The win-win of cross-cultural cross-disciplinary collaboration
Language educators and students have always been implicitly aware of the benefits of building bridges between diverse cultures. Often those benefits are the kind that turn up on the travel, cooking, business and style sections of our newspapers. More recently, front page headlines highlighting threats to our wellbeing are implicitly arguing for even more cross-cultural bridges. As climate change, energy security, terrorism, pandemics and food scarcity grab our attention, we are increasing conscious of the importance of addressing these issues through shared understanding. Our chances of success our far greater if we recognize these threats as shared challenges rather than taking an us-versus-them approach.
Meanwhile, as we notice how globalization has transformed our vast small choices into dramatic global impact, we wonder, what is the other side of that coin? Might we make minor changes in the way we work so that, in aggregate, we create a positive global impact while also improving our experience? A pair of professors at Clarion University have found a way to do exactly that: produce a positive impact on the world while improving the experience of language education for students.
As described in their article in The Language Educator, German Professor Eleanor ter Horst and Physics Professor Joshua Pearce at Clarion University conceived their project as a way to promote the type of interdisciplinary learning that leading professional organizations advocate. They believe that the strikingly positive results for student learning obtained in this project will encourage other foreign language educators to adopt a similar interdisciplinary approach to teaching.
In their effort to connect the disciplines of Modern Languages and Physics, they undertook a pedagogical experiment working with a website, Appropedia (www.appropedia.org), which is devoted to global sustainable development and features environmentally friendly projects that can be built using local resources. Appropedia is wiki-based website, similar in structure to Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org), where a large number of participants can create and modify the content directly from their web browsers. Despite its ambition to reach people throughout the world, however,
Appropedia had very little content in languages other than English when we began our experiment. The students’ task was to expand the content in other languages. Initially, German was chosen to establish
the foreign-language template because of the relatively advanced nature of Germany’s sustainability thinking and initiatives.
One student said while summarizing her experience with the project that “Working on Appropedia was an experience of a lifetime. The site increased my knowledge of sustainable development greatly and expanded my understanding of the German language. Everyone should get involved in this site.”
More details on the Clarion project can be found at The Language Educator. Professors ter Horst and Pearce (now at Queens University in Kingston) also welcome inquiries on their project. The Appropedia Foundation is very supportive of this kind of project, and welcomes comments and questions about how projects can be optimized for class-oriented translation projects.