 Hi everyone, welcome back to our YouTube channel and my name is Shakhrizoda and I'm the foundation year student and your host today's interview. We hope you found previous video useful as we continue our interview with our lecturers and academic staff. Today we have Mr. Samuel Robertson from Kansas City, USA, who is currently a lecturer in social studies, faculty of general education in our university. Hello Mr. Samuel, thank you for finding time for us and please introduce yourself. Good morning, it's great to talk with you Shakhrizoda. So just a little about myself, like you said I'm born and raised in the US. I was born in Kansas City, sort of in the middle of the country, but I grew up, I spent a lot of my time in Maine, which is on the east coast up in the northeast, not far from Boston or New York. What else can I say about myself? I've always been passionate about learning languages, particularly about history of other places, cultures, practices of other peoples. And I think that's kind of what originally brought me to Uzbekistan. I had the opportunity to come here and teach English as part of an exchange program. I thought Uzbekistan is a place I've always been interested in. I love learning languages and I love teaching too, so why not give it a try? That was in 2021 and I'm still here, so I've been here for about three years now. Loving my time here, Tashkin is a beautiful place, Uzbekistan is a wonderful country. This is my first year teaching at British Management University and likewise. I think we've got great students, we have wonderful faculty, it just really feels like a community here. We're a family of learning, so I really enjoy that. Why do you teach social studies or why did you choose social studies as your subject? Social studies was always my favorite classes when I was a student. Maths, physics, I think, I don't want to go to those, but history, literature, those are the classes I always look forward to myself. And that reflected in the subjects I studied, politics, economics, history, etc. I think that social studies give students a really unique way of understanding the world and incorporating different perspectives into solving the challenges they face, whether that's at work, in their personal life, their understanding of the world. So I think just that ability to expose students to so many different perspectives and help them, guide them, and watch them as they incorporate that and grow and mature, both as students, as learners and as people. That's why I really love teaching social studies, and that's what draws me to it. For which professions or for whom social studies can be useful in the career? So talking again about the diversity perspectives and what that contributes to students' learning, I think for that reason alone, social studies is going to benefit you no matter what kind of career you go into. Now, of course, our students here, they're studying to enter into business and management jobs, right? That means they need to acquire a lot of hard skills, whether that's financial reporting, statistical methods for understanding financial data, working with different information technology. But social studies I see as sort of the basis for all of those other skills you need to succeed and work in life in general. That is what allows you to have that perspective to interpret those numbers. It's not just about, okay, we made this much money last year, but rather, what does this mean? What is the significance for this for our business? How can we reinvest that money in the best possible way? It gives you those perspectives to be able to work well with your colleagues, your coworkers, to understand each other, recognize the value their perspectives are contributing. So really, I'd say that in a word, social studies is going to benefit you whatever career you go into, whether you become a teacher like me or you're the CEO of Usel or something like that someday. It's all about being able to recognize the importance of and incorporate those diverse perspectives into your world view and how you approach life. So as we know, you have BA in political science and Master of Public Affairs. And why did you choose these subjects? And is it temporal or you can change the future career? So I often tell my students, you know, especially my students are all freshmen, I say it's okay if you don't know what you want to do for a career yet, it's okay if you haven't figured that out. Because sometimes I kind of feel like I haven't figured it out myself either. For the longest time, I wanted to be a diplomat as my career. I thought that that was, you know, really inspiring work to be able to work with foreign ministers, you know, build that understanding across cultures between countries. That was kind of the idea of me coming to Uzbekistan originally. I thought that would be a good chance to get international experience, work on my language skills, you know, cross-cultural competencies, all those good things. Though I've always had a passion for teaching, I was looking forward to that as well. And I think I've had a change of heart in my three years of teaching here. I've always enjoyed teaching. I never saw it as my career per se, but having done it for a couple of years now, I say that, yeah, I think this is something that it really, it gives me a lot of fulfillment. It's kind of my purpose in life, you might say that. Working with my young students, helping them to grow, to mature. Again, not just as my students, you know, as learners, but as individuals as well, helping them to broaden their horizons, increase their perspectives. So I'm not sure, maybe I will do this for the rest of my career. Maybe I'll go change something, but I really enjoy it for now. It's something that I find a lot of purpose in, and I really try to make that clear to my students. Can you tell us a bit about teaching techniques that you use in your classes? So my philosophy about education, how I approach teaching and learning, I keep two adjectives in mind. I think that education should be active, it should be participatory, and it should be transformative. What I mean by that is, I know a lot of students, their experience with education is they go to class, and their teacher talks with them for a long time, and they're just sitting there like, oh my gosh, when is class gonna be over? And then they go home. I don't want my classes to be like that. I try to keep my talk time down as much as possible, and I really want to have my students working at those materials, you know, using their skills, acquiring those in an active way. So I try to do a lot of activities that are not so much focused on me, you know, lecturing, what have you, but are more focused on the students and acquiring those skills, that knowledge in a much more active participatory way. I also think that the main goal of education is to transform our students. It is to challenge them in some ways. Students come into my classroom with certain ideas about what education is like, what the world is like, and what their place in that world is. I try to challenge them on that. I try to change their perspectives on some of those things. Sometimes they say the same, sometimes they say, oh, I didn't think of it like that, or you know, oh, I didn't think that that could be an option for me. I didn't realize how important this particular skill or this particular topic was. So, you know, if I can change some of my students' minds about the importance of education, you know, what they're capable of, what they can do with their future, then I consider that I've succeeded in my job. So just in a word, yeah, the way I approach education should be active and it should be transformative. What students will gain from their subject? So I teach academic skills this year, which is one of our modules in the foundation year. Practically speaking, students acquire in our module a number of skills that they're going to need to succeed and thrive, not just for the rest of their university career, but their career in general. Research skills, you know, how to find reliable information, how to make sense of it, interpret, analyze it, and how to be persuasive as well. We focus a lot on rhetoric, particularly in written form. How do you make an argument in a way that is logical, is convincing, is persuasive? Students need that, of course, to succeed in their papers, right? Do a good job on their term papers, their projects. That's also such a critical career skill to be able to convince your colleagues, your boss, your business partners that, hey, you know, I think this is the way we should be doing it. Use my evidence, let me convince you of that. More in general, I think, again, one of my big goals as both a first-year teacher and talking about academic skills in particular is to transform the way my students see education. A lot of my students, they come into my classroom. They haven't had such good experiences with education. It's something that's boring for them. They don't see the relevance of it. They think, you know, how am I going to use this in the real world? And that's really sad for me, both that they've had that experience and that they think that way. So more generally, I approach my teaching, you know, my relationships with my students to, like I said, try to change their mind about that, get them to understand that, look, I know that it's boring sometimes, learning about how to do Harvard referencing, it's not the most exciting thing. But more general, acquiring those skills to be an independent, self-motivated lifelong learner, and to be able to use these skills in an active way, not take the shortcut to do it the easy way, but, you know, do it the right way, which is difficult, but it's, you know, that's how they acquire these skills they're going to need to succeed. Why do you think future applicants should choose British Management University? So I think there's a lot students have to gain from an education at British Management University. Just thinking about some of the advantages, the first one that comes to mind is the fact that English is our medium of instruction, not just for students' English classes. Every module they take here is going to be taught in English. That gives students a chance to, you know, over their four years here, really improve their English skills in a very profound way. In my own experience as a language learner, my Russian's pretty decent, and I studied that in a Russian program where all day, every day, we were speaking Russian. I know that that is much more effective than just, you know, an hour a day of English like some other universities offer. So the fact that everything students do in their academics here in English is an incredible chance for them to improve that language skill, which, as we know, is very valuable in the 21st century, globalized workforce. More broadly speaking, the partnerships we have here at British Management University with the University of Reading and Queen Margaret University, two of the top ranked universities in the United Kingdom, that really gives us a chance to work in collaboration with some really experienced educators and make sure that the curriculum we offer across all of our concentrations is rigorous, it's validated, it uses the best methodologies, the best teaching techniques, and ultimately it gives students a quality of education that really is equivalent to what they would get in a British university. Last thing I'd say is I think we're very lucky at our university to have very diverse faculty. We have teachers from all over the world, many experienced qualified educators from Uzbekistan, as well as from Russia, United States, like myself, Britain, of course, Australia, the Philippines, and that diversity of perspectives, teaching approaches our teachers bring is a great asset to our students. To, again, be exposed to different ideas, there's different ways of doing things, as well as in our student body, actually. Most of our students are from Uzbekistan, of course, but we have some students from Turkmenistan, from Afghanistan, from the United Arab Emirates, if I'm not mistaken, and of course we're an ambitious university, we're growing every year, so we anticipate that we'll continue to improve upon that diversity. So the fact that you study in English for all four years, the fact that our curriculum is developed in partnership with some of the UK's top universities, and the fact that we have diverse and experienced teaching staff, as well as a diverse student body, I think those are all really unique advantages that British management university has to offer and why students should choose us. From our website, we know that you like to cook and eat Uzbek food, and can you tell us about your favorite traditional meal? That's really hard to choose. I don't think I've eaten any Uzbek food I haven't liked. My favorite, I'd have to say plov, of course. It's the plov with the acikchuk and the tea and the naan. It's just, oh, it's a perfect meal. I think maybe my favorite also, I'd mention olat samsa. I love samsa, but I'd like, you know, a little more veggies in there, so I like that with the tomato and the spicy pepper. Plov and olat samsa, my favorite Uzbek feast. Some motivational words from you to your students. This is something I talk about on the first day of class with all of my new students, and again, something that is new to them. They haven't been exposed to this idea. The words of motivation I'll give to my students are this, don't be afraid to fail. A lot of students previously, part of the experiences they've had with education, maybe they haven't felt safe to make mistakes in class, to take a risk, even if that means they get the wrong answer. I don't want them to feel like that in my classroom. Certainly, I know my other colleagues feel the same way. Here at university, this is a time where young people, our students, not only is it expected of them to make mistakes, but in some ways it's encouraged. This is the time in our students' lives where they get to kind of find themselves, right? Figure out what's important for them, what they're passionate about, what they're all about. Sometimes that takes a little trial and error. We know our students, they aren't always going to get our questions right. We know that they might bomb an exam or not do so good on a project. I say that it's all part of the learning process. If you're making mistakes, even though it can be discouraging, it can be a little uncomfortable, that's an opportunity to learn. So I really encourage my students to keep that in mind. This is the time in their life when it's best to make mistakes, as long as you're learning from those, you're keeping a positive attitude. You're saying, how can I do better next time? So don't be afraid to make mistakes. Thank you, Mr. Samuel, for this interview. And we hope our followers will find this video useful. And if you have any questions to Mr. Samuel, you can comment it. Don't forget to subscribe to our BMW YouTube channel and be turned into new videos every week.