SUNY COIL Conference 2018

Faculty from SUNY Oneonta and Universidad del Valle will share their experiences connecting undergraduate and graduate students in Oneonta, New York and Cali, Colombia through courses in language, history, and museum studies. They will discuss: 1) the assessment tools they have used to evaluate their work, 2) the theoretical frameworks that have informed their curricular designs, and, 3) the practical lessons they have learned in their collaborations. The panelists will analyze their practices—over several semesters and across a variety of courses and disciplines—utilizing the COIL framework to cultivate students’ intercultural competence skills as well as to support language acquisition. University students today face pressure not only to be aware of cultural differences, but also to use language pragmatically as they skillfully negotiate diverse cultural settings. These skills are often difficult to obtain in the classroom. COIL is a powerful sociolinguistic teaching tool, which supports faculty efforts to cultivate high-level intercultural communication skills among students. In their collaborations, the panelists have utilized the frameworks and methodologies of the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience and the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) to structure and assess their students’ interactions and projects. Through sustained collaboration and reflective practice, the panelists have been able to refine their methods and identify innovative and effective ways for both undergraduate and graduate students to build intercultural communicative competence and language acquisition. Through their experiences and assessments, the panelists have observed that by participating in COIL courses, students have cultivated language skills that are difficult to obtain in traditional classroom settings. They have advanced their knowledge of U.S. and Colombian history and its connections to contemporary issues. Perhaps most important, they have shared elements of their cultures and identities that are important to them and have explored issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability in new and complex ways.