Teaching to Learn, Part 3: Rendering Visible the Invisible

I've been struggling with this entry for some time.  In my last entry I wrote about acculturation, the idea that many students in New Orleans are learning a different set of cultural norms at school than at home.  I ended that entry with the question: "whose line are they falling into?" with every intent of interrogating that question with this entry, which I began shortly after I finished the last one.  I wanted to write about the possible long-term consequences of acclimating students to white middle-class culture and about the specific ways that young, white out-of-town educators were moving that process along.  I still want to write something about that, but the last two months have both nuanced and confused my views on the topic.  I'm going to try to sort it out in the next couple of weeks (probably not until after Mardi Gras), but in the meantime here's my attempt to stop this blog from withering and dying.


"Can I go use it?"


I can't remember the first time a student said it to me, but I do remember a long puzzled feeling followed by a wave of recognition.  My thought process went something like this: "What?  What's "it?"  Oh!  The bathroom.  You need to pee.  You're asking me if you can go pee.  Yes, please go pee."  I'm not sure who was more confused: I who had just learned an idiom or my student whose simple request I had met with a blank stare.


I like to think I've been pretty good about picking up phrases.  "Boo koo" means "a lot," like the French "beaucoup."  "Big ole" means "large," like "big old."  "Ti" is short for "auntie," "pops" means "grandpa" not "dad," and "makin' 7" means "to turn 7 years old."


Little bits of dialect like these are some of the easier things I've had to learn.  They're simple, visible, repeated often, and my students are always willing to explain gently when Mr. Sam looks like an armadillo in the headlights.


It's the invisible parts that give me trouble, the times that my students say things that go over my head or act in a way that I completely misunderstand.  I'm sure it goes both ways, that I say and do things that seem foreign to them or that they misinterpret.  We do speak different dialects, but spoken language is only one way that we at times fail to understand each other because of our cultural backgrounds.


Educator, scholar and author Lisa Delpit enumerates some of the challenges of cross-cultural education, the kind that's occurring in mine and other schools throughout New Orleans and across the United States.  There's a laundry list of examples she presents related to language, narrative style, skill acquisition and so forth, all of which I'm going to oversimplify into a single obvious thought for the sake of space and because I'm only on page 63 of her book Other People's Children: people from different cultures see the world differently.  Delpit offers example after example of teachers who misinterpret cultural differences or dialectical variations for student incomprehension, when really the student might be demonstrating a culturally specific type of fluency or skill and in fact it is the teacher who does not comprehend.


This past Sunday I attended a wonderful workshop hosted by the New Teachers' Roundtable on cross-cultural education led by Lance Hill.  Hill led us in two activities that demonstrated some of the difficulty in cross-cultural education.


In the first he drew a glacier as a metaphor for understanding culture (below is my re-creation).  Like a glacier, cultures have certain codes and characteristics that are visible: music, clothing, language, rituals, traditions, foods, icons and so forth.  And like a glacier the real substance of cultures is what lies beneath: values, beliefs, aesthetics, narratives and histories, each of which connects to the visible aspects of culture.  "Often what happens in a cross-cultural setting," Hill explained, "is that the bottoms of glaciers, the invisible parts, will collide before the above-ground parts."  In other words, it's a challenge to identify the deep causes of cross-cultural conflicts.

Artist's rendition

It's difficult enough to notice and process the visible differences in another culture, and even more difficult to get at the invisible stuff resting beneath.  Harder still is to identify our own glaciers, to understand the codes and rules that dictate our own behavior, to interrogate what David Foster Wallace might call our "default setting."  In the second exercise Hill had us do just that: we split into threes and made a "Thanksgiving Rulebook," naming the set of unspoken rules at our families' Thanksgiving dinner.  We named rules such as "Everyone brings a dish," attached values to them such as "shared responsibility," then suggested rewards or punishments such as "disdain from family members."  My group wrote about five rules in 15 minutes and barely scratched the surface.


Hill then challenged us to think: how many rules could you think of for your classroom?  For your school?  For your workplace?  Like a foreign guest at your Thanksgiving meal, is it fair to expect your students to know all of these rules?  Have you even considered them, or how many there might be?  Can you imagine the psychological strain of constantly having to process and operate under cultural standards that aren't your own?


So one problem is this: teachers in multicultural classrooms are bound to screw up.  They'll have to make a lot of mistakes to learn about culturally appropriate ways of doing things if they desire to be effective at what they do.


Hill presents and even larger problem: teachers operate within the confines broad, non-local systems and their accompanying cultures: education, government, and philanthropic foundations.  Teachers have opportunities daily for cross-cultural practice and community accountability.  Not so for the people and institutions who decide curricula, who set educational standards, who allocate budgets and who award grants.  It's next to impossible to finesse a cultural gap in New Orleans if you're:


a. Living in Washington, D.C., New York or even Baton Rouge
b. Not at all interested in doing so
c. Not even aware that it might be a thing worth doing


If the folks who set the agenda for education in New Orleans make no effort at cross-cultural understanding then some of that burden will fall on the handful of teachers willing and able to alert their students to the invisible rules and codes dictating their education.  The rest of the burden will fall upon the students, who already have a thousand and one other compulsory things to learn.


The question of how to operate in a cross-cultural classroom is still very new to me.  Lance Hill offered a couple of tidbits at the end of his workshop that I found helpful about how to work through such challenges.  First, the idea of "perceptual relativity," that no two people see the same event, idea, or experience in precisely the same way.  Second, to "stop, look and listen," that in order to process a cross-cultural experience it's best to exercise patience, observation, self-reflection, and engage in dialogue when possible.  He also noted that the longer it's been since the embarrassment, confusion, or tension of a cross-cultural experience, the more thoroughly you come to understand it.


To those I would add humility: the acknowledgment that there will always be far more that we don't know than what we do; the recognition that communicating with people and trying to understand people's meaning will always be a challenge with room for improvement; the acceptance onto ourselves of some of the culpability for misunderstanding, rather than seeing our own cultures as correct or as standard.


Rendering visible the invisible rules and codes of a culture requires educators to go beyond the curriculum, beyond planning lessons and managing behaviors.  It demands that teachers turn the pedagogical gaze on themselves and ask: who am I, culturally speaking?  Do I know all of the rules and expectations that govern my classroom, or just the obvious ones?  Have I made the less-obvious ones clear to my students?  Am I breaking any of their cultural rules?  Have I taken the time to process and reflect?


If it's not plain to see then let me make clear: this is bound to be hard work.