全球華人創造力學會
Global Association of Chinese Creativity
FEN-001-2
Building Cultural Awareness through Global Citizenship Education in College EMI General Education Classrooms
Virginia Shen
National Sun Yat-sen University
The topic of global citizenship is pervasive in the realm of education in the 21st century. As globalization continues at such a fast rate, the world is becoming more interconnected. It is important to think about the role each citizen plays in this new dynamic community and be prepared to discuss the challenges the global communities are facing, including disease, poverty, war, and the struggle for world peace. As global citizenship is a way of thinking that helps to increase cultural awareness, resulting in a deeper sense of cultural empathy, it is imperative for instructors to transform the teaching and learning paradigm into a process which not only focuses on equipping students to be successful learners of the target language, but also educate them to be more understanding, sensitive, tolerant, and respectful of their surroundings. Through careful planning of a multicultural curriculum, teachers can seamlessly integrate global citizenship education into general education classrooms.
This study intends to demonstrate how college EMI instructors can effortlessly incorporate effective instructional strategies to develop students’ English language skills to be in pace with Taiwan’s 2030 bilingual nation policy while at the same time, enhance students’ multicultural awareness. Through innovative curriculum design, an array of multicultural projects can be designed and implemented to develop students’ listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills, and prompt them to be keen thinkers and culturally competent global citizens. Suggestions on generating reflective questionnaires to stimulate interactive discussions, sorting out engaging themes to enhance cultural studies for individual and group presentations, as well as organizing first hand multicultural awareness activities will also be addressed.
Keywords: globalization multicultural awareness global citizenship cultural competence
cultural empathy