For immediate release: December 15, 2003
For more information, contact Susan Griffith at 216-368-1004 or susan.griffith@case.edu

CLEVELAND—The cameras will simultaneously roll Thursday afternoons in spring semester at Case Western Reserve and Fisk universities as students begin discussions through cyberspace for the collaborative course, "Multicultural Diversity, Social Inequality and the Pursuit of Health in Global Perspective."

As students in each of the classes of Thomas Csordas, chair of Case's department of anthropology, and Irma McClaurin from Fisk's department of sociology sit around seminar tables, they will examine a broad range of critical issues important to the physical and mental health in today's global community.

"This will be like a scene from Through the Looking Glass," says Csordas, as Case students will view and talk in real time to their Fisk counterparts seen on a 30-inch screen, positioned at the end of the table in 201 Mather Memorial along with a camera pointed at the class.

The seminar was developed through a Walter Nord Grant that Csordas received from UCITE and through assistance from the Case Office of Instructional Technology and Academic Computing.

This collaboration in the College of Arts and Sciences is one of the first for the two universities that that formalized a five-year agreement in 2002 to partner in a variety of academic pursuits. Case also is working with Fisk as part of a component of an NSF Advance Career Award at Case to change the cultural climate in the sciences.

Csordas stated that he hopes students gain an understanding of diversity from this experiential learning environment. "We are bringing multiple perspectives to bear across universities, regions, disciplines and cultural backgrounds. What we are trying to do here is not just to make diversity a topic that we are studying but making diversity a feature of the way we are studying," he explained.

The class has the potential to be a core course for a new international collaboration of Case and Fisk with two universities in Brazil that Csordas has been building over the past two years.

Csordas stated that it is "a stepping stone" for the two universities to form an international consortium through the United States-Brazil Higher Education Constorium Project, a program of the U.S. Department of Education's Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education (FIPSE). Fisk and Case will submit a proposal in the United States in March, while the Federal University of Bahia in Salvador (the most highly Africanized par of Brazil) and the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre (a region of strong European ethnic influence) will submit a similar one to their government.

"It has been far too much the case that anthropologists from the first world-the dominant colonial countries-have gone to third world countries and studied them without fully recognizing and articulating with their academic counterparts in those countries," stated Csordas.

He added that he does not see this use of technology as "a more convenient way to poach on the cultural phenomena that we study, but as a way to create more of a symmetry between the academic disciplines we have in anthropology and sociology here and in Brazil."

Setting up the technology and working out class schedules in different time zones has been a challenge, but Csordas sees these collaborations as expanding the horizon of education. "The very fact that you are moving the educational experience outside of the classroom can be an impetus for students to engage in issues in a way that combines the intellectual and the pragmatic," said Csordas.

In addition to classroom work, the students at each university will team up to present co-authored term papers that they will research and write through the use of Blackboard and other computer technologies.

Because of the nature of anthropology with roots in the social sciences as well as the humanities, Csordas can envision this class becoming a model for expanding other campus classrooms beyond their four walls and into experiential learning situations at Fisk and other places around the world.

About Case Western Reserve University

Case is among the nation's leading research institutions. Founded in 1826 and shaped by the unique merger of the Case Institute of Technology and Western Reserve University, Case is distinguished by its strengths in education, research, and service. Located in Cleveland, Case offers nationally recognized programs in the Arts and Sciences, Dentistry, Engineering, Law, Management, Medicine, Nursing, and Social Sciences. http://www.case.edu.

 

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