A Culturally Enriched Teacher

In few weeks, I am about to finish my course on culture. It has been more than a great journey. It has enriched me as an EFL teacher. I can say that I have become a culture-based book designer and a totally aware activity planner.

As the final project of this course, I was assigned to create a didactic unit which intended to enhance cross-cultural communication. Here, we are talking about two main challenges. On one hand, I had to find the most creative ways to make the target students-get aware of those features that make every culture unique. There will always be a long way for teachers to reach such cultural understanding from students. Therefore, I like to create that kind of curiosity towards peculiar behaviors, traditions and worldviews that foreigners have by carefully teasing my students' brains. It is not that difficult if you get to know to know their C1 first; based on their background knowledge, you take advantage of it and have them inquire all those aspects that differ from the ones they have in their inmediate contexts. On the other hand, it comes the time to think in advance that students may face cultural and get prepared to help them recover form it. Consequently, the idea of what a real educator is like has to clear enough for teachers not to run into cultural misunderstandings transmitted to the students.

In brief, my teaching experience has evolved. I have learned about the most remote places in the world, from their underpriviledged environments. I have also came to understand that one of the main roles a language teacher can brag about is that of promoting social changes. Every time culture is taught, we are contributing in making gaps among cultures smaller, and we are mainly influencing people see the whole picture that is blurred with stereotypes at time. It is a big responsability but a rewarding one.

Besides acronyms like TOEFL or TESOL, there should be something like TECU (Teaching English for Cultural Understanding) so that this big topic receives the importance it deserves.

Enhancing Cultural Topics from the Beginning

Recently, I had the wonderful experience of visiting one of my colleagues to observe on culture acquisition. Her class was made up with learners whose ages range from 17 to 30, and who were just beginning in their program.
They receive a 5 hour-lesson per week under the principles of the Communicative Approach. Therefore, I could see how students did get engaged in all the activities. In spite of them struggling to communicate, they were happy to get across with the message. They were studying routines, so their professor made use of different activities for them to compare their own with those of other people around the world.
A comfortable environment was set up. Students were given a role so that they could interview each other about the activities they did around the world. Also, they were played a video of a teenager from Greece. They participated a lot when comparing Costa Rican teenager's daily routine with the European girl from the clip.

This experience did not end after the lesson finished per se. My colleague had the chance to observe my group as well. We both agreed that promoting cultural awareness has several benefits:

 Students' motivation is seen at all times. They are no longer learning just from one culture (L2 culture; i.e. Culture from the US), but they are enriching their world view through the exposure of different cultures.
 Students will be better equipped when approaching a foreigner, be he or she from anywhere. They would move on getting interested in the new culture.
 They do get conscious about their own context by analyzing other people's contexts.

As part of this peer-observation task, we gave each other feedback for future implementation of the plans, and we also asked our students to fill out a survey about how much they knew about the topics of the lesson , How much they learned from the lesson, and what they thought the relevance of the lesson was. As a matter of fact, I want to quote the response of one of my students: "Yo aprendí de las personas que hablan el idioma que yo quiero aprender". A translation would go like: "I learned about the people who speak the language I want to learn". This makes me feel good and proud of my role as a teacher. You may teach grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation..., but these areas will be awkward without a context, without culture.

Knowing more about a culture from single stories

As I have come to understand, preconceived ideas about a specific culture have two sides. On one hand, one can get the picture of what the person might be like, how the person might behave or what kind of traditions the person might the person have. This is somehow advantageous in the sense that we activate cultural awareness, and we may not face uncomfortable encounters when sharing with the person being encountered some of my costumes, which can be normal to me but not to that person. On the other hand, if we just get carried away by negative ideas towards that culture, we will end up thinking that all people belonging to a specific group behave in the same way.

Last week, I got surprised by having Jonna Kay Beck, a guest speaker from Texas, in my course on culture. In previous classes, I had made myself believe that knowing just one single story may obscure the perceptions we can have when referring to a cultural group. I, however, acknowledge the value of knowing single stories as elements of a big puzzle.

Due to the origin of this lady, my classmates and I came up with stereotypes that aimed to feature a Texan. Some of them were true for most of inhabitants of this state but not for her. She has a lot of characteristics in common with her fellow citizens, though she has some others that are just unique for her.

Moreover, this encounter was meaningful enough to understand how language shapes culture. Since Texans have Hispanic ancestors, some of the names of the places and names of activities are like the ones you can have in Mexico. We also can see it the other way around; culture can shape language. I suppose that being a learned professor, the speaker has developed sort of a standard American English accent due to her academic roles; although her pitch is high, she does not show the very particular marked speech that you can hear in the region where she is from.

Once again, it is advisable that we provide our students general stories that can help them identify people from other cultures without falling in the mistakes of having them believe that those stories are the truth indeed. Instead of that, teacher should be very careful and set a clear cut that get our students to understand that are lot of untold stories that break the general picture. Doing so, we will be promoting an essential goal when teaching culture, that of making them be motivated to research about a given culture and the sub-groups that co-exist in it.

From Weirdness to Uniqueness

Around the world there are a lot of customs that identify certain ethnical groups. For example, if we went on a trip to Africa or Asia, we could find several tribes with the most peculiar traditions ever.

Being an outsider to these culture groups, one can get startled at seeing women changing the physiognomy of some of their body part. For example, once I saw a documentary about women who stretch their necks in Northern Thailand. They do this by placing neck rings as they grow up so that when they are adults they get a pretty long neck.

You may say that giraffes have long necks since they need to get the food from trees, so what purpose does the long neck fulfill in the women of Kayan tribes? Well, after surfing the net, I realized that not every woman undergoes that process. Only if they are born in full moon are they chosen to modify this organ. The meaning of this ritual lies in the fact that they are the privileged ones . In other words, they are specially gifted by superior entities. Therefore, they are admired by the other members of the tribe and considered the most beautiful (they get to be married first), the most productive (they are good at crops) and the wealthiest (they belong to the clans in power).

Once again, having one single story of a cultural aspect is to hinder the truth indeed. Before judging others, we must know all the versions around them.

Getting Rid of Stereotypes

Upon meeting a foreigner, people generally start labeling that person. They match him/her with a common stereotype. That is, they think that this person suits in a preconceived idea of the cultural group that he/she belongs to.

When doing so, we are falling into a big deal. Not only are we setting the ground for negative attitudes such as prejudices, but we are not letting ourselves see beyond from what we think it is the truth for that group.

Every culture has remarkable features made up by its members. Thus, they have a different expression, a particular accent, a traditional way of wearing, a unique way of thinking, an incomparable worldview, among other aspects.

Seeing people through preconceived ideas can give us a general picture of what they are like. This, however, can blind us in the attempt to be aware of what they are actually like and why they act in a certain way.

Calling people "weird" is the result of stereotyping them. Therefore, we must get rid of those harmful labels that do not allow us to get deeply in cross-cultural understanding.

Bio Data

Dear users,

I am glad to open my first blog for those who are currently teaching English and consider culture an essential part of any curriculum. And for those that do not belong to the teaching field, be welcome as well since culture is an aspect that concerns every human being.

I have been a teacher of ESL for about 5 years. Being in the classroom has made me face an uncountable amount of experiences in which my students have learned several cultural aspects. The fact of seeing them anxious is quite rewarding. Not only are they interested in the language per se, but their attention goes enthusiastically to the context where language is spoken.

For this reason, I have let myself share my day-to-day practice with you in this blog entitled Enriching Teaching Culturally.

With the aim of getting nurtured, I invite you to access http://enrichingteachingculturally.blogspot.com/ so that we can discover the amazing world of teaching culture together.

Regards,
David Rodríguez
B.A. Teaching of English
Universidad Nacional, Costa Rica