN 483 offers an ideal context for this project as the subject matter covered in this course is modern Chinese literature and the instructional language used is Chinese.
Compared to other subjects, such as Shakespeare or economics, this course is built on a familiar topic for these international students, with an increased depth and width on the topic without a language barrier. As such, there is a higher possibility for the students to be willing to participate in the process and offer their voices in learning. Assessment tasks are chosen as the vehicle for this project as most students pay greater attention to grades and have more incentive to talk and participate if the topic has an impact on their assessment tasks.
In summary, our team would like to explore ways to increase international students’ engagement in CHIN 483 by bringing their own voices into the teaching process and showing them that their voices actually matter, both for their own learning and for this course. Beyond the scope of this course, we hope that students who have taken this re-designed course will have increased confidence in participating in teaching and learning in other UBC courses. Beyond the scope of this partnership, we also hope that the partners will discover new perspectives and view our future teaching or learning from each other’s eyes.