Culture and SLA - Week 3 - Cultural Products

  Culture and SLA - Week 3 -  The Cultural Products

Introduction: Hello and welcome to Week 3 of the course Culture and Second Language Acquisition for the master's in English teaching at ULACIT term IIIC0 2022. This week we explore products, the visible dimension of culture and consider how products can serve as a portal to exploring other dimensions of culture.

Today's Goals:

• Share a personal example of a cultural learning experience you have had by making reference to the four cultural knowings.
• Explore the practices, perspectives, communities, and persons associated with everyday Costa Rican cultural products.
• Create a culture map to examine the interaction between products, practices, and persons in a physical space.

Guiding Questions:

• What kinds of knowledge are needed to fully learn a cultural feature?
• How is my culture represented in the products I see around me?
• How do products, practices, and persons intersect in a cultural place that I visit often?

Warm Up: Future Archeology

Archeologists study the material culture (products) of past civilizations. With some cultures, there is a written record that helps researchers understand their associated practices and perspectives. However, in preliterate societies or ones whose writing system has not been decyphered, these associations must be infered. David Macaulay (1979) wrote a humorous book called Motel of the Mysteries to explore this topic.

• Typical 21st Century North American: CLICK HERE 

Now, play the role of a future archeologist exploring the ancient ruins of the lost civilization of Ti-qui-cia. Choose several everyday cultural products that are common in Costa Rica. What would a future researcher infer about the practices and perspectives associated with it? CLICK HERE to view an example from a previous group.

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

Task 1: Week 2 Recall

Last week we discussed the four cultural knowings that form the cultural experience. Let's quickly review these important concepts. 

Theory Review: 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)."

• "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)."

• Knowing How: - Participation - This is the experience of interacting with an aspect of the culture. This stage involves developing skills and appropriate cultural behaviors.

• Knowing About: - Description - This is the act of gathering information about a cultural aspect through research, observation, or consulting members of the culture. The result of this stage is cultural knowledge.

• Knowing Why: - Interpretation - This stage involves exploring the perspectives connected to the cultural aspect, many of which are implicit. The result of this stage is cultural understanding.

• Knowing Oneself: - Response - This stage involves reflecting on your experiences, examining how you personally feel about the cultural aspect and making a decision about whether or not or to what degree you want to adopt it. The result of this stage is self-awareness.

• "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 2: Exploring the Cycle

Complete the following tasks with your partners to review these important concepts. 

• The Teacher's Cultural Experience: Click on your group link below and complete the chart with the missing information by copy/pasting the names of the stages, their descriptions, and examples into the green spaces.

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

• My Cultural Experience: Can you think of an example of a cultural learning experience you have had and describe it using the four cultural knowings? This could be an experience you have had with someone from another country, another part of your country, or even experiences adapting to a new school or work environment. 

Task 3: Exploring Cultural Products

For homework this week you read Chapter 5 Cultural Products in the Moran book and completed a study guide. Open your study guide and respond to the following prompts with your partners. 

• What is a cultural product?

• What are the four types of cultural products?

• At the beginning of your study guide you were asked to write a vivid description of a busy place in your country or your first impressions of a different country. Read your descriptions to your partners and see how many cultural products you can identify. 

• Now think about those same places you described earlier. Can you think of any of the following that are associated with this place?
• Artifacts
• Places
• Institutions
• Art Forms

• In two tasks you were asked to describe the artifacts and layout of your living room. In what ways does the layout and organization of your living room represent typical organizational patterns of other living rooms in your culture? Why do you think Costa Rican living rooms are organized in this way? 

• What could someone from a very different culture learn about Costa Ricans by stuyding their living rooms?

Theory Break: Cultural Products

• "Products, the visible dimension of culture, are the gateway to the new culture, the new way of life. They are the first things that greet our senses when we enter the culture, and the differences stand out (Moran, p. 48)."

• "Visible cultural products often appear discrete or isolated. However, if we look more closely at them, we see that they are almost always related to other cultural products, and that these collections of objects are ultimately linked to sets of cultural practices, set within specific communities, involving particular persons, and are carriers of meaning - cultural perspectives (Moran, p. 49)."

• Cultural products can be broken into four categories:

• Artifacts: The things of the culture
• Places: Places or physical settings
• Institutions: Social institutions to deal with "the business of living
• Art Forms: Reflect the esthetic outlook, sensibilities, and philosophy of the culture (perspectives) CLICK HERE

Task 4: Artifacts as Portals to Other Cultural Dimensions

Since products are the most visible dimension of culture, they are often what we first notice when entering a new culture but we don't need to stop here. Since all products are associated with practices, persons, communities, and perspectives, they can serve as an entry point that helps us explore the rich details and connections under the surface. Return to the links in Task 1. Look at some of the cultural artifacts and explore the 5 Dimensions of Culture framework by responding to the prompts below.

• Product: What is it? Where do you find it?

• Practices: How do you use it? When?

• Persons: Which people use this?

• Communities: Which groups of people use this object?

• Perspectives: Why do people use this? What significance does it have in the culture?

• Additional Associations: If you have time, use the prompts below to guide your exploration of this cultural practices assocaited with this artifact even futher. Not all will be applicable.

• Making/creating
• Designing
• Decorating
• Buying
• Selling
• Trading
• Losing
• Using/operating
• Maintaining
• Storing
• Damaging
• Repairing
• Discarding
• Recovering 

Theory Break: Places

• "Man-made settings are populated with numerous artifacts, arranged in particular ways within the physical space. The organization, layout, or interpretation of this physical space is a critical feature of places, just as much as the artifacts and their arrangements in these places (Moran, p. 52)."

• Places are interesting cultural features to explore because of the reasons mentioned in the quote and also because it is within places that different cultural practices are carried out by communities and specific persons.

Task 4: Culture Mapping

Let's explore the topic of places in greater detail by drawing a culture map. Choose a public place that you are familiar with and draw a map of it from a top-down perspective. Be as detailed as you can and include the cultural artifacts in their locations. If your drawing skills are not great, just use simple shapes and symbols. 

Suggested Places: You can choose any public place but be sure it is a specific real place that you visit.

• Bus station you use
• Pulperia in your neighborhood
• Soda/restaurant you are familiar with

• Group 1: CLICK HERE
• Group 2: CLICK HERE
• Group 3: CLICK HERE
• Teacher's Example: CLICK HERE

Exploring the Culture Maps: Now share your maps with your partners and explain the following aspects.

• Where is this place located within your city or neighborhood?
• Describe the physical layout of the place and the artifacts found there.
• What is the significance of the location of the artifacts?
• What are the "hot spots", the points in the map where actions occur?
• What can you say about the products, practices, perspectives, communities, and persons associated with this place?

References:

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