Understanding Cultural Changes

The Human Ecology Abroad in Taiwan program is close to its end and here, sitting in front of my beaten up computer and writing from my new keyboard which has Chinese characters, I sit down and reflect on the knowledge gained in this (almost) 3 month journey and my mind gets caught up on intercultural education and Chinese characters and wonderful temples and gods and goddesses and I ask myself: well after all of this, what have you learned? At first the information swirls into my mind too fast and overloads my hard drive so I cannot really think of anything coherently.

After this initial shock there’s a word that stays in my brain—culture—and so I proceed to think about how the meaning of this word has changed in my mind during the course of the program. From the different readings to the different assignments we had and the different field trips I noticed how my definition of the word has become larger and more profound.

Culture flows, like a river, and drifts, speeds up, slow downs, drags different sediments along with it, and becomes more accessible to people who are not part of it the more the culture gets promoted by individuals inside that culture (usually the ones that live near that specific river).

Before enrolling in the HEAT program I found it easy to understand how a culture continues changing as time passes by. We humans like learning new things and experimenting with different knowledges; however, there were two aspects that still baffled me which had to do with the ways in which a culture from a specific place changes, and why this occurs. The first aspect was about how culture gets negotiated between individuals within a cultural group. The second one was about the different power relationships embedded between a culture that influences another culture to change.

There have been several times in which a culture changes not because all of the individuals inside said culture decide to change it but because an outside society imposes their changes to another society. An example of this was the Japanese occupation in Taiwan. The Japanese changed a lot about the people and its culture (on top of killing lots of Taiwanese residents, in particular aboriginal ones) but it wasn’t something that was negotiated with original inhabitants that got changed. A political power, in this case Japan, decided to impose their culture onto the Taiwanese one and for some Taiwanese people. So what I’m still processing is the fact that culture, as it happens with many other things in life, is not a single entity existing by itself in a specific isolated location. Culture is influenced by political decisions, economics, or people with a lot of power. And as it so happens with the Japanese-Taiwanese example, several times there’s simply not negotiation at all but culture still changes.

A more personal example of different ways in which a culture changes is my previous school in Bogota. Starting by the name of the school “Gimnasio Colombo Britanico” or in English “Colombo Britain Gymnasium” one can tell that the school is trying to combine a Colombian (Colombo) and a more British education for the students that enroll in the school. I have no problem with this; I actually think it is a good thing to integrate different ideas in an educational system to make it better.

When I started attending this school they taught intensive English to their students in order to give them more opportunities outside the country once they left the institution and ventured out into the “real world.” When I was in high school they changed to a bilingual system in primary school, so I never experienced the bilingual part of it but continue to see how the school kept on changing every year. Our logo changed to make it more British, using a white, red and blue lion as our mascot, more English speaking teachers were hired, especially for younger students, and a new curriculum like the IGCSE (International General Certificate of Secondary Education) became available for high school students. We were even credited with a European excellence certificate, which my teachers and the principal seemed to be very happy about. And the school kept on changing over the years, becoming, as my principal used to say: “better and better.”

A little while ago I was curious and I searched online to see how my previous school was doing only to encounter a very different webpage from what I had known before. Now my previous school is “bilingual and international,” and on the main page you can select either English or Spanish versions of the webpage. New buildings and tennis courts added, and the high school is now bilingual as well. However, throughout the page I was only able to find little pieces of anything resembling Colombian culture: the first one is the fact that the page is in Spanish, and the second one is the little Colombian flag next to the British flag to change between English or Spanish.

The more I tried looking for anything Colombian, the less I found. From the web page, and from my previous experience studying in the school, I can say that the school has always tried to change to become “better,” but the model the school is trying to recreate in order to become “better” is a British one—which British one I don’t know.

Right now, across the globe, we’re experiencing a melting pot of different cultures thanks to globalization and communication technologies. However this melange of cultures is one in which the main ingredients come from powerful countries, such as the United States or western European Countries, and other ingredients from “less” powerful countries are significantly less prominent inside the melting pot. What’s worse, the countries who are letting go of their culture, the less powerful ones, are missing and losing all their cultural knowledge to be more like the US or Europe.

In the case of Bogota, power relations play an important role for cultural change, and, even though the changes have not been violently imposed (i.e. Japanese invasion to Taiwan), power relationships still play a huge role in the cultural change because countries like Colombia, with less (political and economic) power are following and copying the US and Europe hoping to resolve their own internal societal problems.

This is why intercultural education for me is so important: we need to be able to celebrate cultural differences in societies, and the best place to start is inside the classroom for both teachers and students. With the HEAT program and its combination of the language learning component, intercultural education, and my independent study (a documentary about rituals in Mazuism) I was able to understand the importance of intercultural education from first-hand experiences and theories we read.

There were three aspects in this program that made me reflect a lot about culture, intercultural education, and its importance. The first one was an English class that we taught at a school in Hualien; the second one was a “media analysis” assignment in which we had to produce a ten-minute video about portrayals of a specific group (we could choose which one) in media, and the third one was a field trip we took to Junyi Experimental High School.

At the beginning of the English class that we taught in a school in Hualien I was really nervous because I was about to teach in an intercultural classroom. All the students were Taiwanese and Chinese speakers and me and some friends were there to teach them a lesson in English about weather in different parts of the world . With time I became more comfortable and was able to be more expressive with my teaching, but intercultural teaching is difficult. As Jin Li writes in her book Cultural Foundations of Learning, classrooms from the West and from the East have fundamental differences, which I could feel when I was inside this classroom. The students were a bit more silent and respectful of the teachers, and the class was quieter and better behaved than in classes I have taught in Bogota. Of course by the end of the class, as I was expecting, kids were happy to go out and play, which seems to be a universal after-class feeling. But I learned a lot with this experience, and some of the readings we had before helped me understand and handle the situation in a better way.

The “media analysis” assignment was challenging but really interesting to do. The medium, video format, allowed both Shir and I to express how stereotypes about gay people are perpetuated in the media and how these affect the population who consumes this media. As as I understood from a couple of course readings, stereotypes strip down a person, with their personalities, dreams, fears, knowledge, etc., to a single aspect of their personality by portraying them through exaggerated caricatures in the characters they create. The problem with this is that media may be the only way in which a person gets to know another culture or another way of thinking different from their own, and if these are exaggerated caricatures of reality, the viewer or consumer of these media will have a very limited (and untrue) portrayal of a group of people who share said characteristic. Things have been changing recently and media (slowly but surely) has been portraying homosexual characters as rounded individuals who are not defined solely by their sexuality, which is great! Media is a very powerful tool for both entertainment and education but it has to be used wisely, otherwise stereotypes or false facts can spread through the masses and create pre-judgment towards specific groups of individuals.

Another experience with the HEAT program with which I had the opportunity to reflect on culture was at Junyi Experimental High School when I was talking with one of the students. The situation in Junyi is different than in many other schools in Taiwan. They have a different curriculum from the Taiwanese one and they exalt cultural differences by accepting and celebrating the culture of several different students coming from different aboriginal tribes in Taiwan. But coming back to the anecdote, the student told me that before coming to Junyi she was studying in Taipei but that she preferred Juny much better because their educational system wasn’t only about millions of tests and test scores. Her description of her schooling prior to Junyi sounded very similar to the “Examination Hell” Jin Li talked about in her book. However, at Junyi things were different. I mean the sole fact that the students prepared presentations in English, their third or fourth language in some cases, about the each of the countries where we come from for the day we visited their school, already denotes differences in their school experience compared with the majority of Taiwanese students. This is one example of what intercultural educators have to do in order to address students coming from different cultures; they have to acknowledge, celebrate the different cultures, and help students with the new culture they are immersed in while still promoting their own.

On top of this I had some conversations with other students who told me how much they appreciated the fact that they could go and talk with their teachers about aspects they were struggling with, maybe not in their native language, but they still felt comfortable enough to go to their teachers and ask for help. In some schools racism can be taken to serious extremes where students don’t feel safe or comfortable. I remember that my cousin, who is also Colombian but studied some years in Miami, told me how she didn’t like the school she went to because of the hostility against “latinas” in the environment. This also affected her grades in school; it affected her mentally, and she ended up having resentment towards the school system because of this. And I don’t blame her. If anything it just makes me realize how important it is nowadays, with globalization and migrations around the entire globe, to have proper intercultural education and educators.

However Junyi was quite a unique place on its own. I really liked how they had such a diversity of students coming from different aboriginal tribes in Taiwan specially after reading about minorities in schools with some assigned readings. The language in which education is taught already denotes a power relationship in society. In this case the language of power was Chinese and aboriginal students had to learn this language prior to their enrollment in any school. The difference with Junyi was that, instead of diminishing the value of all of these rich aboriginal Taiwanese cultures they celebrated them inside and outside the classrooms and encouraged their students to keep on having and learning about their culture, and this is just a great example of the openness that intercultural education has to have.

Educators, as Viv Edwards argues in her book The Power of Babel, need to understand the different backgrounds of and the implications for students who come from a different culture. This is exactly what my cousin didn’t have. In her school most of the educators were English speakers, none of them were Colombian or even Latin American or of Latin American descent, and for some reason they just let other kids discriminate against her for being latina. They were not teaching their students about the differences in culture nor explaining the inherent value of a different culture. Every student has to be properly and respectfully addressed inside and outside the classroom in order to have a proper environment to learn and that’s why more intercultural educators are needed.

And after pondering on the students at Junyi and the wonderful presentations they gave, I remember my Chinese classroom and my classes and how much I learned from them regardless of the difficulties I experienced learning a new language. How can a teacher who doesn’t speak much English, teach a group of students from the U.S., Colombia, Italy, and Korea how to speak, read, write, and understand Chinese? And the answer is intercultural education (and a shit ton of patience!)