Bringing Real Life into the Classroom: Learning in Nearness & Distance

This article details and reflects on how student learning was elevated to a new level through inviting real life into the classroom of a course in cultural understanding, aimed at engineering students at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. In preceding years, the learning was organized as two group assignments where students authored a make-believe narrative, wherein a technical project was accomplished in collaboration with a foreign party. This year, the students’ second project was a collaboration with social science students from the West University in Timișoara. The students not only learned facts about Romanian culture, but, more importantly, they became immersed in culture as an experience and a process, observing a turn from culture understood as a reified scientific entity, to culture as an environment or lifeworld. Rather than trying to approach culture at a distance, distance itself became the students’ environment. Only as the students came to accept a state of unknowing, with associated feelings of frustration and anxiety, were they able to dwell in a nearness to Romanian culture quite unlike that in which a “native” dwells. The students’ project solutions evocate this nearness. In previous projects, cultural challenges were hurdles for the technical product that needed solving much like any technical hurdle. This relationship was flipped upside down in the real collaboration, putting technical products in the service of culture rather than the other way around. We show and discuss how our open-ended pedagogical philosophy was critical in unlocking this new level of learning.