Suggestion 119. Fill in the cultural gaps with handouts

IF YOU WANT TO:

• Give personal help to students having difficulty

• Help students meet performance objectives

• Fill in important cultural gaps the students may have

Handing out brief excerpts or abstracts of contextual material to fill in any cultural gaps the students may have.

One professor of Near Eastern studies distributes such hand-outs fairly often in a lower division survey course. "I don't expect students to know much about the geography, religions, literature, and social and political institutions of the area we are studying," he says. "However, more and more, I find that I cannot make many assumptions about what the students know about Western culture either."

"This poses some difficulty for me as well as for the students, because I think one of the best ways to teach something `foreign' is by analogy with something that is familiar. Yet, in order to do that, I find that it is increasingly necessary to provide information on the so-called familiar Western examples as well." Among the contextual materials he distributes in excerpted or abstracted form are fables, fairy tales, nursery rhymes, biblical stories or quotations, and Greek mythology.

Limitations on Use of Suggestion

  Discipline:  Humanities and Social Sciences
Course Level:  Undergraduate
 Course Size:  None
        Mode:  None

Copyright 1983 by the Regents of the University of California

Next suggestion