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8 - Realizing “Cross-cultural Exchange”: A Dialogue between the USA and China
- Hong Kong University Press, HKU
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8 Realizing “Cross-cultural Exchange”: A Dialogue between the USA and China Ivy Wang Each year, publicly and privately financed organizations fund thousands of Americans to travel to distant countries to teach English. These organizations range from the Fulbright Committee, which administers hundreds of teaching fellowships a year, to university-affiliated programs that select only a small handful of their own alumni annually. For these ESL teachers, their classroom mandate does not end at language instruction. The loftier and less tangible goal of their work is frequently that of effecting “cross-cultural exchange” between the USA and the country to which they have traveled. More than a simple education in American customs and society, the term implies a reciprocal experience, in which both teacher and students contribute and learn by representing the views and behaviors of their own places of origin. The relationship between second-language learning and culture has long been an object of study and debate for educators. In recent decades the idea of culture itself has come under scrutiny. Scholars in the fields of anthropology and cultural studies have launched critiques of the “culture concept” — the idea that groups of people each possess their own unified and distinct cultures — arguing that it is no longer a useful way to conceive of and explain difference among people. These critiques have in turn forced a re-evaluation of how language instructors should teach culture to students. At the same time, the rapid internationalization of education worldwide and the globalization of media have blurred geographic and social borders, further complicating the task of the ESL teacher-cum-cultural ambassador. Drawing from recently published research, my own experiences as a teaching fellow at a Chinese university, as well as the official reports of other young instructors supported by the Yale-China Association teaching fellowships, I will show how English teachers working in China in the past few years have Ch08(P.149-160).indd 149 08/07/2010 12:14 PM 150 Ivy Wang sought to realize meaningful cultural exchange. In this new environment of blurred geographic boundaries and multifaceted individual identities, teaching culture need not take the form of top-down instruction. Rather, the interactive crosscultural classroom can be a place in which students and teachers representing different backgrounds and affiliations challenge existing ideas and, together, build new ones. Debating “culture” In his book Innocents Abroad (2006), the historian Jonathan Zimmerman relates the drastic shift in perspective that American teachers working in foreign countries experienced in the mid-twentieth century. Whereas earlier Americans had assumed the justness and superiority of their nation’s values, teachers who went abroad after World War II began to point to such notions as “cultural imperialism.” They openly doubted and frequently flatly rejected the idea that American practices should be adopted by other countries. Zimmerman traces this sea change to the spread of the “culture concept” throughout the early twentieth century. First identified by anthropologists, the culture concept posited that rather than describing the distinction between “civilization” and “savagery,” culture could be understood as the “complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.”1 Thus, every society had its own culture, and no culture could claim to be superior to another. Originally conceived of in 1871, the culture concept gained traction throughout the early twentieth century, and by the 1950s had become one of the forces that “helped to shape and define midcentury America,” including the young teachers who went abroad to represent it (Zimmerman 2006, 5). Today, concepts originating from academia continue to affect the thinking of teachers working abroad. In his essay “TESOL and Culture,” Atkinson (1999) maps the critique which scholars in the field of anthropology and cultural studies have leveled against the culture concept. The “received view” of cultures, he describes, is one that sees them in their most typical form of geographically (and quite often nationally) distinct entities, as relatively unchanging and homogenous, and as all-encompassing systems of rules or norms that substantially determine personal behavior. (626) According to Zimmerman, this idea that “each people possessed a single culture, not more than one . . . [which] imprinted itself on each individual, in more or less the same way” (2006, 11) dominated the thinking of American teachers Ch08(P.149-160).indd 150 08/07/2010 12:14 PM [3.92.96.247] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 16:15 GMT) Realizing “Cross-cultural Exchange” 151...