Doctors of the World Special Lecture

Posted on November 4, 2010 by Jodias

Speaker: Ms. Prune Helfter

Topic: The work of Médecins du Monde (Doctors of the World)

Location: Sagamihara Campus, Building E-101

Date: Friday, November 19, 2010

Time: 1:10 PM to 2:40 PM (3rd period)

Ms. Prune Helfter, the General Manager of Médecins du Monde Japon, will speak about her international humanitarian aid organization whose volunteers provide medical care for vulnerable people all over the world. She graduated from the Paris Institute of Political Science, Essec Business School and the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations. She has a PhD in Economics and is also a former research student at Kyoto University.

As Doctors of the World serves culturally diverse populations around the world, they face challenges presented by the sociocultural differences among those groups and in the teams implementing the projects, who are themselves multicultural, made up of expatriated volunteers as well as local staff. How can these cultural factors be dealt with in the humanitarian field in order to maximise the efficiency of the projects and the benefits for the targeted population? Ms. Helfter will speak about how Doctors of the World has been struggling to address these issues.

We’d like to encourage IE Core teachers  to find online materials (perhaps YouTube videos and articles) that connect the content of the talk with the IE themes, and use those materials to help prepare students for the lecture. Here are some possible connections with each of the IE themes:

IE I themes
** Memories and Childhood ** — Children at risk
** Urban Life ** — Street children in cities & how they can be helped
** Food ** — World hunger; its causes and possible solutions
** Travel ** — Traveling in the capacity of a volunteer

IE II themes
** Technology ** — Simple technologies that save lives in vulnerable populations
** The workplace ** — Working  for humanitarian organizations/ NGOs & NPOs
** Geography ** — Introducing the countries where Doctors of the World operate
** Biography ** — Presenting people associated with humanitarian organizations

[ The site “PeaceWomen Across the Globe” is highly recommended.]

IE III themes
** Cross-cultural values ** — Intercultural issues relevant to working in NGOs/ NPOs
** The media ** — How humanitarian organizations get their message across (PSAs, websites, etc.)
** The environment ** —  The relationship between the environment and health
** Relationships ** — Relationships among people who work for humanitarian organizations and beneficiaries

When you identify materials that you find relevant, please pass them on to Joseph Dias so that he can share them with other teachers in the program.

Posted in News | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Doctors of the World Special Lecture

Activity to help prepare students for Médecins du Monde lecture

Posted on November 3, 2010 by Jodias

One of our Core teachers, Mr. James Broadbridge, has generously shared an activity he devised to help prepare students for the event. It involves watching a YouTube video about the activities of Médecins du Monde and doing some related exercises, which are included in this document.

Mr. Graham Courtney has kindly provided us with a concise summary of the content which appears on the website of Doctors of the World.

Doctors of the World has a YouTube Channel that features videos about its recent work in Nepal, Haiti, and the Gaza. Check out some of these videos before Friday’s talk. Come to the talk prepared with questions to ask the speaker.

Posted in IE Core | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Activity to help prepare students for Médecins du Monde lecture

Video editing workshops for teachers

Posted on July 12, 2009 by Jodias

On June 27th and July 11th video editing workshops were held by representatives of Apple Japan (Satoe Fujita and Azusa Matsumoto) at the Sagamihara and Shibuya campuses, respectively. Nearly 20 teachers, teachers’ assistants, and Foreign Language Library staff members attended the workshops with enthusiasm. Participants learned how to create a video, insert transitions, add voiceover, and export the video file as a podcast. Much was covered in a short period of time. Hopefully, the lessons learned will translate into a richer variety of learning materials for students in the near future. Click here to view photos of the workshops.

Posted in News | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Welcome to the 2009/2010 academic year!

Posted on April 10, 2009 by Jodias

Gregory Strong and I would like to welcome you to the IE Program Web site and wish you all the best for this academic year, which brings many changes and challenges. Numerous improvements have been made to the IE Core and Writing guides, and we’ll be introducing  a new, improved IE Listening course that we call “IE Active Listening,” which will be far more interactive than the previous course and include an important self-access component. The computer network throughout the university has been updated to Windows Vista and a new CALL (computer-assisted language learning) Calabo system has been installed, with some excellent new features

We would like to encourage Core teachers to tie in to their course a field trip to a TIP (Tokyo International Players) production of “Oliver!,” a highly accessible musical version of Charles Dickens’ novel Oliver Twist. There will be six performances from May 14th until the 17th. That will make it possible for students to choose Oliver Twist as the subject of their first book report. Graded reader versions of the novel are available and the entire novel can be accessed through Project Gutenberg. Tie-ins can be made with IE themes at all three levels: IE 1 (Memories and Childhood, Urban Life, Food [Glorious Food!]; IE II (The Workplace, Biography); and IE III (Relationships and, possibly, Cross-Cultural Values).

As in the past, our department is offering, in cooperation with Hertford College, Oxford University, a three-week study tour to beautiful, historic Oxford, England. Explanation sessions about the program will be given at both campuses later this month. Students who are interested in participating in the program can view podcasts featuring interviews with teachers and students involved in the program in past years.

Busy Bee

Both students and faculty should feel free to contact Professor Strong or myself should they have any concerns, questions, or problems regarding IE courses and IE seminars. As the last of the cherry blossoms fall from the trees and blow in the warm spring breeze, let’s start the semester with renewed energy, spirit, and hope that every day will bring something wonderful and joyfully unexpected.

Joseph Dias (with Gregory Strong) — IE Program Coordinators

Posted in News | Leave a comment

“Self-directed listening” sites

Posted on February 6, 2009 by Jodias

Use the following sites for the self-directed listening part of the new IE Active Listening course:

Listening Resources for Language Learners (many of these include transcripts)

Challenging Listening Materials Intended for Natives

These videos may be used for various tasks at each level of IE Active Listening:

IE I Active Listening

Memories and Childhood

Urban Life

Food

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSWJmq4XC2s

Travel

IE 2 Active Listening

Technology

The Workplace

Biography

IE 3 Active Listening

Relationships

Cross-Cultural Values

Media

Environment

You might want to make use of the some of the following resources related to environmental issues as alternatives to YouTube:

  • Environmental Justice Foundation Short Films are from an organization tries to make a world where the natural environment can sustain the communities that depend upon it.
  • Discovery Channel features amazing stories and experiences from the world of science, natural history, anthropology, survival, and engineering.
  • Greenpeace International offers videos describing environmental problems and their solutions.
  • National Geographic has videos on environmental issues and animal-related news.
  • Earthrise is a program featuring developments in Asia and includes stories about environmental issues.
  • BBC Reel  presents engaging short videos on a wide variety of social and cultural topics.
  • Scientific American introduces a variety of environmental issues through videos at its website, including a census on jaguars in Central America.
Posted in IE Active Listening | Tagged , , | Comments Off on “Self-directed listening” sites

The new IE Active Listening Course

Posted on June 26, 2008 by Jodias

From the spring semester of 2009 we will introduce a revamped IE Listening section, which we will call IE Active Listening. To summarize the changes:

  • Although the first and last classes of the semester will take place as plenaries, for all the classes in between, each half of the class will alternate between a week of classroom instruction followed by a week of self-access or outside-of-class cooperative learning. Therefore, the size of each class–except for the initial and final ones–will be reduced by half.
  • The smaller number of students in the classes will make it possible for teachers to introduce listening tasks, giving students the opportunity to take a more active approach to learning.
  • Students will prepare for tasks outside of class and work on self-access materials that will be made available for each of the IE themes. A management system will keep a record of the students’ engagement with the listening materials, and summaries will be accessible to teachers.
  • Eventually, we will work toward having teachers and students themselves author listening materials that will be made available to other students in their class, or program-wide, after they pass a vetting procedure. To achieve this, we are having software developed that will allow for the easy creation of listening material using embedded YouTube videos and podcasts.

Please refer to a PowerPoint presentation explaining the new program in detail.

Joseph Dias

Posted in IE Active Listening, News | Tagged , , | Comments Off on The new IE Active Listening Course

Back again by popular demand !!

Posted on June 25, 2008 by Jodias

I’m pleased to announce the re-opening of our new website. We apologize for the inconvenience caused to you when our former server conked out. Our new web host has an excellent reputation and we will employ redundant back-up systems.

If you are reading this now, you should be congratulated for finding the new location of the IE Website. The site, designed by the computer whizes at Cyber Synergy, will provide the same useful information as our previous site, along with a lot more functionality. With the customized open-source software “Word Press” behind it, teachers will be able to create their own pages to publish class assignments and announcements, and they will be able to create blogs for their classes. Students will be able to join class blogs and comment on entries written by their classmates. As the site offers rss feeds, it is possible to “subscribe” to blogs, news, etc. and read new postings on your favorite news reader, such as iGoogle. Teachers will be able to make their profiles available to others and even upload podcasts to their personal spaces. We hope that teachers and students will use these features to the utmost.

Joseph Dias

Posted in News | Comments Off on Back again by popular demand !!