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TopIntroduction
A Glimpse of China is an English-taught course for international students of a variety of ethnical, cultural, and academic backgrounds at a university in Shanghai. The 30-hour course offers a brief introduction to Chinese culture, with its focus on the present-day social behavior and value system of the Chinese people. It covers the social, cultural, educational, economic, political, and historical aspects of China. The course had been offered offline to students for 3 years until the outbreak of Covid-19 in 2020 turned it into an online mode.
A virtual classroom could shorten the physical distance and remove the differences in time. However, the absence of immersion in the target culture, which used to be one of the most valued elements of the course, would definitely influence the learning outcomes in a negative way. Though total replacement was impossible, measures had been sought to compensate to whatever extent possible for the loss. The study attempts to assess the effects of the Covid-imposed changes in instructional design and explore possibilities for future improvements.
TopLiterature Review And Theoretical Framework
Social Constructivism
As a theory of learning, Constructivism regards learning as “a process of constructing meaning; it is how people make sense of their experience” (Amineh & Asl, 2015). Constructivism diverges into two schools: (1) cognitive constructivism which maintains that ideas are constructed in individuals through a personal process; and (2) social constructivism where ideas are constructed through interaction with the instructor and other students (Powell & Kalina, 2009).
Vygotsky (1962) lays the foundation for social constructivism and posits that learner construction of knowledge is the product of social interaction, interpretation, and understanding. Thus, learning is not a static product. Instead, it is a process of active knowledge construction where social interaction, cultural influence, and collaboration play important roles. Diversity in learners, such as ethnicity, identity, and biological differences, in the social constructivist light, leads to a renewed view of learning in many aspects.
Social constructivism has shed new light on learning and pervaded the annuals for educational theory in the past several decades. Among all the revolutions this pedagogical paradigm triggered in education, the most enlightening for a cultural course lies in its epistemological basis. The social constructivist epistemology locates knowledge as “a contextually-driven intrapersonal creation” instead of “an objective, context-devoid discovery” (Adams, 2006). This theory of knowledge might sound problematic and cause disputes for education at primary and secondary levels. However, for a learner group of extremely diverse background in higher education who is taught to understand a new culture, the lack of absolute rightness helps students negotiate cultural differences and value conflicts better.
A pedagogical philosophy embracing diversity like social constructivism would naturally lead to culturally inclusive models for instructional design.