Abstract
The need to create age-friendly communities and spaces has become increasingly urgent, especially in light of concerns about the wellbeing of rapidly growing aged populations in society. Providing age-friendly continued learning options is both a societal obligation and an opportunity to establish vibrant age-friendly spaces in their own right. Tailored pedagogical techniques can potentially transform foreign language classrooms into age-friendly communities, increasing the quality of the educational experience for both young and aged students. As such, the development of successful techniques would have important implications for education and pedagogy studies, with particular significance for foreign language instruction. Here, in age-mixed courses at an American community college, I employed and evaluated multiple pedagogical approaches for both on-site and online platforms. The courses, whose topics were introductory and intermediate Mandarin Chinese, were comprised of students with widely varying ages in differing compositions. Qualitative and quantitative data in the form of observation, student achievement of learning goals, and student feedback provided a means to judge these approaches. Pedagogical techniques designed to foster collaborative learning appeared to successfully and broadly increase quality of the educational experience in an age-mixed classroom, both in online and on-site settings. The deployment of appropriately-designed pedagogical approaches to construct age-friendly classrooms, as done here, should be of great interest for instructors worldwide, particularly those of foreign language education.
Presenters
Weihsun MaoAdjunct Professor, Language and Communication, Ohlone College, California, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Social and Cultural Perspectives on Aging
KEYWORDS
Continued learning options, Age-mixed courses, American community college, Collaborative learning
