{"id":8969,"date":"2016-02-11T17:03:34","date_gmt":"2016-02-11T17:03:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lantern.humanities.manchester.ac.uk\/?p=8969"},"modified":"2016-02-12T10:05:21","modified_gmt":"2016-02-12T10:05:21","slug":"a-creative-visual-and-intercultural-related-workshop-in-uclan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lantern.humanities.manchester.ac.uk\/?p=8969","title":{"rendered":"A Creative-visual and Intercultural-related Workshop at UCLan"},"content":{"rendered":"

In this post, I will share my experience of giving an intercultural-related workshop by using creative visual methods at the University of Central Lancashire.<\/p>\n

\"\"(Fun facts: the two flowers are Lancashire roses.)<\/em><\/p>\n

Following the IALIC conference in Beijing, UCLan invited Kelly and me\u00a0to give a 3 hours workshop for their students. The main\u00a0purpose of the workshop was to provoke students’ thinking\u00a0about intercultural communication through creative-visual activities. The students were a mixture of diverse cultures, languages, ages and levels (e.g UG and PG). Below, I add\u00a0some pictures of\u00a0them\u00a0participating in the\u00a0workshop.<\/p>\n

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We carried out\u00a0three creative-visual activities: ‘blind’-portrait, a\u00a0map of intercultural\u00a0journey, and film-postcard. The students responded to these activities very positively.\u00a0We were also continuously stunned and inspired by their\u00a0creativity and\u00a0meaning-making ability. Their course leader and lecturer gave us feedback saying that they were happy to see the students who were usually quiet in the class was active in the workshop. Below, I share with you some of the paintings created by these students – as insightful individuals:<\/p>\n

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\nThe intra-personal- and interpersonal- interconnectivity in intercultural communication – by Y.Y.Y<\/p>\n

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\nThe ever-changing ‘weather’ in intercultural communication – by Q.S.<\/p>\n

My main reflections of the experience this time are:<\/p>\n

a) The Audience:
\nIt is not a easy work to always keep ‘who is the audience?’ in mind when we plan for a talk\/seminar\/class. I am practising it and still find it quite challenging.\u00a0I was informed that the students will be a mixture of nationalities with different levels of English language skills. Then, I thought our use of visual methods will be suitable for the audience as the visuals could assist their language\u00a0expressions. It also turns out that the students were very happy with the visual activities.<\/p>\n

However, wearing my own research hat, it is my first-time experience to present\/use my study with a group of audience\u00a0most of whom are not from academic-backgrounds. Although we only use 30 minutes to present our studies in the 3 hours workshop, many of the students still seemed to be more interested in the activities\u00a0than a dry talk. A student also suggested me to\u00a0do\u00a0the activities with them first. When they found the activities interesting and had got more involved with the topic,\u00a0we could then\u00a0give\u00a0a short presentation in the end – serving as a summary, a theoretical debriefing or an extended stimulation.<\/p>\n

b) From Methodology to Pedagogy:
\nIt was a really interesting experience for me to convert my research methods into a practical\u00a0teaching method in the classroom.\u00a0It required me to shift my\u00a0research-oriented thinking to be educational-oriented. When I used\u00a0creative visuals as a research method,\u00a0my focus was on\u00a0maximising the\u00a0insights that they could enable from my participants. Nevertheless, when I used them as a teaching method, I had to hold myself back in the aspect of desiring and attempting to\u00a0dig out interesting answers from the students. On the contrary, I tried to focus on maximising the educational potential (e.g. to provoke thinking, understanding, and reflection) that the activities could enable for the students. With this shift of moving from thinking as a researcher (i.e. What can I\u00a0learn from the data?) to thinking as a teacher (i.e. What can the students learn from the activities?), I changed the way how I asked questions in the activities. I also added\u00a0more prompts for the students to think\/reflect rather than to enable them to give a satisfactory answer right away.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In this post, I will share my experience of giving an intercultural-related workshop by using creative visual methods at the University of Central Lancashire. (Fun facts: the two flowers are Lancashire roses.) Following the IALIC conference in Beijing, UCLan invited Kelly and me\u00a0to give a 3 hours workshop for their students. The main\u00a0purpose of the workshop was to provoke students’ […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":60,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p865eh-2kF","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lantern.humanities.manchester.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8969"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lantern.humanities.manchester.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lantern.humanities.manchester.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lantern.humanities.manchester.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/60"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lantern.humanities.manchester.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8969"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/lantern.humanities.manchester.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8969\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8985,"href":"https:\/\/lantern.humanities.manchester.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8969\/revisions\/8985"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lantern.humanities.manchester.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8969"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lantern.humanities.manchester.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8969"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lantern.humanities.manchester.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8969"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}