Cultural Literacy: The Treasures Under the Surface
By Lupe Fisch
What does it mean to be culturally literate, and why is it important? One of the more challenging and necessary aspects of a world language program is preparing students to encounter people with different cultural practices and values than their own. Here’s one way to do it: 13 years of education, 11 schools, four countries, three languages.
For me, cultural literacy wasn’t just a perk of rigorous independent and public schools; it was a survival skill that I started developing in kindergarten. Culture can be a tricky concept–start looking for definitions, and you get a plethora of permutations. But I think that at its core, it is what’s present whenever you walk into a place, and there are other people there. We often think of art and literature as culture: museums, concert halls, and all the creative artifacts a society produces. No argument there, but there’s a lot that is less visible in culture. In 1976, cultural anthropologist Edward T. Hall developed a theory of culture using the metaphor of the iceberg: What we see is a small portion of the whole. Above the surface we find the artifacts–those things that we can perceive with our senses. They include art and literature, but also cuisine, holidays and celebrations, attire, and language. It’s important to know these aspects of any culture that we study or visit, but knowing these things was not particularly helpful for the 4th grader starting a new school in a new country, where the Spanish dialect is different, the rules are hard to figure out, and making friends feels impossible.
Below the artifacts, we find behaviors. Once these are pointed out, we all have a bit of an “aha!” moment. It isn’t always clear that these relate to culture, but they do. Practices around preparing and sharing food, greeting people you know well, a little or not at all, body language, comfort with emotional expression, and concepts of time. If you are invited to a party at 8:00 p.m., arriving at 9:30 is inconsiderate in Seattle; but in Buenos Aires, your hostess will answer the door in a robe with a look on her face that communicates that you are way too early. That’s culture. This type of cultural information would have been useful to me in 4th grade. What Mexican kids play during recess, what kind of food is okay for lunch, what the norms are about asking to go to the bathroom. All that is also culture.
Deeper still in Hall’s iceberg metaphor we find values. These are paradoxically the most important but the hardest to see: Individualism vs. collectivism, child-rearing ideals, attitudes about elders, gender roles, familial relationships, and hierarchy. This is the arena where we shift from being intrigued and charmed by the differences to being confused, surprised, and sometimes even shocked or dismayed by them. “How can they…?,” we think. “That is so weird; why would you do that?” Because values can be the least visible, the least explicit, the least identifiable, values are where the hard work of cultural literacy happens. When a child is exposed to a wide range of cultures in their formative years, this learning happens organically and implicitly. By the time I was a young adult, it became second nature for me to watch, notice, assess, and negotiate an interaction. As we all do, I still privilege my own values, I feel the way my people do some things is a little better, but I try hard not to lead with that, to ask and wonder, to assume the best intentions, to think first that I’m the one who doesn’t understand, not that the other person is doing it wrong. But most of all, I try to remain aware of my own tendency to judge, and to remember that being human is a richly varied thing.
Although every language teacher hopes all their students will maintain and continue to expand the language they started building in high school, the reality is that unless they continue studying in college and build regular immersion experiences into their adult lives, most will lose the additional languages they acquire in their youth. At The Downtown School, we strive to launch students with a robust foundation in Spanish, but we also work to expand students’ capacity to engage with cultures other than their own, to maintain a sense of respectful curiosity as they navigate any culture they encounter–from the family culture of future in-laws, to the corporate culture of their first job after college, and to any experiences they have with other countries and languages. A side benefit of this approach is that it also leads to deeper reflection of the self and broader empathy for others. Our hope is that this skill set enriches the lives of our students and endures well past their ability to have a conversation with a Spanish speaker decades after they graduate.