The series of joint on-line seminars followed the MOU on college-to-college collaboration between Yerevan State University (YSU) Faculty of Sociology and College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Houston (UH) signed in summer 2023.
Dr. Stella Grigorian, Assistant Chair of the Department of Sociology in the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at UH and Dr. Yuliana Melkumyan, Chair of Social Work and Social Technologies of the Sociology Faculty of YSU with the assistance of Regan Bennet (UH) and Lusine Karamyan (YSU) initiated and coordinated the on-line seminars starting from September 18, 2023 until October 11, 2023. These seminars created the opportunity for the students to meet and discusses various topics relevant to their courses: Sociology of Food at UH and Social Work with Migrants at YSU. The collaboration involved organizing online meetings on Microsoft Teams platform, determination of the topics for discussion and pinpoint of mutually available materials for the students to review before the discussions.
The students were divided in 6 mixed groups, each included 12-14 Students both from YSU and UH. Each group was meeting once a week under the supervision of instructors from UH and YSU: 2 meetings on Monday, 2 meetings on Tuesday and 2 meetings on Wednesday. The groups were meeting at 18:00 Yerevan time, which is 9:00 Houston time. Before the beginning of meetings students were asked to work on a short, 2-3 minute “Welcome” video to share with the other students abroad. The videos included notes of welcome to their respective classrooms, universities and cities.
First meeting involved open ended introductions and the guidelines for the next meetings were provided. The topic for the second on-line meeting was “Ethnicity and National Identity”. Students shared their knowledge, told about their ethnicity and national identity and experienced the whole diversity of people present in on-line classroom. The topic for the third meeting was “Gender roles, Food and Migration”. Students discussed gender stereotypes, masculinity and femininity, the difficulties that male/female migrants may face in the hosting societies because of their gender roles. And the topic for the last fourth online meeting was “Class and Economic Stratification”. Students discussed the patterns of stratification in their societies, economic factors pushing/pulling the migration flows and the differences in migration policies in US and Armenia.
It was quite challenging to confirm on the time of meetings because of the time difference between Yerevan and Houston. Another challenge was the language barrier: US students do not speak Armenian, some of Armenian students have advanced knowledge of English, for others it was the first communication experience in English. Some of Armenian students did not study English at all, they speak French or German: for them translation was provided by their peers.
Joint seminars enriched the students’ skills of cross-cultural communication, enlarged their perceptions of diversity in the globalized world and reinforced their knowledge on the issues of stratification, gender, ethnicity, identity, migration and food.
