Exercise for Teachers | Global Perspectives

Self-led Exercise for Teachers:

Implementing the Affective Pedagogy for Global Perspectives framework in your own classroom

How can course instructors apply the Affective Pedagogy for Global Perspectives framework to their own classes?

By completing this exercise, course teachers can (1) become more aware of the affective aspect of Global Perspectives as a pedagogical aim, and (2) re-shape or create new pedagogical activities aimed to evoke positive affective engagement.

Following the procedure of “backward design” (Wiggins and McTighe, 2005), we encourage course lecturers to define learning outcomes, devise assessments, and develop instructional plans with reference to the values, knowledge, skills and attitudes underlying students’ global awareness and intercultural competence. In the project supported by this Teaching Development Grant, the project team engaged participating lecturers from a broad range of disciplines in a collaborative process of defining the globally-oriented cognitive and attitudinal learning outcomes of their course activities. They were then assisted to adopt pedagogical activities to teach relevant content that would also increase affective engagement among students, ranging from drama-based pedagogy to experiential activities to simulate a variety of experiences, and to assess their effects on students’ cultural knowledge and associated affective outcomes. The project activities illustrated the broad utility of our pedagogical framework for teaching global content across disciplines.

Step 1: Defining your class’s Cognitive and Affective Outcomes for Global Perspectives

The learning of global perspectives goes beyond acquiring knowledge about global issues to also focus attention on accompanying affective outcomes. In addition to knowledge, can you aim to facilitate students’ cultivation of positive attitudes towards diverse people and cultures around the globe? The lecturer’s role is that of a facilitator and role model (de Leo, 2010), helping move students from exposure to global content into cultivation of positive global attitudes.

Briefly write down for yourself:

What is your culture-relevant Cognitive goal? Specifically, what is the Global Perspective-related content or knowledge that you want your students to learn?
What are your culture-relevant Affective goals? Specifically, do you hope your students will become more (all or some of these): Curious about the traditions of other cultures; Eager to interact with people from different cultural backgrounds; Would enjoy learning more about the history and traditions of other cultures; Feel that they can understand the perspectives of people from other cultures; Feel a sense of respect and tolerance for people from other cultures?

Step 2: Designing for Affect-Evoking and Affectively Engaging Classroom Activities.

Affective pedagogical activities (Zembylas, 2016; Tschakert, 2018) are those that actively engage students’ emotion, sensitivity and sensory perceptions. Such an approach may be particularly important for developing students’ global perspectives by stimulating their curiosity about, and engagement with, other cultures and encouraging positive attitudes towards diversity.

An important piece of new knowledge gained from this Teaching Development Grant was that positive and sympathetic affective engagement in the classroom activity was associated with gains in both affective and cognitive cultural competence, while negative affective emotions were associated with loss of affective cultural competence specifically.

Briefly write down for yourself:

Will your activity be more stimulating and engaging by being concrete, interactive, and emotionally evocative? What specific kinds of affect do you intend for your activity to evoke? (Please take a look at our advice below)

Emotions Advice

When aiming for an increase in students’ affective cultural competence, we recommend that learning activities should be planned with these emotions in mind:

Emotions to aim for:

Positive and Sympathetic emotions were associated with an increase in Affective Cultural Competence.

Emotions to avoid:

Negative emotions were associated with a decrease in Affective Cultural Competence, so should be treated with care. Activities may want to actively avoid, or quickly resolve, emotions such as:

Treat with caution:

Negative emotions that lead to epistemic search may be employed cautiously; they had neutral but trending-negative effects on cognitive and affective cultural competence.

Summary: A positive learning environment that is supportive and enjoyable, encourages active learning and emphasizes curiosity, critical self-reflection and collaborative action is also an environment conducive to intercultural understanding. By being more aware of the affective goals and affective effects of your teaching and learning activities, we hope you can more successfully facilitate students to having the positive attitudes needed by our new global citizens!