Senior Lecturer Dr. Shelley A. Saltzman and Lecturer Brittany Ober, from the American Language Program at Columbia's School of Professional Studies, traveled to Universidad Panamericana, Guadalajara, Mexico in early January to present a weeklong seminar on teaching in English. In the seminar, entitled “A Pedagogy of Student Engagement,” Saltzman and Ober shared recent research literature and best practices to foster active learning in a second-language classroom, including but not limited to promoting interaction, incorporating multimodality, and encouraging critical and divergent thinking.
The 24 seminar participants represented a wide variety of disciplines, including Engineering, Corporate Communications, Strategic Marketing, Economics, History, Law, and Statistics, among others. Though teaching in a university in Mexico, these professors provide instruction to their students in English. The seminar provided an opportunity for them to hone their English language skills as well as reflect on how the pedagogical concepts presented and practiced could be applied in their own teaching contexts.
At the end of the seminar, the participants formally presented projects and received a certificate of completion from Universidad Panamericana’s Academic Vice Chancellor Rafael Hernandez, who spoke of the importance of internationalization, and proudly announced UP’s collaboration with SPS’s Nonprofit Management program.
