In language teaching, we often talk about how to teach culture. In the CI/TPRS teaching I do, I often weave pictures of Chinese "Products" and "Practices" into my PictureTalk slides, and relevant concepts into the stories I write. But the current professional talk is really into a full three Ps: Products, Practices, and Perspectives. For novice learners, I often see teachers fall into an easy trap of over-simplification and stereotyping. This happens when images show Chinese people drinking hot water but Americans drinking ice water. The lesson implicitly promotes making assumptions about individual people based on norms which may or may not represent the fuller population and its various communities. It seems as if we want our students strike up conversations with Chinese people and say, "Oh, you are Chinese, so you must use chopsticks and drink only hot water." This seems irresponsible to me.
Recently when teaching Chinese jiaozi (dumplings) to students, one teacher, herself being from China, told us in private, "I'm from the south. We don't eat Jiaozi there." I remembered meeting people born and raised in Sichuan who don't eat spicy food. This is not a regional difference, but an individual one. I soon started thinking about how I was born and raised in the US, but I'm not into sports. Not one sport. Not a one. I mentioned to Ngan, my partner in teaching crime, what if we designed a unit about the people who don't do some norm in a country? Doesn't that kill two birds with one stone; introduce the perspectives of why people do and don't do some norm at the same time? Ngan responded, "Essential Question: Who doesn't eat jiaozi." Boom. Diversity. What a thought. In CI teaching, I might do this for my college students by PictureTalking with survey numbers provided by my Chinese friends. The survey would be designed somewhat openly, asking, maybe, "What do you drink with different kind of meals, and why?". For the 2nd and 3rd graders I teach after school, I might write a story about a person from Sichuan who wants a light-tasting meal. Each restaurant they go to offers a spicy meal, mentioning why spicy is good ("when living in Sichuan, I was often told that it helps you sweat, to keep you cooled of"). There. Products: food. Practices: eating spicy and avoiding eating spicy. Perspectives: keeps you cool and not everyone there cares about sweating to keep cool. Cultural norms as viewed from the perspective of non-participants, a kind of "local outsiders".
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Reed Riggs (Author)
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