What do American and Russian students have in common? Project-based learning helped BYU Russian learners find out.
A typical clasroom project may entail writing a 10-page paper or doing laborious research, but one Russian 201 class recently proved that experiential learning can teach students just as much as traditional projects. In fall 2023, German & Russian Department Chair Jennifer Bown (Russian Linguistics and Pedagogy) introduced her 201 students to a new form of experiential learning called project-based learning. She explains, “The basic idea is that you look for a real-world problem with community partners and [create] a product . . . that has meaning outside of the classroom.” This approach to learning allowed Bown’s students to practice their Russian, learn more about Russian culture, and create useful resources for people on the other side of the world.
The real-world problem for Bown’s students revolved around the lack of intercultural competence (i.e., the ability to effectively interact with different cultures) between Russian and American students. To solve this problem, Bown’s students divided into groups and created informational videos for Russian-speaking students who might study abroad in the United States. The videos highlighted three topics of common cultural importance—personal relationships, food and holidays, and health and wellness—and demonstrated cultural practices that foreign students from Russia might find surprising when coming to the States.
To gather research for their videos, Bown’s students collaborated with conversation partners from Armenia and Russia through the organization SRAS. They met with their conversation partners virtually throughout the semester (speaking completely in Russian) to compare American culture with Russian culture and to discuss the three focus topics mentioned above. Mathilde Oscarson (Art History, French ’25) discovered that she and her conversation parter shared similar ideas and practices around friendships, especially in how they spend time with their friends, but that their biggest cultural differences were in food and health practices, especially home remedies.
The students created their videos (again, speaking completely in Russian) once they had collected enough data. Oscarson’s group compiled a four-and-a-half minute collection of recorded scenes featuring each group member addressing a different cultural topic. They used fun methods like acting and overlayed emojis in their video to convey what they had learned.
Oscarson and other students left the class inspired by what they had done through their projects. Oscarson says, “I developed more empathy for other cultures and other people because it was a culture that I wasn't super familiar with. And I loved my conversation partner for who she was . . . we didn't agree on everything, but we still had so much in common.”
Due to the valuable lessons and real-world experience that her students gained from this learning method, Bown hopes to conduct other language projects in the future. She says, “In most of our classes, students produce things for the professors and other students to look at. What I like about project-based language learning is that there was an external audience for them. And there was a real reason for them to communicate, a real reason for them to do research.”