Present your case: Combining Case Method and Collaborative Teaching

Azuara Guillen, Guillermo ; Neumann, Claus-Peter

En : Las lenguas para fines específicos ante el reto de la Convergencia Europea: VIII Congreso Internacional AELFE, Universidad de La Laguna, 3, 4 y 5 de septiembre de 2009
2009
Servicio de Publicaciones Universidad de La Laguna La Laguna
ISBN: 978-84-7756-804-9
Pp: 133-143

Abstract: In the course of adapting the subjects of our School of Engineering to the European Higher Education Area —and encouraged by the success of a previous experience in innovative teaching (Azuara Guillén, 2007)— we decided to combine the case method (Reyes, 2005) with interdisciplinary, collaborative teaching and apply the two approaches to students of Computer Sciences enrolled both in the compulsory subject “Computer Networks” and in the elective “English”. The main objective of this experiment was to integrate the students’ content-oriented cognitive and critical thinking skills, on the one hand, with their interpersonal and communicative competence, on the other, both components mutually reinforcing each other. In order to give the students ample class time to both work on the case and improve their oral competence in English, we opted for non-co-presential collaboration, teaching the students separately but in parallel, as recommended by Dudley-Evans for non-English medium situations (Dudley-Evans, 2001: 236-237). To implement our project, we adopted a complementary approach (Bauwens & Hourcade, 1997): the Networks instructor presented his students with a networks-related case on which they had to work in teams and eventually present their result orally to their fellow students, while the language instructor provided training in the corresponding discursive and generic conventions in English, both related to the process of discussion and negotiation and to the result, i.e. the final presentations. The final presentations were videotaped and compared with presentations from previous years, given separately in the two respective subjects, so as to measure the degree of improvement. Also, the presentations given in English were compared with presentations in Spanish (of students not enrolled in “English”) in order to determine the impact of the collaborative approach.

Nota: This venture is being supported by the University of Zaragoza as Teaching-Innovation Project PIIDUZ_08_2_253.