LET’S COLLABORATE!
Today we are presenting our first collaborative project!!! We had never done any collaborative task like this one and we were a bit confused at the beginning. We all prepared very long projects which would take half a lesson to be explained… Yet, once we understood what it was about, we went straight down to work! Basically, the class was divided among groups of five people and each group had to make a very short presentation about a linguist. We got to choose, and for us, Saussure was THE ONE. This way, the whole lesson was taught by us, the students, who learnt from all the other groups.
THE MAKING OF...Here are two of us, trying to get Genially to work… Yes, we did not want to use power point, since we thought we might engage our peers’ attention better with this new tool. It took a while, but the results were worth it!
We got to revise our previous knowledge about Saussure’s dualism. We talked about language being structural, and thus a system of signs which were composed by a signifier and a signified. We reflected upon the properties of such signs: arbitrariness, linearity and value. We discussed the difference between “langue” and “parole”. And we learnt about his influence on several other linguists and artists! We loved the famous picture… “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” So we decided to wink at Saussure, the linguist who united our group, and name our blog: “This is not a blog”.
We used sources such as:
Course in GeneralLinguistics , Ferdinand de Saussure
Ferdinand de Saussure and Structural Linguistics
This is us just before the presentation!
WE LEARNT…
After doing this project, we actually understood the importance that collaborative teaching and learning entailed. The lesson was completely student-centered. All students had an active role: they were either presenters or evaluators of their classmates’ work. We all learnt from each other since we all shared similar funds of knowledge which allowed us to explain the key contents in a way that we knew the rest would understand.
We have decided to do some research and we have learnt a bit more about collaborative learning:
It bases on the fact that knowledge is a social construct and thus it should be approached from a social point of view. This is why learners are encouraged to work both peer-to-peer, which involves students working in pairs to solve problems, and group-to-group, which can be activities done in one class or projects that may take a week, a month, or even a whole semester.
Every day after class, students will enter a society where they will have to interact and cooperate with many different people from many different backgrounds. Thus, collaborative learning is essential not only in terms of teaching a given subject, but also in terms of teaching about life, society and culture. Moreover, they learn and are encouraged to develop schemata for real-life problems’ solving.
If you want to learn more, check the bibliography we used!
Turn to Your Neighbour
Cornell Universtity. Center for Teaching Excellence
Collaborative Learning
No comments:
Post a Comment