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Reading across cultures ‘Self localization’ in the higher education curriculum Gabriel García Ochoa Monash University
Higher Education institutions worldwide are aware of the fact that intercultural and interdisciplinary collaborations will be an essential part of their students’ professional lives. To that effect, it is crucial to develop pedagogical strategies to provide students with the skills that will give them the mobility and flexibility to operate efficiently in different cultural contexts. ‘Reading Across Cultures’ is a module taught at Monash University that was specifically designed to enhance students’ levels of Cultural Literacy. The module is particularly innovative in that its structure follows that of a literary studies course, but it focuses on teaching students how to transfer the analytical and interpretative skills learnt in the classroom to real life scenarios. This article presents a detailed description of how ‘Reading Across Cultures’ does this. In the context of Localization and Internationalization Studies, the article discusses the need to teach our students how to ‘localize themselves’, and how this can be achieved by means of Cultural Literacy. It also provides an explanation of the overall structure of ‘Reading Across Cultures’, including a description of assignments that will be particularly useful for educators at a tertiary level who seek to plan similar courses aimed at enhancing students’ levels of Cultural Literacy or Intercultural Competence. The article focuses on two specific techniques that were used throughout the module to enhance students’ levels of Cultural Literacy: ‘destabilization’ and ‘reflection’. Keywords: Cultural literacy, localization, destabilization, reflection
1. Introduction In Higher Education, the need to equip students with the necessary skills sets to become ‘global’ professionals has become a curricular imperative. Globalization itself, as a term, has become “a buzzword in danger of becoming a cliché” (Lindgren et al 2015, 74), and the same goes for the idea of internationalization (Davies 2008).
The Journal of Internationalization and Localization 3:2 (2016), 165–181. doi 10.1075/jial.3.2.04och issn 2032–6904 / e-issn 2032–6912 © John Benjamins Publishing Company
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Not surprisingly, the last two decades have witnessed the popularization of a host of terms in Higher Education that make reference to attributes associated with globalization and internationalization: ‘Global competency’, ‘Cosmopolitanism’, ‘Global citizen’, ‘Cosmopolitan capital’, each of these, as García Ochoa, McDonald and Monk suggest, with slight differences of meaning, but in essence the same goal in mind: “to provide students with the skills sets that will give them the mobility and flexibility to be able to operate efficiently in a variety of cultural and professional contexts.” (Forthcoming) One of the most recent answers to this need for educating students to be adept professionals in an increasingly globalized world is the notion of Cultural Literacy. This article presents a detailed description of how ‘Reading Across Cultures’, a literary studies module at Monash University was designed to embed Cultural Literacy in the Higher Education curriculum. In the context of Localization and Internationalization Studies, it discusses the need to teach our students how to ‘localize themselves’, and how this can be achieved through Cultural Literacy. The article also provides an explanation of the overall structure of the module, including assignments and content material that will be particularly useful for educators at a tertiary level who seek to plan similar courses aimed at enhancing students’ levels of Cultural Literacy or Intercultural Competence. The article focuses on two specific techniques that were used throughout the module to enhance students’ levels of Cultural Literacy: ‘destabilization’ and ‘reflection’. 2. Cultural Literacy Cultural Literacy, in the way it is understood in this paper, is a relatively new field of research. It started in 2007, when the ESF Standing Committee for the Humanities (SHC) commissioned a group of its members, academics in Literary Studies, to consider the role of Literary Studies in Europe today, and the potential contributions that the field could make to resolving the many challenges we are faced with in the 21st century (Caball et al. 2013, 2). The definition of Cultural Literacy that will be used in this paper is that proposed by García Ochoa, McDonald and Monk (Forthcoming) in “Embedding Cultural Literacy in Higher Education: A New Approach”, which is greatly influenced by the ideas explored in the ESF/SHC brief “Cultural Literacy in Europe Today” (Caball et al. 2013).1 García Ochoa, McDonald and Monk define Cultural Literacy as 1. It is different to the theory proposed by E.D. Hirsch in the early 80s when he coined the term in the seminal article, ‘Cultural Literacy” (1983), later expanded into the famous book Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (1987).
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the ability to read and interpret culture in its many manifestations (cultural artefacts) by applying skills and knowledge inherent to Literary and Cultural Studies (LCS), opening up the possibility to modify such artefacts, or one’s attitude toward them, to the benefit of everyone involved in a given situation. (2)
The aim of Cultural Literacy “is to equip students and professionals with the ability to ‘read’ and understand their ever-evolving cultural and disciplinary contexts.” (4) As Caball et al (2013, 4) explain, one of the primary foci of Literary and Cultural Studies is to “examine the ways in which human beings form thought or action into ‘text-like structured artefacts’ through a range of techniques and practices”. The “text-like” nature of cultural artefacts implies their inherent readability. In this sense, Cultural Literacy involves the development of cultural readability as a macro skill that encompasses a number of basic skills inherent to Literary and Cultural Studies, such as “contextualisation, analysis, comparison, collation, questioning, and the ability to describe, explain, critique, and interpret information…a practical understanding of concepts like narrativity, textuality, fiction and fictionality, rhetoric and rhetoricity.” (García Ochoa, McDonald, and Monk Forthcoming) These skill sets allow students to nurture a basic platform for developing the ability to read and interpret culture, and thus, become more culturally literate. In Orientalism, arguing in favour of World Literature, Edward Said famously states: Rather than alienation and hostility to another time and different culture, philology as applied to Weltliteratur involved a profound humanistic spirit deployed with generosity and, if I may use the word, hospitality. Thus the interpreter’s mind actively makes a place in it for a foreign Other. And this creative making of a place for works that are otherwise alien and distant is the most important facet of the interpreter’s philological mission. (2014, xxv)
One of the self-evident values of literature, one that is often utilized for pedagogical purposes, is its power to expose readers to this ‘foreign Other’, the capacity to disturb notions of normalcy in order to prompt reflection and, one would hope, usher in the positive outcomes that may accompany this process: empathy, tolerance, cultural competence. This is precisely the spirit of Said’s exhortation, and what many courses in World Literature or International Literatures often strive for. This was also one of the main goals of ‘Reading Across Cultures’. The module, however, also had a more practical application in mind than that found in Said’s proposition. Many of the elements of ‘Reading Across Cultures’ are what would normally be expected of a conventional, introductory course in Literary Studies: close readings of different texts, interpretative theory, historical contextualization, developing an understanding of genre, aesthetics, etc. However, ‘Reading Across
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Cultures’ focused on one particular innovation: teaching students how to transfer the analytical and interpretative skills learnt in the classroom to real life scenarios. In ‘Reading Across Cultures’ students were taught specific ways in which their literary analysis could be applied to reading, interpreting, and modifying the cultural artefacts that surround them. For decades the Arts and Humanities have marketed the value of their degrees based primarily on the development of useful, transferable skills that can be applied outside a student’s discipline of study.2 The argument goes that if a student learns Classics or Poetry at University, although the utilitarian ‘value’ of doing so in a market economy may not be at once apparent, the critical and analytical skills developed in the process can be transferred to any context. However, how to transfer these skills is something that students are seldom, or in most cases never, taught. It is generally assumed that students will implicitly understand how to apply the skills they learn in an Arts or Humanities degree to real life. Unfortunately, those students who are not able to make the connection between the two, to go from theory to practice, will end up with a trove of transferable skill sets they don’t know how to transfer. Thus, the primary aim of ‘Reading Across Cultures’ was precisely to teach students how to transfer those skills, from the page, to real scenarios of cultural unfamiliarity. Over the course of twelve weeks, in a very structured way, students progressed from analyzing and interpreting written texts, to film, and from film to the world surrounding them. Underpinning this goal was the rationale of Cultural Literacy mentioned above, the idea that culture is a ‘text-like’ artefact, and as such, readable. This means that if a student is able to develop the same skills that equip one with the ability to analyze a page in a book, a written text in the most orthodox sense, the student would also be able to interpret the world, or at least to do so in a more nuanced, structured manner. As is the case with many other disciplines that use different types of simulators to train their students, here, literature is being used as a simulator for the human condition. 3. Destabilization and reflection García Ochoa, McDonald, and Monk (Forthcoming, 2) define Cultural Literacy as both a threshold concept, following Jan Meyer and Ray Land’s understanding of the term, and a modus operandi, an approach to learning. Meyer, Land and Baillie 2. See: http://concentrations.fas.harvard.edu/pages/arts-and-humanities, http://www2.open. ac.uk/students/careers/ou-study-and-your-career/arts-and-humanities;http://www.careereducation.columbia.edu/resources/tipsheets/non-academic-career-options-phds-and-mas; http:// www.kent.ac.uk/careers/humanities.htm
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argue that learning threshold concepts is akin to “passing through a portal, from which a new perspective opens up, allowing things formerly not perceived to come into view.” (2010, ix). The transformative quality of threshold concepts involves “a significant shift in the perception of a subject…[that] may lead to a transformation of personal identity, a reconstruction of subjectivity.” (2006, 7). Threshold concepts involve preliminal, liminal and postliminal stages of understanding. When the postliminal stage of understanding is reached, it comes with “a new and previously inaccessible way of thinking about something. It represents a transformed way of understanding or interpreting without which the learner cannot progress, and results in a reformulation of the learner’s frame of meaning.” (Meyer, Land and Baillie 2010, ix–xi). Meyer and Land’s ideas on threshold concepts are particularly germane to Cultural Literacy, especially in relation to the notion of transformative learning.3 Meyer and Land’s ideas of deep, transformative learning inform García Ochoa, McDonald and Monk’s two primary teaching strategies for the development of Cultural Literacy: destabilization and reflection. García Ochoa, McDonald and Monk define destabilization as “a teaching strategy that propitiates both a conceptual shift in students, and a more instinctive, ‘visceral’ form of unrest that is aimed at unsettling their views on culture, identity, and the world at large.” (Forthcoming, 9) The primary purpose of destabilization is to expose students, within a safe and controlled environment, to scenarios of uncertainty, so that they can understand how they approach what they don’t know in order to “prompt introspection at a very fundamental level”. (8) Bill Green states of the traditional understanding of literacy that “the literate individual is “someone who knows that he or she does not have to be and, further, cannot be literate with regard to everything.” Green adds that “literate individuals are not rendered powerless in circumstances outside their immediate competence; they know what to do and who to see in order to achieve their purposes.” (1988, 160–61). Green is essentially arguing that a certain competence in dealing with uncertainty can be considered a basic component of the traditional notion of literacy, which is also true of Cultural Literacy. Ly Tran addresses the same idea when she discusses the distinction between “passive ignorance” and “creative/agentive ignorance.” (2015) According to Tran, passive ignorance refers to a state where an individual is not aware of his or her own ignorance. However, when a student transforms ignorance “into co-constructive knowledge and capabilities and attributes” (Tran 2015), he or she is engaging with ignorance in a creative way, or actively rather than passively. This is one of the aims of Cultural Literacy, to equip 3. In the context of Cultural Literacy in Higher Education, I refer to disciplines and disciplinary backgrounds as cultures.
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students with the versatility to adapt to “a myriad scenarios where their knowledge will not be absolute, and to provide them with the necessary skills to read, analyze, and draw meaning out of these situations.” (García Ochoa, McDonald and Monk Forthcoming) Destabilization allows teachers to challenge students’ prior learning and preconceived ideas, in particular when it comes to notions of ‘normality’ and ‘ethnocentrism’. It enables them to create a context where students are, in a way, ‘ignorant’, and must make use of their creativity and ingenuity to make sense of the given situation. But the process of transformational learning that Cultural Literacy aspires to is not possible unless the students’ exposure to destabilization is followed by an intense period of reflection. As García Ochoa, McDonald and Monk explain, “the initial purpose of destabilising students is to place them in a position of cognitive uncertainty, from which they will be able to extricate themselves” through a process of structured reflection during which they “learn to apply a variety of skills that are inherent to Literary and Cultural Studies.” (Forthcoming, 10). This is precisely what distinguishes Cultural Literacy from other approaches to Intercultural Competence, the application of LCS research skills that allow students to “create ‘structures’ that facilitate the readability of cultural artefacts, enabling them to draw meaning out of such artefacts” (García Ochoa, McDonald and Monk Forthcoming). As Schwartzman notes, “as the mechanism for transformational learning, reflectiveness is required for productively navigating the interval of confusion that follows an encounter with the existentially unfamiliar” (2010, 40). In this sense, developing Cultural Literacy involves an active process of meaning-making that is more nuanced than the basic interpretation of the world that most people use to operate on a daily basis. 4. Localization and Cultural Literacy As mentioned in the Introduction, the word ‘globalization’ has become an item of fashionable jargon in Higher Education, and the same goes for other sectors and industries where it is frequently used in different ways with only slight variations in meaning. Jiménez-Crespo (2009, 79) defines localization as “a new translation modality”, noting that it is “a technological, textual, communicative and cognitive process by which interactive digital texts are adapted for their use in a different cultural and linguistic context of reception.” Part of Jiménez-Crespo’s work has focused on the ways in which texts that are localized are able to assimilate the conventions of their target culture (2004, 2009, 2013). Whether this is successfully attained or not, this process of cultural adaptation, of accurately understanding and assuming
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the conventions of the target readership, is one of the primary goals of convention, equally important to the appropriate use of local linguistic paradigms. As Pym explains in relation to globalization, internationalization, and localization, “the terms are not standard” (30). ‘Localization’ in particular is understood differently in different contexts. Evidently, if this is the case with Localization and Internationalization Studies, it applies to other fields of study and industry sectors too. The meaning of ‘localization’ within the Higher Education sector, for example, is not exactly the same as how ‘localization’ is defined in Translation Studies. In Higher Education, the term localization often refers to providing educational models that are relevant to the locale where a university is situated, and often refer to how these are negotiated with a need for globalization. In Taiwan Education at the Crossroads: When Globalization Meets Localization, Zhuying Zhou (2012) explores the dilemma that Taiwanese education has experienced in the face of globalization, which in many ways reflects that of Higher Education in other parts of the world. As Zhou argues, Taiwanese culture is constantly negotiating the tensions of the globalization/localization process, which “can be easily observed in its education system today, because it not only actively reaches out in the foreign language and exchange context but also deals with many cultural features that are local in nature.” (2). Part of the challenge faced by Taiwanese education–a challenge shared by many universities worldwide–has consisted of devising strategies to successfully “globalize its education system while preserving its cultural heritage with a local identity” (5) Generally speaking, this is what ‘localization’ entails in the context of Higher Education, the ability to reach out to the world while being able to maintain a sense of ‘cultural heritage and local identity.’ The idea of localization in Higher Education described by Zhou is similar to the process of cultural adaptation that takes place through Cultural Literacy. In their attempts to become ‘global’, Universities first aim for the internationalization of their students in a myriad ways: build campi overseas, forge alliances with other universities, creating joint degrees, exchange programs for students to come and go, etc. However, unlike online global companies seeking to localize their products with a particular market in mind, whether it be China, Brussels or Brazil, in the case of our students in most cases we can’t know the specific locales where they will be undertaking their professional careers. As a result of the students’ “internationalized” educational experience it is assumed that the world is now their oyster. Thus, as educators, with very few exceptions, it is impossible to ascertain where our students will be working, locally or internationally, and in terms of cultural adaptation, to prepare them for that environment, in a sense, localize them. Cultural Literacy teaches students how to become aware of unfamiliar cultural conventions–whether at home or abroad–and how to read, interpret and adapt
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those conventions to ensure more efficient professional interactions; in a sense, learn how to localize themselves. As García Ochoa, McDonald and Monk argue, Cultural Literacy “is not about learning ever-changing sets of professional practices and social mores.” (Forthcoming 4). If a colleague has a Japanese background one will not become an expert in Japan for the sole purpose of interacting with him or her; of course not. Rather, using the premise of “the world as a text” as a point of departure, and taking into consideration that cultural artefacts, including conventions, are readable, we are teaching students how to adapt themselves to everchanging sets of context-dependent conventions. The goal with our students is not for them to be able to blend in seamlessly as locals, but rather, to understand cultural conventions so that they can operate within them. We are teaching students how to read new situations in order to determine how to best adapt to the cultural conventions that surround them, whether in their home country, or abroad. 5. Reading across cultures One of our responses to this need for teaching students how to read and adapt themselves to culturally unfamiliar scenarios was the design of ‘Reading Across Cultures’. This is a first year module offered during second semester at Monash University. It is delivered over twelve weeks as a two-hour weekly seminar. Most of the students enrolled in it are in their first year of tertiary education. The module is available to every student in the university as an elective, and as a result of this it attracts students from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, which leads to rewarding discussions between students from very different fields of study (Science, Marketing, Medicine, Business, Arts and Humanities). The first year this module was offered (2015), the students were predominantly Australian with only four exceptions: two international students from mainland China, and two from Malaysia. As Lindgren et al. argue (2015, 69), Teaching and learning which crosses both national and disciplinary borders, while in step with many current drivers in the HE sector, inherently challenges the ways in which many universities conceive of and design learning experiences and spaces, which are frequently geared toward information download.
This was certainly true of ‘Reading Across Cultures’, which aimed to provide a nontraditional, experiential learning context. The module incorporated a mixture of problem-based learning, where students are encouraged to take responsibility for organising and directing their learning with support from their supervisors; and a
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variety of in-class activities and assignments that made use of both Destabilization and Reflection to prompt the development of Cultural Literacy in our students. Every week the students had to analyze a short story by an author with a mixed cultural heritage, or from a literary tradition other than those which Australian students would be expected to be most familiar with (American, British, Australian). Throughout the semester, the students were taught how to analyze three particular elements of the texts that they read: dialogue, character, and setting. At the start of the semester, three full seminars were dedicated to understanding each of these elements of the text (one seminar per element), and another three during the second half of the semester to reviewing them. As part of their training a limited number of basic concepts in literary theory and cultural studies were also provided throughout the semester to enrich the students’ analysis: the notion of ‘Otherness’ as defined by Edward Said, the classic interpretation of ‘Tragedy’ according to Aristotle, and Joseph Campbell’s notion of the ‘Monomyth’. These concepts had to be taught taking into consideration the majority of the student’s year level for this module, and adapted accordingly to make them more digestible. As the semester unfolded, the aim of the course was for students to learn how to transfer the analytical and interpretative skills applied to the short stories studied in class to increasingly complex ‘texts’. They progressed from short stories to film in their mid-semester assignments, and from film to a real-life scenario for their final assignment. 6. Assignments The assignments for this module placed great emphasis on group work and collaboration as basic skills required to work efficiently in any professional setting. The assignments and in-class activities that took place throughout the semester were designed to work in synergy with each other; they were all related, and the skills practised in each were cumulatively built upon for subsequent activities. The rationale behind this was to find strategies to make every aspect of the course reinforce the others, to make them all relevant in different ways. Students were assessed on the depth of their analysis and their ability to draw logical conclusions on the basis of the information provided to them, even when such conclusions may have been factually wrong.
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The students had to complete five assignments for the module. For the purpose of this paper, I will only focus on the three most salient: Assignment 1: ‘Gimpel the Fool’; Assignment 2: ‘Film Analysis’; and Assignment 3 ‘Ethnographic Analysis’.4
Assignment 1 Title: Character Analysis, ‘Gimpel the Fool’ Value: 10 % Individual/Group work: Group work. Format: Class presentation, eight to ten minutes long. Marking criteria: ‘Communication and Presentation Skills’; ‘Teamwork’; ‘Focus’; and ‘Evaluation of Primary Source’. Details of Task: Students were divided into groups of four or five; these were the groups they worked with throughout the semester for all their other tasks. Each group had to analyze one of the main characters in the short story ‘Gimpel the Fool’ by the Polish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer. The assignment made use of embodied learning, an element of Open Space Learning that is based on the idea that “learning should be grounded in discovery, enquiry and action, with stress on the development of social intelligence” (Monk, 2011). After doing their preparatory character analysis prior to the class, the students had to present their findings to the class as a role-play performance that adhered to very strict instructions. Each group chose one of its members to enact the character that was assigned for their analysis. The chosen student was interviewed by the rest of the class in a group-presentation setting. The other groups, those witnessing the presentation, had to have at least one question prepared for each of the characters being analyzed by their peers, which meant each group had to prepare a total of four questions. The student who was interviewed was allowed to receive help from his or her fellow group members in answering the questions posed by the rest of the class. This was done in order to allow students to actively display their ability to work together as a group, and to showcase the research and preparation that they had done on the topic prior to the presentation.
4. The other two assessed assignments for the course, an in-class test and a “Constructive Criticism” piece, reinforced the skills learned in assignments 1 & 2 and to avoid repetition, will not be discussed here.
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Goals: 1. Introduce students to the group-work dynamic that took place for the rest of the semester. 2. Familiarise students with the marking criteria that was used for the next two assignments: ‘Film Analysis’ and ‘Ethnographic Analysis’. 3. Destabilization and Reflection: these were present in the assignment in a number of ways. Firstly, the unorthodox nature of the task in the context of a literary studies module destabilized the students’ assumptions of what a character analysis should entail. In addition to this, students’ preconceptions surrounding a number of issues addressed in the story (gender roles, the nature of evil, loyalty, etc.) were destabilized when they were prompted to understand, embody and defend the point of view of a fictional character who often had very little in common with them. Their ideas of normalcy and ethnocentrism were visibly challenged. These mild instances of destabilization were followed by very structured opportunities for reflection in the form of the group presentations, and the questions asked by their peers. These activities prompted students to reflect during their research on their assigned character, and when they answered the questions asked by their peers, and most importantly, when they thought-up questions to ask each other.
Assignment 2 Title: Film Analysis Value: 30% (group presentation = 80%, individual reflection = 20%) Individual/Group work: A combination of group and individual work. Format: Group presentation to the class (eight to ten minutes long); written, individual reflection (300 words) Marking criteria: Group presentation: ‘Communication and Presentation Skills’; ‘Teamwork’; ‘Focus’; and ‘Evaluation of Primary Source’ (see Figure 1, ‘Film Analysis Rubric’). Individual reflection: ‘Analysis of the Situation’; ‘Problem Identification’; ‘Suggestion of Feasible Solutions’ Details of Task: The student groups for this task were the same as for the previous assignment. Each group had to analyze a short film clip, 5–8 minutes long, without watching the rest of the film. The students’ presentations had to incorporate the three elements of textual analysis that had been covered in class during the previous weeks: setting, dialogue, and
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character; and make reference to the basic Literary and Cultural Studies concepts that had also been covered during those weeks: the Other, and the purpose of Tragedy according to Aristotle. The students presented their work to the class as a group, and were encouraged to do so in as creative a way as possible, doing role-play, or a pretend round table with the film’s crew and cast members, or any other scenario they could think of, as long as it was approved by the teacher prior to the presentation day. The group presentations were followed by five minutes of questions from the rest of their peers, and the teacher.
Preparation: An important component of this assignment was the unorthodox way in which the students had to prepare for it. Initially, the groups were not given the title of the film that they had to analyze. Part of their assignment involved discovering what film they had to discuss, and they did this by embarking on a ‘treasure hunt’. The treasure hunt demanded that students make use of their creativity, ingenuity, and problem-solving skills. Four weeks prior to the due date for their presentations, each group was given a clue. The clue, once decoded, referred them to one of five different staff members in the School of Languages and Linguistics who held the next clue. My colleagues in the School of Languages who generously offered to help with this activity had to follow one very precise instruction: when the students approached them to get their clue, they could only speak to them in the language other than English that they teach at Monash: French, Spanish, Japanese, Indonesian, and Tagalog. Only if the students were able to communicate in the language in question, would they be given the clue. Not surprisingly, most students were shocked at encountering a staff member unwilling to address them in English, and they had to regroup and formulate a strategy to communicate, either in the language in question, or through other means. Presentation: After their group presentations the students were asked very specific questions to prompt the reflection process. Were they able to transfer the skills that had been previously applied to the texts we read in class to the film? What was different? How did they adapt to that difference? In relation to the film clips themselves, how did they deal with the uncertainty of not knowing what the film was about, and only being able to ‘read’ one small part of it? What meaning were they able to draw from that film clip? What insights could they gather? What did they assume was the topic and plot of the story?
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The questions were also related to the preparatory treasure hunt. What were their reactions? How did they feel? How did they deal with the problem? What skills did they have to make use of? Were these analytical skills similar to the ones we learned in class when analyzing the short stories?
Written reflection: This was a very short piece designed to encourage students to further reflect on the experience of their task. They were asked to mention at least two challenges that they encountered throughout the process of doing their assignment, and the specific way in which they were able to overcome such challenges; and to mention how these skills may be useful to them in the future. Goals: 1. Skill Transfer: one of the primary aims of this assignment was for the students to transfer the analytical skills they had been taught in class through the analysis of short stories to a new type of text, in this case, film. 2. Meaning: to learn how to draw meaning when the necessary context to do so is unavailable, or only partially available. This prompted students to question not only what they knew, but as Ly Tran (2015) would argue, more importantly, what they did not know, and how they could bridge that gap through creative ignorance given the restrictions imposed on them by the task. 3. Destabilization and Reflection: There were two main instances of curated destabilization in this assignment: the preparatory treasure hunt, and the decontextualization of the film clips. In a safe and controlled environment the students were exposed to an all-too-common, real-world problem: having to communicate with someone in order to complete a task, and struggling to do so. In this case the language barrier made the nature of the problem perfectly obvious, but students were later prompted to reflect on more subtle iterations of this idea: what happens if one is working with a colleague from a different disciplinary background, and the technical language each of you uses is different? How can one bridge that gap, and learn to communicate efficiently with the other? What tools do we have at our disposal? In a playful, entertaining, and non-intimidating manner, this activity prompted students to exercise their problem-solving skills in order to obtain the title of the film that they had to analyze for their assignment. Likewise, with the film clip, the students had to learn how to draw meaning from a situation whose context was completely unfamiliar to them, and reflect on the skills that they utilized to do so.
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Assignment 3 Title: Ethnographic Analysis Value: 30% (group presentation = 60%, individual reflection = 40%) Individual/Group work: A combination of group and individual work. Format: Group presentation to the class (eight to ten minutes long); written, individual reflection (300 words) Marking criteria: Group presentation: ‘Communication and Presentation Skills’; ‘Teamwork’; ‘Focus’; and ‘Evaluation of Primary Source’. Individual reflection: (the same as for the previous assignment): ‘Analysis of the Situation’; ‘Problem Identification’; ‘Suggestion of Feasible Solutions’ Details of Task: The student groups for this task were the same as for the previous two assignments. Each of the five groups in the class had to attend one place of worship that was assigned to them by their teacher: a synagogue, a mosque, a Buddhist temple, a Hindu temple, and a Greek Orthodox Church. If a student in a group had a prior affiliation to their assigned place of worship, they were moved to a different group. The students were asked to refrain from doing any research on their assigned place of worship prior to their visit. Within certain parameters, the purpose of this was to make the actual experience as destabilizing as possible.5 The students had to visit the place of worship allocated to them and ‘read’ it using the three elements of textual analysis that had been covered in class throughout the semester: setting, dialogue, and character. They had to attempt to draw meaning from the experience, and interpret it by using the aforementioned skills. The second part of the task was to do basic research on their assigned place of worship, and compare their initial readings and assumptions against facts.
Presentation: Unlike their previous presentations, this did not make use of embodied learning or other forms of creative expression. The students were asked to give a traditional, straightforward class presentation divided in three parts.
5. Each of these venues was visited by the teacher prior to the assignment to ensure that they were appropriate for the students. The teacher provided the students with all the basic information that they needed to know prior to attending their place of worship, (whom to contact once they got there, what to wear, etc.). Additionally, from the onset, the students were given the option to do an alternative assignment if any of them refused, on principle, to visit their assigned place of worship. No one refused to do the assignment.
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During the first part of their presentation the students shared their initial reading of the place they went to. They described what conclusions they had been able to draw using their analytical skills, and how they drew them. The second part of the presentation was a comparison between the students’ initial reading of the place of worship, and how this contrasted with the facts they later researched. Were their assumptions correct? If not, why not? Why did they misinterpret something? Can this be avoided or improved? How? Again, from the beginning of the task the students were told that the point of the exercise was not to ‘get it right’, but to practise the transference of their literary analysis skills to a real-life scenario, and to learn from any possible mistakes that took place in that process. The third part of the presentation consisted of a Q& A session, similar to the one from previous assignments, designed to encourage the students to further reflect on the experience.
Written reflection: The written reflection for this assignment was worth twice as much as for the previous one, but other than that it followed the exact same format, the students simply were asked to provide a more in-depth analysis. They had to mention at least two challenges that they encountered throughout the process of doing their assignment, and the specific way in which they were able to overcome such challenges; and to explain how these skills may be useful to them in the future. Goals: 1. Skill Transfer: This assignment represented the culmination of one of the main aims of the course, which was the successful transfer of the analytical and interpretative skills learned through texts in the classroom to a real-life scenario. 2. Destabilization and Reflection: In this case, the main instance of destabilization was the experience of going to an unknown place of worship. The students were immersed in a completely unfamiliar scenario. The reflection process came during the question and answer session at the end of the group presentations, and through the students’ written pieces. 7. Conclusion Now more than ever, globalization is not only a matter of knowing how to ‘go out into the world’, how to be an ‘international’ professional; globalization also entails knowing how to greet a world that is rapidly heading toward us, in our own backyards. Technological developments and increased mobility across nations will
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180 Gabriel García Ochoa
only continue to intensify this already fast-paced situation of continuous change. Given this, one of the best skills that Higher Education institutions can provide their students is knowing how to adapt to change, and how to operate effectively within situations of uncertainty. It is important for students to understand that their ideas of ‘normalcy’ and ‘status quo’ are locale-dependent conventions, and consequently, subject to change when the locale does. In order to do this, it is important that a cognitive-shift take place, ideally, within a controlled educational setting that will allow the student to train and be prepared for true examples of ‘difference’ when they do occur, to know how to identify, read, and interpret these instances of difference, and to develop a degree of versatility that will allow them to ‘localize themselves’ in a variety of professional scenarios. The students’ responses to ‘Reading Across Cultures’ were overwhelmingly positive. Their ‘Reflection Pieces’ show that there was a true appreciation of the empirical value of the Literary and Cultural Studies skills that they were being taught, and more importantly, on learning how to transfer these skills to real-life scenarios. They also recognized the importance of taking their knowledge beyond the classroom and making it an experiential learning experience. The constant, joint use of destabilization and reflection were an important part of this process, which helped to prompt deep transformative learning in our students, and show that it is possible to learn how to ‘localize’ oneself.
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Hirsch, Erik D. 1980. “Culture and Literacy.” Journal of Basic Writing, 3 (1): 27–47 Hirsch, Erik D. 1983. “Cultural Literacy.” The American Scholar, 52,(2): 159–169 Hirsch, Erik D. 1987. Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Jiménez, Miguel. 2009. “Conventions in localization: A corpus study of original versus translated text” The Journal of Specialized Translation, 12: 79–102. Jiménez, Miguel. 2013. Translation and Web Localization. London: Routledge. Meyer, Jan H. F., and Ray Land. 2006. “Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge: An Introduction.” In Overcoming Barriers to Student Understanding: Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge, edited by Land, R. and J. Mayer, 3–18. London, New York: Routledge. Meyer, Jan H. F., Ray Land, and Caroline Baillie. 2010. “Editor’s Preface.” In Threshold Concepts and Transformational Learning, edited by R. Land, J. Mayer, and C. Baillie, ix–xlii. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Monk, Nicholas. 2011. Open-Space Learning. Online. www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/iatl/ activities/projects/osl-final/introduction/ (accessed 31 August 2015). National University of Singapore. 2015. “About NUS.” National University of Singapore. Accessed December 3 2015. http://www.nus.edu.sg/about Oxford University. 2015. “Strategic Plan 2013-18” Oxford University. Accessed December 3 2015. https://www.ox.ac.uk/about/organisation/strategic-plan/education?wssl=1 Peking University. 2015. “About PKU.” Peking University. Accessed December 2 2015. http:// english.pku.edu.cn/aboutpku/message_from_the_president/index.htm Said, Edward. 2014. Orientalism. London: Penguin. Schwartzman, Leslie. 2010. “Transcending Disciplinary Boundaries.” In Threshold Concepts and Transformational Learning, edited by Ray Land, Jan Mayer, and Caroline Baillie, 21–44. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. The University of Melbourne. 2015. “About Us.” The University of Melbourne. Accessed December 3 2015. http://about.unimelb.edu.au/strategy-and-leadership/engagement The University of Tokyo. 2015. “About UTokyo.” The University of Tokyo. Accessed December 2 2015. http://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/en/about/mission.html Tran, Ly. 2015. Internationalising the student experience and cosmopolitan learning: Theoretical concepts and examples of practice from the VET sector. Paper presented at the Learning and Teaching for a Globalised World: Internationalisation of the Curriculum SIG Forum 2015, Melbourne. Zhou, Zhuying. 2012. Taiwan Education at the Crossroad: When Globalization Meets Localization. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Author’s address Gabriel García Ochoa Monash University, School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics Office: W528, Menzies Building, Clayton Campus Wellington Road Clayton Victoria 3800 Australia
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