However, having been to a Peña Folclorica last month and seen few teenagers participating in it, it made me think of how much we love our country; how much we feel identifyed with its culture, what it has been done inside the schools with chilean culture or, going further, how our identity as chileans is changing.
Since I am going to be a teacher of English, this topic of identity is very important to me, because we are going to be teaching a language with a set of characteristic, that “automatically” are inserted in the language. For example, ways of thinking, ways of speaking, ways of treating people; in short, with another different identity. According to the Cambridge dictionary, the meaning of the word “identity” is “who a person is, or the qualities of a person or group which make them different from others”.
Marcia Prieto, author of the book “Mejorando la Calidad de la Educación” states that “la escuela como ninguna otra agencia educativa tiene todas las posibilidades de lograr en las personas efectos verdaderamente transformadores si logra recordar que está al servicio del desarrollo de la vida de ellas”. In other words, the school- referring to the school not as the solid entity, but as the people that work there- has all the posibilities to make very noticeable changes. Therefore, it is clearly stated that changes begin from school. I have experienced at school that the majority of the books that English teacher work with show only, for example, short stories from England, pictures from USA, songs from Canada and so on and so forth. What’s with ours? Are our stories meaningless?
Is our culture involved in this topic? Yes. There are several concepts related to this issue. For instance, we have the word acculturation, which according to the Encarta Enciclopedia has two meanings:
1) Cultural change: a change in the cultural behaviour and thinking of a person or group of people through contact with another culture. (Encarta, par 1)
2) Absortion of culture: The process by with somebody absorbs the culture of a society from bith onward. (Encarta, par 2)
If we connect this with the reality in the schools, students, and perhaps English teachers too, are suffering from a change in their “cultural behaviour”, because they have to be all the time in contact with a foreign culture and its features.
Now, very related to acculturation, we have another concept, which is called transculturation. Ramiro Podetti, from Universidad de Motevideo quotes Bronislaw Malinowski, a famous anthropologist. He states that transculturation
“es un proceso en el cual emerge una nueva realidad, compuesta y compleja; una realidad que no es una aglomeración mecánica de caracteres, ni siquiera un mosaico, sino un fenómeno nuevo, original e independiente. Para describir tal proceso, el vocablo de raíces latinas transculturación proporciona un término que no contiene la implicación de una cierta cultura hacia la cual tiene que tender la otra, sino una transición entre dos culturas, ambas activas, ambas contribuyentes con sendos aportes, y ambas cooperantes al advenimiento de una nueva realidad de civilización”
In other words, what we are suffering is the process of transculturation. That is to say, we are building a “potpurri” of our own personality. Now, are we, future teachers, taking into account our own features of our identity when teaching? How are we going to deal with that?
In Chile, we have several aspects of our identity that can be meaningful to our students, depending in the place where they live. For instance, we can teach Chilean myths in the South of Chile, or we can teach them about some important characters related to our history in the rest of our country. That is, what it is called Content Based Instruction. Basically “Content based instruction (CBI) is a teaching method that emphasizes learning about something rather than learning about language.(...)This interest has now spread to EFL classrooms around the world where teachers are discovering that their students like CBI and are excited to learn English this way” (Davis, Stephen, par 1). In short, what this technique suggests is that we shouldn’t care about the language, but the thing we are teaching. For example, there are very good translations of Pablo Neruda’s poems that we can find on the internet. However, we shouldn’t care about grammar (although it is important), but we should be interested in showing who Neruda was, what his contributions are, etc.
To conclude, I think that teaching aspects of our culture can be really fun and meaningful, if we are willing to do so. There are a lot of different strategies that can help you to teach your own country for FL students. It’s not bad to show the students other cultures, because it is necessary for them to know other cultures. But what I’m trying to suggest is that “do not focus your classes on other people’s culture. We, chileans, have a rich country, culturally speaking, that we need to explore.
References
• “Acculturation”. Encarta World English Dictionary 2009, 8 July 2009
• “Content Based Instruction in EFL Contexts”. The Internet TESL journal. 2 February 2003. 8 July 2009
• "Fleeting Consciousness." US News Online 29 June 1998. 25 July 1999
• “Identity” Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary, 8 October 2009 http://dictionary.cambridge.org/define_b.asp?key=38918&dict=CALD>
• “Mestizaje y transculturación: la propuesta latinoamericana de globalización”. Eric Courthes’s blog. 21 October 2009. 8 July 2009
• Prieto, M. Mejorando la calidad de la educación. Valparaiso: Ediciones Universitarias de Valparaiso, 2001
• “Transculturation”. Encarta World English Dictionary 2009, 8 October 2009
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario