He noted that many Alabamians may have their first contact with foreigners at college, yet they will enter careers that are becoming increasingly international, and their daily lives may involve contact with people from other nations. An international student completing the program may still face communication difficulties, but the budding teacher has learned how to overcome the problem. He or she has learned to enunciate and communicate better and has developed teaching techniques suited to the American classroom. The important thing, Flick said, is for the teacher to draw out the students and, if something does not get the idea across the first time, try another approach. For graduate students such as Fengmei Zheng, an experienced science teacher from China, the class is part of the process of learning from others while sharing her knowledge of chemistry in a lab she teaches.
Chemistry is universal.
Our purpose is to help the graduate students adapt and to be more effective teachers. Despite the course title, Flick said many foreign-born students who do not plan to teach immediately are taking the course to improve their current performance as students and future teaching performance. One who took the class as preparation for teaching, Grffith Nyuydinkong of Cameroon, admitted to being nervous and unsure about how to make himself understood in a freshman math course he is teaching. Flick or his teaching assistant, Allyn Bransby, videotape each student presenting mini-lectures at weekly sessions and help the students critique their performance in individual sessions. Since some students come from cultures in which students are not supposed to speak unless called upon, Flick teaches his students to solicit comments from their students when they are in front of a class.