ABSTRACT
Active learning techniques, including case teaching, have been used in a variety of American classrooms, for different grade and skill levels, cultural settings, and types of educational institutions. This chapter discusses the inherent dilemmas by focusing on five issues: breadth versus depth; professional schools versus general education; the lack of published cases; cultural differences; and language barriers. Students presumably enter into professional schools with a common intellectual core: they have already been exposed to the “big picture"; they have a body of substantive information at their disposal. Both for the professional schools to fully take advantage of the method and for general education faculties to move in this direction, a vigorous campaign for cases written from the perspective of other countries needs to be launched. The individualistic culture found in American educational institutions is compatible with new approaches and experimentation in classroom teaching.
