Hi Sophie
I understand your problem, and think I may have something for you to try.
I teach at a South African University and am using TBL in very diverse
groups - multicultural as well as multilingual. Although we have been a
democracy for 15 years now, the legacy of apartheid lingers on and people
are still racially divided.
I mix the teams up colour-wise and strengths-wise. So, it may be that there
will be white students from excellent schools in the same team as black
students from disadvantaged township schools, EFL and EAL in the same team.
These are people who would normally not even talk to each other.
Therefore, the very important thing is to get the teams to bond, so I spend
the first class, when they are in their brand new teams, entirely on
ice-breakers and team-bonding exercises (I can let you have a list of what I
do) that I find work very well. I invest time on teaching the teams what a
team is, time-management in a team, conflict resolution, team roles that are
swapped for every task to avoid social loafing and how to communicate using
"I"-language. I do all this in a fun way so that there is a lot of laughter
and enjoyment. At the same time I explain to the students what I doing and
what they are learning in the process. I do all this right at the beginning
of the course and have found that the teams gel and work very well after
that for the entire term.
I have used Prof. Dee Fink's taxonomy of significant learning to design my
course, which contains the element of CARING. I go through the whole
taxonomy and explain to the students what I am doing, what the course is
about and why it is so different from the other courses they have. I pause
at the Caring section of the taxonomy and we brainstorm what caring can mean
and then I explain how we are going to make this a core value of each team
coupled with the African philosophy of Ubuntu (caring). Then the teams do
tasks where they are given scenarios where caring has to be applied and as a
team they have to work out how to do this, e.g. a team member's mother has
suddenly died, how will the team respond? This takes the team through a
discussion of the different cultural approaches to death and mourning, and
then they come up with an appropriate response that is caring in terms of
that person's personal Discourse.
This is time-consuming, but without getting the team to bond first, TBL
would be, in my opinion, a meaningless exercise.
I just want to share some of the comments made by my students in yesterday's
first Information Literacy TBL class:
"I really enjoyed class today. I actually thought it was an odd way of
teaching but very effective".
"...for the first time I gave feedback and spoke in front of the class, not
being shy of what I wrote."
"It was great to listen to the other student and what their dreams entailed.
One realises not everyone is the same and there is always more to learn
about one another."
"Today's class was a pleasant surprise. It was fun getting to know group
members a little better".
"I thought the class was interesting and did well for team-building. I also
didn't feel the need to fall asleep coz I was actually having fun!"
"It was a new way of learning, experiencing other people and what they are
interested in...We get to know each other and get comfortable around each
other and their beliefs. It was nice to get to know other people from
different groups and diversities. Time flies when you're having fun".
"I am a natural introvert, so it's very hard for me to be interactive and do
these kinds of activities, but as we began, I started warming up to the
group and wanted to be a part...I didn't feel like I was exposed or forced
to do something".
"The dreaming exercise was a good starting point as everyone of us has
dreams...realising once again we may not all be the same age, colour,
gender, but we are made-up all the same. We all dream."
"In today's class I really had fun learning about other people in my class,
what they do and what kind of things they like e.g. clothes, food, music. I
also loved talking about the different music that my group listen to cause
there's other kinds of music that I didn't know about".
"I was always tense in class coz I'm that someone with low self-esteem but
after this class all that is gone. I'm a new person...I am proud of who I am
and where I come from..."
I think the comments above (there are many more in similar vein, not a
single negative comment)indicate the value of spending time getting the team
to bond and to break down barriers.
Hope this helps a bit.
Regards
Bernie Millar
Cape Peninsula University of Technology
Bellville Campus
Cape Town
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