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by LAURA TABOR
Lifestyles Reporter
Elitza Kotzeva, an English graduate student and part of the interdisciplinary studies faculty, sought to take her history teaching out of the classroom.
“I teach an ‘Investigations: Global’ class, through the Watauga Global Community,” Kotzeva said. “When I decided that I wanted to show my students some films, I was able to get the Great Hall to show movies.”
The Great Hall is a multi-purpose room in the academic side of the Living Learning Center on Appalachian State University’s campus.
Now, Kotzeva is showing her students authentic movies from Eastern Europe every Friday afternoon.
She has
already shown films such as “Time of Violence” and “Zelary;” two movies
made in Bulgaria and the Czech Republic/Slovakia.
“The
films focus on communism and post-communism times,” Kotzeva said. “They
show how Communism affected the lives of various peoples.”
After the movies, Kotzeva facilitates discussion about what the class viewed.
Kotzeva chose to teach about Eastern Europe because she is originally from Bulgaria.
“It is my area of expertise,” Kotzeva said. “There aren’t very many people [at Appalachian] who know about Eastern Europe.”
The
“Investigations: Global” class is part of a sequence that will be
incorporated into the General Education curriculum starting next year.
Right
now, only Watauga Global Community uses the Local-to-Global history
model, where students take a class on a specific facet of their local
area, and then an investigative class like the one taught by Kotzeva.
While
Kotzeva was organizing this event for her classes, sophomore global
studies major Cami A. Hesterberg was seeking out an event like
Kotzeva’s.
“I spent
a year in high school living in Hungary through the Interact Foreign
Exchange Program,” Hesterberg said. “My host family there became like a
real family to me, and I’ve been really interested ever since.”
Hesterberg
was thrilled to discover Kotzeva’s expertise in Eastern Europe,
prompting her to inquire about undergraduate research with Kotzeva as
her faculty mentor.
While
Hesterberg is not a member of Watauga Global Community, she thinks the
program benefits students who have not connected to the world, as she
has.
“Classes
and films like this gives an identity to these countries,” Hesterberg
said. “It may be a silly fact or something, but it places a history
with the location. There is something somewhere else in the world that
I like, something I want to learn.”
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