Culture of English Speaking Countries - Week 2 - The Culture Experience

Introduction: Hello and welcome to Week 2 of the course Culture of English Speaking Countries for the bachelor's in English teaching at ULACIT. This week we will discuss content related to the culture experience, the four cultural knowings, ethnocenrism and cultural relativism, and also the topic of cultural pluralism and national identity.

Today's Goals:

• Describe the four cultural knowings that make up the culture learning experience.
• Carry out a cultural analysis of the Nacirema people in terms of their products, practices, and perspectives.
• Compare and contrast the perspectives on immigration and cultural pluralism in the US and your home country.

Guiding Questions:

• What are the four cultural knowings and how can they help me better understand the cultural expderience?
• How does my own culture influence the way I view others?
• How does cultural pluralism contribute to the national identity of my country?

Warm Up: Where in the World?

Click the link below and follow the teacher's instructions to play the game.

• JamBoard: CLICK HERE

Task 1: Week 1 Recall

Last week we introduced the course and discussed several important topics. Let's strengthen your memory by making some attempts to recall some of the key moments of last lesson. Discuss these questions with your partners:

• Teacher: Mark mentioned that one of his favorite foods is ceviche and he showed a picture of one he made. Can you remember the secret ingredient?

• Assessments: Your teacher summarized the key points from the syllabus and you were expected to read the syllabus in detail over the week. What do you remember about the following assessments. 

• Culture Learning Journal (25%)
• Reading Responses (15%)
• Cultureal Map Video Podcast (15%)
• Folktale Analysis Presentation (15%)
• Holiday Research Paper and Presentation (20%)
• LinkedIn Learning Course Certificate (5%)
• CEPA (5%)

• Poem: You reconstructed, read, and analyzed a poem called "The Blind Men and the Elephant". What was it about? What was the author's message? How can the poem serve as a metaphor for the process of learning, describing, and teaching culture?

• Starting Point Ideas: You worked in groups to articulate your starting point ideas regarding major questions to be explored in the course. Briefly state what you remember discussing with your partners about some of these questions. Were any questions difficult to answer? Why?: 

• What is culture?
• How can cultures be studied, described, analyzed, or compared?
• How do people learn culture?
• How can I teach culture?
• Why is knowledge of culture important for language teachers? In other words, why are we taking a whole course about this?
• What questions do we have about culture, culture learning and teaching, and culture of English speaking countries?

• Views of Culture: Then we compared some different ways that people have conceptualized culture. What do you remember about these terms?
• Culture as Civilization: "Big C" culture , "little c" culture
• Culture as Communication: 
• Culture as General Concept:
• Culture as Groups or Communities Interacting:
• Culture as Evolutionary Psychology: 

• English Speaking?: We finished by questioning what we mean by the term "English Speaking Country". Why is the definition of this phrase not obvious? What complexities did we explore regarding this topic?

Task 2: Reading Response Exploration

Now work with your partners to discuss some of the ideas from the chapter you read in Moran (2001) called "The Culture Learning Experience". You can have your study guide open but try to look at it only when it's absolutely necessary.

• Group 1: CLICK HERE
• Group 2: CLICK HERE
• Group 3: CLICK HERE
• Group 4: CLICK HERE

Theory Break: The Cultural Experience

• "As teachers, we have little difficulty listing cultural topics, but organizing them is another matter entirely. For good reasons. Culture is multifaceted and complex, and there is no consensus on what culture is (Moran, p. 13)."

• "As language teachers, our challenge is to bring some order to the apparent randomness of culture, both for ourselves and for the students in our classes, as a first step in making culture accessible (Moran, p. 13)."

• "Culture has many definitions... For the most part, these definitions present culture as an abstract entity that can be separated from the experience of participating in it. While they do help us understand the nature of culture, these definitions remain abstract, disconnected from the people who live in that culture, and more importantly, from the experience of participating in that culture (Moran, p. 13)."  

Theory Break: The Cultural Knowings

• "The cultural knowings framework offers a means for describing culture in terms of what students need to do in order to learn it - their encounters with another way of life. Once these interactions are specified, the learning objectives follow, as do the choice of teaching and learning activities and the appropriate means of evaluation (Moran, p. 15)."

• In terms of the stages of the cylce, concrete experience becomes participation, where the task is direct or indirect engagement in the culture, with an emphasis on knowing how. Reflective observation becomes description, with a focus on knowing about. Abstract conceptualization becomes interpretation, where learners concentrate on knowing why. Active experimentation becomes response, with an emphasis on self-awareness, knowing oneself (Moran, p. 19)."

• Reflection: Moran gives the example of a female college student from the US studying abroad in the Dominican Republic. What were some of her initial confusing experiences? How did she interpret them? How did she come to greater levels of self-awareness as she also learned the other knowings (about, how, and why)? 

• Task: Describe a time when you had an experience with another culture. Use the language of the experiential learning cycle and the Cultural Knowings framework to illustrate your learning process and your own reactions to it.

• "The cultural experience is highly personal, and therefore idiosynchratic. Individual learners need to understand themselves and their own culture as a means to comprehending, adapting to, or integrating into the [target] culture (Moran, p. 17)."

• "In the end, individual learners set the limits of knowing about, how, and why. They decide. For this reason, knowing oneself is the organizing dimension of the cultural knowings. Learners' abilities to make such decisions depend on their awareness of themselves, their situation, and their intentions. The more aware they are, the more focused their work becomes in the acquisition of cultural information, skills, and understanding (Moran, p. 17)."

Task 3: Cultural Investigation - The Nacirema People

To wrap of this first session, let's analyze a summary of a famous ethnographic case study that is often discussed in most introductory anthropology courses to see what insights it can give us about cultural perspectives. Click your group link, read your text, and discuss the questions. Be ready to summarize the main ideas in your own words when we get back to the main room.

• Part 1: CLICK HERE
• Part 2: CLICK HERE
• Part 3: CLICK HERE

Now let's read some quotes from the introduction to our main textbook, Teaching Culture: Perspectives in Practice. How do these quotes connect with the ideas we just discussed about the Nacirema?

• "Milton Bennett makes the point that ethnocentrism is the natural state for peoples of the world. Our instictive reaction is to assume that our culture, our way of life, is the right one, and that all others are not. Whether we simply tolerate these other ways of life or treat them as enemies, our attitude toward them is essentially the same - ethnocentric."

• "Overcoming these ingrained cultural perspectives, according to Bennett, has to be consciously learned. Developing sensitivity to cultural differences, in other words, does not come naturally (Moran, 2001, p. 7)."

• Cultural Relativism and Ethnocentrism: CLICK HERE

• "Culture hides much more than it reveals, and strangely enough what it hides, it hides most effectively from its own participants. Years of study have convinced me that the real job is not to understand foreign culture but to understand our own." - Edward T. Hall

Task 4: Sharing our Culture Learning Journals

Last week you read the chapter "Understanding the Culture of the United States" and wrote the firest entry in your Culture Learning Journal. Take a moment to open your journal (CLICK HERE), share what you wrote, and discuss the additional prompts below:

• Summary: 
• What were the main points made by the author? Speak in general terms. You don't need to remember every detail.

• Reaction: 
• What did you think about the content of the reading? What were your thoughts, opinions, reactions, or interpretations?

• Connection:  
• Mention how these ideas are similar or different to what you know about your own home culture. What similarities and differences can you see between what you read and your own culture?


• The author describes the United States as a nation of immigrants. Would you say that your own home country is also a nation of immigrants? Why or why not? What impact have immigrants had on your culture?

• Read the following quote from page 6. Then answer the questions that follow. 

• Quote: "One of the critical questions facing the United States today is what role new immigrants will play in their new country. To what degree will they choose to take on the traditional American values and culture? How much will they try to maintain some of their own language and cultural traditions? Will they create an entirely new culture based on some combination of their values and those of the traditional American culture?"

• What challenges do you think immigrants and the children of immigrants have when trying to form their identity in the United States? Do you think immigrants in your home country face similar challenges? Is there concern in your country that immigrant populations do not assimilate into the mainstream culture? Is cultural diversity celebrated or is maintaining cultural values and traditions from the immigrant home cultures seen as a threat to your country's national identity?


• One of the cultural issues your teacher encountered early in his experiences in Costa Rica was the sensitivity that some people have about the words America and Americans. On page 8 of the chapter, the author describes why this is truly a linguistic problem rather than a view of superiority.

• What do people in the United States mean when they say America or Americans?
• What do people in Latin American mean by those terms?
• Why don't people in the US use terms like "estadounidense" in English?
• What is the problem with refering to people from the US as North Americans?

References:

·     Kearny, M., Crandall, J., & Kearny, E. (2005). American Ways: An Introduction to American Culture (3rd ed.) Pearson Education, Inc.

Miner, H. (1956). Body Ritual Among the Nacirema. American Anthropologist. 58(3), 503-507.

Moran, P. (2001). Teaching Culture: Perspectives in Practice. Heinle Cengage Learning.