Educational Vision
The design promotes the WSMC mission and programs.
Thumbnail of a Group function.
"My teaching vision is ever-evolving, but one thing never changes—my commitment to help students find their path to academic and career success."
University of Oregon, Eugene, OR
World Studies Media Center, 2012.
by Ted Stahl, St. Louis University
Vision for a 21st-century Foreign Language Curriculum
In my vision for language teaching in higher education, the curriculum is culturally responsive, proficiency-oriented, standards-based, student-centered, instructor-guided, and technology-enhanced. I aim to deliver the optimal curriculum that leads to communicative proficiency and inspires students to think critically. As an instructional leader, I strive to inspire other teachers to find deep fulfillment in their craft and encourage them to invest in their practice throughout their careers.
I want to empower language students and teachers to achieve their full potential. I aim to cultivate learning environments that are welcoming, dynamic, engaging, and rewarding. My overarching goal is to enhance and diversify teaching and learning with computers, digital and social media, telecollaboration, and innovative instructional design.
I am a teacher, language pedagogy specialist, content creator, artist, and presenter. I am a "learning experience designer" of world languages and cultures, helping language students and teachers be successful in an ever-changing world.
I use a hybrid approach that encompasses constructivist, cognitive, behaviorist, and humanistic pedagogy. Language is a human function. Immersion and practice are inherently essential to the second language acquisition process. For this reason, I use media, computers, and telecollaboration to deliver a more dynamic, engaging, and transformative language learning experience.
Education comprises many learned and shared experiences. Lectures and textbooks will always have value in teaching and learning. In the 21st century, however, students use the internet, smartphones, and social media to learn and better understand the world. They fully expect education to be visual, interactive, accessible, and retrievable.
Transformative Learning Experiences and High-impact Teaching Practices
One of my goals is to inspire and motivate teachers to blend media and computers with traditional models to make instruction more dynamic, engaging, effective, and relevant. Education should be life-changing. Teachers must be inspired by their work and the influence they have on students. Instructional development requires long and short-term strategies, patience, and persistence.
Internationalization Vision for Higher Education
In today's increasingly globalized society, higher learning institutions have a responsibility to provide students with opportunities to learn about the world.
My vision for internationalizing U.S. secondary and post-secondary schools focuses on bringing global engagement and collaborative learning into the classroom. Through cooperative teaching partnerships with EFL instructors abroad, EFL and language teachers can cultivate optimal immersion scenarios for their students. When teachers learn to develop mutually beneficial relationships with peer colleagues abroad, they can create new transcultural learning communities that enable language teachers and students to benefit from the partnership linkages. They gain something of immense value while giving something back and disseminating the institution's name and brand abroad.
Example of Educational Vision in Practice
One example of my creative approach to teaching medical translation, courtroom interpreting, and contrast analysis courses is through a subtitling and overdubbing production projects. I recommended a series of activities that included a collaborative subtitling project, an overdubbing project, and an assessment in the form of a synchronously-delivered and audio-recorded simultaneous courtroom interpreting performance. The subtitling activity below was designed for a course on court interpreting. The activity was set up and implemented as follows:
- Three or four students were assigned per group.
- Each group received a preformatted digital video clip of a courtroom trial scene approximately 10 minutes in duration.
- Each unique scene contained linguistically rich courtroom dialogue, complex witness testimony, and legal terminology suited for students in a court interpreting course.
- The instructor reviewed and rated each clip in terms of difficulty and assigned one to each group. The clips were similar in text length and clip duration.
- I downloaded the publicly accessible text file of the screenplay (in English) for each scene.
- I created project folders for each group with the preformatted video clip, a PDF copy of the screenplay text in English, and a template for the subtitles.
- The group task was to interpret and subtitle the entire clip.
- The instructor showed the produced clips to all of the student groups.
- The instructor showed the clips with the original subtitles, which students had not yet seen.
- Students and teachers openly analyzed the translations for each group's work.
Students were overwhelmingly receptive to the activity. They felt engaged, challenged, and inspired, and their achievements exceeded expectations. It took one 50-minute class session to train students to use the titling and narrating tools in Adobe Premiere to complete the project. The rest they did themselves. The activity was engaging, purposeful, and relevant. The student translations turned out to be significantly more accurate than the original subtitles of each film.
Overdubbing digital media is also engaging and fun for language and translation students. Project-based production activities render relevant products that students can see, appreciate, share, and potentially use in their e-portfolio and capstone projects to demonstrate competencies in specific areas.
This example reflects my vision for education: to empower students, empower teachers, and enhance the curriculum quality in an engaging, inspiring, and challenging learning environment.