“Your ability to demonstrate understanding of (a) the multilingual and multicultural contexts within which adult English language learners live and work and (b) the role of learning and using English in an increasingly globalized world”
Sample Documents
- Selected Blog Entries
- Cultural Complexity: Dinner with a Kazakh family
- Pluralism and Cultural Hybridity: Applying theory to the classroom
- Global Cultural Consciousness: Pros and cons of globalization
- Webs of Significance: White privilege and my Finnish identity
- Journal Entry Activity for Students in ESL Composition courses
- Handout for other teachers about an interactive small group presentation activity
- Cultural Biography: Reflective essay on an interview with an international student at Penn State
- Critical Cultural Analysis: Investigation of the cultural identities of three members of the Penn State academic community
Reflection
Two of my favorite works that we studied in my Applied Linguistics courses were Geneva Gay’s (2010) Culturally responsive teaching: Theory, research, and practice and Bala Kumaravadivelu’s (2008) Cultural globalization and language education.
Here is a segment from my blog entry about how to apply the concept of cultural hybridity in the classroom:
Kumaravadivelu’s chapter (ch. 7) helps me to see the cause for why Americans sometimes seem overly enthusiastic and naïve about other cultures. Kumaravadivelu argues that many American educational practices that embrace multiculturalism inadvertently reify cultures and perform a disservice to students. For example, going through the monthly multicultural activities in elementary school can give Americans a false sense of familiarity with other cultures and nations. There are probably many other sources for this false sense of familiarity, and I will now be on the lookout for them. Ultimately, the main issue with American pluralism is that having a vague appreciation for cultural difference does not lead to social change to correct injustice.
In contrast to the idea of pluralism, cultural hybridity is a rather new term to me, and I could tell that Kumaravadivelu views this concept positively while also offering criticism. Cultural hybridity and a related concept, cosmopolitanism, are similar to the postmodern approach to identity, which I am familiar with, in which borders are unclear and constantly constructed and reconstructed, as in Zygmunt Bauman’s (2000) metaphor of “liquid modernity.”
I was intrigued by how cultural hybridity can be applied in the classroom in order to challenge all students’ senses of identity. Kumaravadivelu (2008, p. 131-133) describes how Mary Louise Pratt at Stanford implemented activities inspired by cultural hybridity, in which she attempted to create a “Third Space” of cultural conflict where each student learned what it felt like to be objectified. Perhaps tongue-in-cheek, Kumaravadivelu describes her strategy: “The fact that no one was safe, she reckoned, resulted in high degrees of trust and shared understandings among students and their teachers” (p. 132). This example reminds me of a course I took on postmodern intercultural communication during my study abroad experience in Finland, and as a result I felt rather forlorn when I learned that my sense of Finnish and American identity was mostly a romanticist, self-aggrandizing vision.
For classroom purposes, I think I would try to adapt Mary Louise Pratt’s strategy, by including myself in the autoethnographic process she used. Sometime during the activities, I would share my own disconcerting experience with seeing the flaws in my own auto-ethnic romanticism while studying abroad. I would try to be as gentle as possible, but my goal would be to help students see how each of us has a tendency to idealize his or her own culture at the expense of others.
Reference:
Kumaravadivelu, B. (2008). Cultural globalization and language education. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
