The Shanghai Municipal Education Commission recently announced the 2021 list of English-taught Demonstration Courses for International Students in Shanghai Universities. Two courses from Shanghai Normal University made the list.
Eighty courses from 25 universities, including Fudan University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Tongji University and East China Normal University, were selected for the list.
The two courses are "The Rise and Future of Global Cities" by Professor Feng Xiang from the School of Environmental and Geographical Sciences, and "Cultural Heritage Protection and Development" by Professor Wang Yuan from the School of Film, Television and Media.
"The Rise and Future of Global Cities" course led by Feng's team is a professional development course for undergraduates, including international students. The curriculum team implements a student-centered teaching concept and adopts flipped classrooms, a task-driven method and other teaching methods.
In the field research section, through the project-based teaching method, students can go deep into the representative areas of Shanghai's urban development, and investigate the development status of global urban construction. Students are encouraged to raise questions, analyze problems, and use modern tools to solve complex practical problems.
The "Cultural Heritage Protection and Development" course led by Wang's team is also a professional development course for undergraduates, including international students. The curriculum implements a teaching philosophy of "knowledge transfer, ability cultivation and value guidance".
It focuses on the education of historical civilization concepts based on the analysis of the essence of cultural heritage, and the cultivation of innovative awareness and capacity based on the creative transformation and innovative development of cultural heritage.
The course is based on the Bloom teaching method, which uses a combination of task-driven teaching, project-based teaching, heuristic teaching, flipped classroom teaching and lecture teaching.
Combined with the characteristics of cultural heritage, the course team has developed teaching methods with curriculum characteristics to guide students to pay attention to observation, think deeply, discover problems, and explore principles.
In recent years, Shanghai Normal University has vigorously promoted the construction of English-taught majors and courses for international students, and plans to develop nearly 50 main courses in four majors, including the human geography and urban and rural planning undergraduate program and the finance postgraduate program, in 2024.
