Flags and Holidays Won’t Make Your Classroom Multicultural
Understanding Culture in the World Language Classroom
In K-12 education, culture is often represented to children through symbols, holidays, and food. We teach students about unfamiliar countries by introducing their national bird or memorizing their capital. We introduce major religions with a set of featured holidays, taught through worksheets, crafts and “stations”. A classroom encircled with flags from around the world — or a school hallway with pastel-colored cartoon children encircling a globe — is understood to be thoroughly and effectively multicultural.
This is not to say that the above representations are inherently flawed, and that the educators who employ these methods in an attempt to honor multiculturalism in the classroom are short-sighted. Their efforts are genuine, and the methodology wholly understandable — culture is complex (there are many debated definitions even among scholars) and we need some way to make it tangible for young, developing minds. But what are we teaching our students about culture — what it is, how it can change, and the ways in which it influences people — by reducing it to national symbols, holidays, and food? Is a quick worksheet on population size and flag colors all it takes to understand an entire community of people?
We incorporate cultural studies into our curriculum, especially in the world language classroom, to cultivate in our students a sense of awareness, empathy, and respect. Learning about a community of people vastly different (or perhaps not so different at all) from the one in which we reside is an exercise of recognition, analysis, and reflection. While culture is complicated, and K-12 students are still developing and refining their critical thinking skills, don’t underestimate your students. Sometimes, little ones have the most refreshing answers to the most difficult questions of the human condition.
In the classroom, then, culture should carry the weight and complexity it holds outside school walls. It should be viewed from an unfiltered lens, where students feel empowered to ask questions, explore subjects that encourage intercultural communication, and engage with various sub-groups of a population. It should encourage individual and national self-reflection, even if that reflection becomes critical.
While every classroom should incorporate conversations about various cultures and populations, the world language classroom deals with culture every day, even at the most basic level of instruction. To empower world language teachers to take their cultural studies to a genuine level of complexity and engagement, we’ve gathered a few ideas.
Here are three ways to incorporate dynamic, dimensional understandings of multiculturalism into your world language classroom:
Literature
The literature you read in your world language classroom (or any K-12 classroom, for that matter) should expose students to cultural understandings that go far beyond a country’s Wikipedia page. Literature presents the opportunity for readers to understand various perspectives on a community’s history, politics, global understandings, national or global rifts, and varying individual or group positions within a culture. Readings should always be followed by open discussions — of the good, the confusing, the troubling — in a way that doesn’t shy away from self reflection of student’s own culture.
News
Just as culture shouldn’t be reduced to symbols, holidays, and food, it also shouldn’t be reduced to its history. Use current events as authentic world language materials for reading or listening. Just like literature, current events should be followed by discussion, potentially even debate, and be examined by adopting multiple perspectives. However, current events should be taken in the context of history. Students should ask: how do the current events relate to what this group of people has experienced in the past? How has this group of people changed, in both its self understanding and relationship with other cultures?
Pop Culture
The “culture” of items like holidays, flags, and national colors is one-dimensional, static, and a strictly limited reflection of a population. “High brow” art can, in some cases, function in a similar way — it’s only available to a limited segment of the population in question, and therefore might only offer a partial understanding of culture. While it absolutely has its place in the classroom, encourage students to also observe the content a population consumes on a daily basis — what are the themes of popular movies, what characterizes popular music, what’s on TV? Importantly, how are people consuming these, and what are varying reactions to pop culture? This may be an opportunity for a research project, where students not only study pop culture content, but also examine the varying responses to pop culture on social media or from individuals and various organizations.
We teach children world languages to enable them to communicate, connect, and empathize. But they can’t put those languages to good use if they haven’t been taught what it means to truly connect with someone — to understand their differences, their similarities, their position. A shared language will only get our students so far. True multiculturalism, however, can empower them to influence true change.
For more on how to strengthen your world language classroom, see World Language Teacher Michele Hill’s post below, and keep tabs on the Art of Teaching project for more teacher-to-teacher blogs like Michele’s.
For easy access resource to news, history, and other important elements of culture, check out eScape.
