Enjoying The Ride with KINHO and PAM

Welcome on board!

Week 1:

Designing Rhetoric course is a new concept to not only co-designers, but also to most of the faculty members. Before coming to Vietnam, Pamela Stacey worked in many intensive English teaching positions in Kapi’olani Community College, University of Hawai'i and Seoul, Korea while Psychology and Neuroscience are KinHo Chan’s areas of expertise. They shared the same opinion on prototype testing and looked for a better way to make the most out of the Co-Design Year of Fulbright University Vietnam. This module is a new challenge for them since they have to find the balance between helping Co-Designers taking the driver seat and keeping the class effectively moving forward.

“I always test out things in my courses, collect feedback from my students, and try to improve things in the following semester. Following this model wouldn’t make the Co-Design Year special in any way for me – it would simply be business as usual. By inviting students to get in on the ground level and contribute real input into the original form of the course, I had hoped to get more out of this year.”

(Pamela Stacey)

“...whatever comes out of this module needs to be a course that any student, interested in writing and reading or not, can buy into.”

(Pamela Stacey)

They came to the first class with excitement, also nervousness of being unsure about their uncompleted course schedule. Class started with a high level of energy as students excitedly joined ice-breaking debate. During the first class, Pam and KinHo felt happy with students’ engagement and quality of discussions, and even felt inspired by some of the discussion points that came out of students regarding course objectives during Co-design year vs future years. The good start brightened Pam and KinHo’s feeling about what would be in the following days. However, KinHo still had some concerns about students’ awareness of the co-designing role and students’ performance as not every students showed the same level of engagement.

KinHo said that students were seem to engage in the course but might be unsure about the difference in the role of co-designers and primarily students, however, students are still willing to explore more about the role of co-designers. Students were in high level of engagement with the discussion and obtain certain critical skills.

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Week 2:

After the first week, Pam left class feeling like we had momentum going forward, but her enthusiasm was tempered after reading the first few co-designer feedback submissions. One even noted that students felt they were “lost” and “losing momentum,” quite the opposite of how she felt. Consequently, they spent almost an entire morning to discuss how students would to spend the next 3 weeks on this course. The result made both Pam and KinHo disappointed because many of students drew away from their co-designing role and wanted to get back to prototype format.

Worried that students might withdraw from the “co-designer” role, they tried to make a clarification on the purpose and objective of the course and on the role of co-designers and the expectation from faculty by an “inspiring speech”. The outcome of the final blind-vote was a miracle and a relief when 17/18 students agreed to try co-designing and only one voted “maybe”.

“The students overwhelmingly embraced this idea, which was a huge relieve because we didn’t really have a plan B.”

(KinHo Chan)

When mentally preparing for this module, they knew it was likely that they would encounter at least one crisis, if not more. Yep, probably!

I'm tired.

The feedback system did not work well throughout the course and it caused worries for both Pam and KinHo.

“We reminded them that even “it’s going fine” is a useful point of feedback, but as of 9 AM Wednesday morning, only 7/18 students have submitted feedback for Tuesday’s class. I’m hoping that most of the others fall into the “it’s going fine” category, rather than a less hopeful “I’m completely unengaged from the module” category.”

(Pamela Stacey)

Also,

“I really want this to be a collaborative effort. I want the co-designers to write the course description and syllabus, set the learning objectives, pick the readings, plan the lessons, design the in-class activities, come up with homework assignments, and even propose mechanisms for assessment. I am reasonably confident that Pam and I have thought enough about the process to effectively guide them to do all of these and produce a high-quality product.”

(KinHo Chan)

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Week 3:

In addition to giving students nearly a week to write research proposals regarding various vital elements of Fulbright Rhetoric Course, Pam and KinHo also organized some workshops on Literature Review and Teamwork to help students finish their first academic writings.

“Afterwards, we held a one-hour “poster session” style readout. A few undergraduate faculty members attended to see what the students had produced. During the readout, I was impressed by how much the groups I gave feedback to had added or changed in their proposals. They produced good work, and I hope they can recognize how much their writing skills have developed through contributing to the proposal project.”

(Pamela Stacey)

It was remarkable that the class was extremely productive in reshaping students’ expectations for this course .Progress was made speedily up until the point of making a decision on the final products. For the first time in the course, Pam and KinHo had different ideas and couldn’t come to an agreement. The discussion seemed like it would never end, so they decided to continue the topic by doing a 3-corner debate the next morning. After long hours of using rhetoric to convince others, KinHo’s group and Pam’s group decided to compromise with the group of a majority of students. The result was to have two final products: The Syllabus and The Visual Journey.

“Despite the chaos and what seemed initially like the worst-case scenario outcome, the debate provided a forum for all opinions to be clearly communicated. Rather than merely reaching a compromise, I would argue that we collectively carved a new path that maximized the strengths and minimized the weaknesses of all three original ideas.”

(KinHo Chan)

Everyone, eventually, clearly agreed that Co-designing is a really important and challenging task to be responsible for. Since nobody could predict what is waiting ahead - both co-designers and instructors certainly learned and grew a lot out of this journey. As Pam and KinHo believed from the beginning, co-designing is a new, unique and challenging way of spending the Co-Design Year to expose students to high level of deep thinking, heavily trains their critical mindset and importantly add more values to the unique Co-Design Year.

If you want to have a more insightful perspective, take a look at our beloved KinHo's diary.