CHALLENGES
Students are highly challenged by the high expectation from instructors and from the course’s significance. These are some examples of how those expectations manifested:
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Be responsible for vital decisions on the course development (leadership): constant discussion and debate to come to agreements.
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Have intensive workload: Students are expected to write research proposals, ideate the syllabus, visual journal of the course.
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Thrive for excellence: instructors hold on high standards of working and keep motivating students to improve.
Teachers had to confront with the difficulties of facilitating students to take the driver's seat. The struggles included:
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Finding balance between guiding totally inexperienced students and giving them autonomy to think and make decisions.
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Finding ways to incorporate teaching rhetoric into the process of building a course teaching Rhetoric
ACHIEVEMENTS
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Successfully incorporate the Vietnamese students’ perspectives into the course designing.
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Students are able to apply and improve rhetorical skills through in-class and take-home activities.
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This module tests the efficiency of this course co-designing model for further adjustment and application.
ACHIEVEMENTS
The Advantages of this model
to students and faculty members
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A plenty of autonomy for students to think and make vital decisions and have the strong sense of ownership and engagement.
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A challenging and healthy environment with constant discussions, debates that push students to practice and improve skills like teamwork and rhetorical skills.
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Both instructors and students have to confront with difficulties
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Incorporate the perspectives of Vietnamese students.
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Keep on challenging the boundaries.
The Disadvantages of this model
to students and faculty members
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There is a lack of clear instruction from the beginning, leading to the confusion and being lost of students.
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Inexperienced students have to bear too much responsibility and specialized work.
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The uncertainty of everything exhausts both students and faculty in the long run.
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The plentiful autonomy causes messy discussion and domination of some strong characters.
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The number of students is sometimes too large to engage everyone in the discussion or debate.
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Working in small groups might take away the knowledge gaining opportunities as each group works on different topics.
What Co-Designers want to share
with Faculty:
Playing the role of co-designers in this kind of module is not an easy task for students, particularly when they entered the module without being well prepared for it. Hence, a good introduction of the co-designing module and clarification of expectation from faculty are crucial. Also, while taking the driver-seat, students hope to receive mental support from instructors through emotional check-ins and small conversations to share our concerns about the course. In the process of working on the plans for future course, students feel the need of a balance between designing and learning, which means providing students with foundation knowledge before giving designing tasks will probably increase their productivity and quality of work.
We are now at the end of the module 3 - Co-Design Rhetoric. We feel so grateful for having Pam and KinHo as our instructors and co-worker, who eventually lead the “don’t-know-how-to-swim” students swimming through the ocean.