Languaging
Travels around the world have made me appreciate languaging more than I ever imagined. With each encounter with a new person in a new context, I find myself noticing more and more details about the act of doing language, the act of communicating, the act of relating. This week has provided several opportunities to converse with graduate students with broad research interests: math and English education, integration of students with special needs, HIV and AIDS research, STEM etc. etc. But each of these conversations included much more language than the words we shared. I enjoy the proximity of space my African classmates are willing to share with me and the slight touches of the hand to acknowledge understanding. When I begin a conversation, I feel as if I enter an intimate space of communication that extends through the physical body: messages are shared through eye contact, facial expressions and stature. We communicate with our bodies everyday, but it is not until we do language with someone who does it slightly different than us that we recognize our own patterns. I often worry so much about learning (some of) the spoken language(s) of a new place that I forget how much other languaging and relating happens without words.
-Jen Stacy
Interesting post, Jen. This reminds of a student of mine who was from the Congo and spoke, I don't know, a bajillion languages :) He insisted that it wasn't learning languages that was key to preparing teachers well (we were talking about ELL teachers in particular). He thought it was learning cultures, and he proposed to place pre-service teachers within other cultures (and then the language would come) as a way to prepare them well. Of course, language and culture are intertwined in ways that may not be all the useful to try to unravel...as your post reminds me. I hope you're all having a wonderful trip!
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