Ah ha Moment
As I said this morning at the round table, one of the best experiences for me in South Africa has been working with the graduate students in the mixed methods class. As I was teaching in my second language, I struggled with my English at some points, both trying to say things and understanding the students here, which happens sometimes as well when I teach in the US to an American audience. However, I felt very comfortable speaking to these students, and it felt different somehow from my previous teaching experiences in the US. One of our colleagues from the University of Pretoria talked about how people here believe that the South African English dialect is inferior to the American English dialect, so deficit notions not only about languages per se, but also about varieties, exist here. This comment made me think of my own experience as a speaker of English with an accent in the US. It has happened to me on a few occasions that people make fun of me, imitate me, or ignore me, and, similarly to what our colleague explained, having a Spanish accent is not generally seen as positive in the US. This made me realize that part of what made me feel so comfortable with these students was the fact that many of them were also second language speakers of English, so, linguistically, we were in the same place.
-Carolina Bustamante
One of the things I noticed that were highlighted and articulated during our round table discussion on Thursday were the "rich points" that both UNL and UP students brought up in their reflections of this experience. In his book Language Shock, Michael Agar (1994) explains the notion of frames: "a frame sets a boundary around details and highlights how those details are related to each other” (p. 130). A frame serves as a layout for how to understand a concept. As different discourses come into contact and tensions arise, what Agar calls “rich points”, frames permit a person to tie things together and show their interrelationships. This may happen at the micro level, between individual words that people use, or at the macro level, between ideologies and entire systems of discourses.
In our discussion, this phenomenon was highlighted several times. I even heard several people ask, "What do you mean by ______ in the US/South Africa?" These are rich points. One example is the phrase "developing critical thinking skills". I think all of the words in this phrase serve as rich points: of all of the people involved in the conversation, what did we each mean by development, critical, thinking, and skills? From the initial reactions, I gathered than many UP instructors were viewing "develop" through the frame of "teach directly"; I approached this term through the frame of "foster" or perhaps "scaffold". (Dr. Jenelle Reeves once deemed me to be a "radical constructivist".) I think it would be very interesting (yet outside of the word requirement) to think more deeply about each of the words in this phrase from all perspectives.
Agar (1994) also highlights rich points as moments of negotiation of culture. Tension between ideologies, discourses and frames is what permits the definition of one’s own culture through the identification and negotiation of the “other”. So, whether we were aware of it or not, we were all "doing" culture during our round table discussion while we were discussing culture and cultural differences. Go us!
-Jen Stacy
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