Session explores cross-cultural teaching practices

March 14, 2014

University Relations

A session will explore cross-cultural teaching programs on Tuesday, March 25, from 1-2 p.m., at Schaible Auditorium in the Bunnell Building.

Most teachers are clear about the value of cross-cultural learning for students, but fewer have focused on the similar value of such experiences for faculty. Cross-cultural teaching programs help us to:

• think critically about our own teaching practices and the ways in which they may be culturally bound.


• become more aware of how unconscious biases and assumptions may be shaping our classroom environments and pedagogies.


• challenge the ways in which our teaching practices may unknowingly serve to reproduce unequal power structures in our educational institutions.


• learn fresh approaches to teaching that can enliven our own practices.

In this session, participants will become acquainted with a Ford Foundation faculty development program based on Alaska Native ways of teaching and learning and engage in brief exercises based on those approaches. They also will be introduced briefly to key difficult dialogues between Alaska Native communities and academic communities. The session will be based upon the work described in the 2013 publication "Stop Talking: Indigenous Ways of Teaching and Learning and Difficult Dialogues in Higher Education," by Larry Merculieff and Libby Roderick.

For more information, contact Joy Morrison, director of the Office of Faculty Development, at 474-5005 or jfmorrison@alaska.edu.