Why do traditional Chinese fashions use so much red, for example? What are the origins of the Nigerian flag, and does it still represent Nigerian cultures accurately today? In one of my favorite projects, Global Partners Junior, students around the world collaborated to understand and share their country and local flags with each other. It’s not that the Fs are a superficial element of a culture at all, really, but we have to ask why they exist if we want culture to be more than a festival. Dig beneath the Fs by asking why the surface elements exist.What are the geographic and cultural reasons behind the fact that Mexican foods are spicy (more or less so depending on the region), while Andean foods in South America rarely are? Instead of just cooking or eating foods from a different region, digging beneath the Fs means investigating the history of local cuisines, why a given region uses the ingredients they do, and how those foods connect to culture and daily life. The Fs are a starting place, an entry point that students enjoy but if we stop there, our students miss an opportunity for deeper learning. I still remember the first time we made molé in my Spanish classroom as a middle schooler, and I loved cooking Costa Rican empanadas with my students. The Fs are alive and well in many elementary and world-language classrooms, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Consider the Fs an entry point, not an end point.4 Ways to Move Toward Teaching Deep Cultureįollowing are a few suggestions for how you might move beyond the Fs in your classroom. It’s not that we should avoid the Fs in our classrooms, but that we should ensure students’ inquiry delves deeper into the complexities that “culture” and the human experience include. Our goal as global educators should be to dig beneath the waterline as much as possible, and global partnerships can help us do exactly that. In fact, when we dig beneath the surface of the Fs, we often find the reasons behind what we can see on the surface. While we can observe facets such as fashion, flags, and food, deeper elements of culture such as dispositions, values, attitudes, and beliefs provide a more nuanced look at culture. Hall’s 1976 book, Beyond Culture, he explores what he calls “The Cultural Iceberg Model.” According to Hall, just as we can only see 10 percent of an iceberg above the waterline, 90 percent of what we call “culture” isn’t visible above the surface. There’s nothing wrong with exploring the observable aspects of culture, of course, but staying there can create superficial learning experiences, even leading to cultural misrepresentation and stereotypical assumptions about other cultures. Most global educators have a challenging relationship with the “Fs of Global Education.” The Fs, which include cultural facets such as food, festivals, flags, and fashion, are those elements of culture we can see most easily. “People are tied together and yet isolated from each other by invisible threads of rhythm and hidden walls of time.” -Edward T.
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