DIMACHE Alexandru    Department   Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University  College of Sustainability and Tourism    Position   Assistant Professor
Type	Practical Example of Education Technique
Period	2019/11/29～2020/01/31
Item	Intensive in-class discussions on very sensitive contemporaneous societal issues
Details	For ‘Tourism and Social Media’, the highest evaluation score by far was for ‘Active Learning’ (4.38). For this course, I took the risk and organized weekly classroom discussions on very sensitive contemporaneous issues. Choosing to discuss very sensitive topics could have backfired. However, in their evaluative comments, most students underlined the positive ontological importance of the these weekly classroom discussions on sensitive topics in boosting communicational skills and broadening horizons by being exposed to a wide variety of opinions from classmates of multicultural backgrounds. They also underlined the comfortable classroom approach which enabled them to want to pick up the microphone and share their opinions. For some, this was the first time they had the courage to speak in public especially on sensitive topics.