Project Summary:
In this GLE project, the central assignment for collaboration enabled students to explore the question, “How does one represent their city to someone who has no context for it?” DePaul students then produced a document meant to convey their impressions of Chicago to students at the University of Georgia in Tbilisi, and vice versa. The goal was to write a piece of creative nonfiction that explains an aspect of the students’ respective cities to someone who has never been there before. Students picked an aspect that revealed something important and defining about Chicago. The main idea was that the aspect the students chose had to be both interesting to write about and revealing to their partner in Tbilisi.
Project Length:
Technology Tools Use:
Interaction Mode:
- Asynchronous
- Synchronous
- Both
Learning Outcomes:
- Students prepared for a complex, globally interconnected world by giving them direct contact with peers from another culture and from a vastly different urban experience.
- Students deepened their understanding of themselves, their own city and their own culture.
- Students were offered keener insights into how they are perceived and how they perceive others.
- Students strived to be better writers, researchers, critics and citizens.
Faculty Feedback:
"Salome is a wonderful collaborator, with whom I’d be honored to work again. I thought our first collaboration went well, but this year I was blessed to have a particularly engaged and outward-looking group of students. One thing I learned this year was to give students more agency in the joint sessions. " ~Miles Harvey
"The highlight for my students was to leave their comfort zone and conduct their work in a foreign language. At first, they struggled a lot but eventually most of them felt comfortable with the process. They loved the exchange of essays; my students found the comments from their partners beneficial and inspiring. Getting to know people from different cultures made them happy too, with one of them saying this experience, in some ways, equaled studying abroad." ~Salome Ugulava
Miles Harvey
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Institution: DePaul University
Discipline: English (Creative Writing)
Course name: English (Creative Writing)
Salome Ugulava
Institution: University of Georgia
Discipline:Journalism
Course name: In-Deapth Writing