SL in Action: Crossing Borders and Building Bridges

Ali Nihat Eken from the School of Languages attended the VIII Annual Worldwide Forum on Education and Culture in Rome, Italy, in the first week of December 2009. This year’s forum was based on the theme of “Crossing Borders and Building Bridges: A Global Program for the Future.” In the forum Eken presented his classroom research on studying representations of gender and sexual identity in film.

Arguing that although originally not intended for educational purposes, film can prove to be a legitimate subject matter that can be studied in its own right and a valuable teaching and learning tool in many educational settings, Eken drew upon his findings of his classroom research study he conducted in Freshman English 101 and 102, undergraduate content-based language courses in Sabanci University.

Ali Nihat Eken’s presentation aimed to answer the following questions: What does studying representations in films involve? What do representations of gender and sexual identity reveal about human relationships and belief systems? While answering such key questions in the light of relevant literature and his findings, he also discussed whether an awareness of views about gender and sexual identity would encourage learners to revisit and revise their own value systems and thus cross ideological borders, build bridges of tolerance and celebrate diversity.