Mike’s reflections on the teleconference
Nov 6th, 2008 by lynn
I enjoyed our discussion with Tehren University on Tuesday morning. I have only done a teleconference once before in high school and it was with another school in New York. It was interesting to see the atmosphere for a school overseas. There was not too much of a difference as far as structure goes from what I could see, just more formal.
The questions that were asked from both sides were all interesting and gave me a good sense of what students abroad are thinking about us. In other words, it was nice to not hear what was going on in Iran through a news station. It was interesting to hear comments made and questions asked about how news is delivered to us about what is going on in the middle-east.
The question that stuck out the most to me was the one asked about how Hollywood projects the Arab society to Americans. Is it projected in a negative light or positive light? Certainly, right after the events of 9/11 there was a lot of evil associated with the Arab culture in the U.S., which was expected. However, over the past seven years those ideals have slowly faded away.
There were several questions asked about our presidential candidates from both schools. Now that it’s official that Barack Obama will be the next president of the United States, I wonder how the students over seas feel about that. Another thing that I found interesting was how one of the Professors was really adamant about not comparing and contrasting the United States with the Middle-East or Iran in general, but more focused on studying and learning about the cultures in their own context. I thought that was a good way to go about the discussion because we were there to learn about each others cultures and not to compare them.