Conformity in Chile
Learning to adapt to a culture of anonymity
By Meredith Hutcheson
I literally cannot tell two of my students apart. Nichole and Skarlethe arrive together each day with three or four other girls. The whole group sports the same attire: large colorful vinyl bags, skinny jeans, imitation Keds, oversized fake pearl earrings, and bright bomber jackets. Their hair is ironed straight. In the case of my pair of duplicates, it is also dyed a strange orange shade of blonde.
In her minimal make-up and perpetual pout, one of the girls stands across the desk from me, asking to see her midterm grade. Internally, I panic: Which test? Which girl?
One of the two has a slightly skinnier nose, I know this. The other one is seated across the room, though, and there’s no hope for comparison unless they are standing directly beside one another. I take a leap and grab the sheet signed “Nichole.” When the girl scowls only at her grade and not at the name, I thank the stars and the patron gods of confused teachers for saving me from more trouble with the pelolais contingent.
As my look-a likes illustrate, the pressure to conform is strong in Chilean culture. If you’ve heard anything about the youth here, it’s most likely been about the tribus urbanas, the urban tribes. These groups of teenagers and young adults make the hipsters and punks of the United States seem tame. With everything from jewelry to color codes to behavior strictly defined by one’s group adherence, the urban tribes break the Chilean youth into distinct and easily definable sects. My pelolais, for example, take their name directly and literally from the fact that they straighten their hair.
But it’s not just the young who lack individuality. The college-level professional institute where I teach English provides two-year certification degrees for those hoping to enter a skilled trade. As a result, some of my students are a bit older, but they show the same habits of conformity as their adolescent counterparts.
One night, in a small class with five men, all in their mid-twenties, I decided to try a game to help them learn vocabulary for describing people. I paired them off and asked them to write a description of their partner. Then I collected the descriptions and read them out loud, with the idea that the class would guess which person was being described. I soon realized my mistake.
“My partner is medium height. He has dark hair and brown eyes. He is wearing a black sweatshirt, blue jeans, and white sneakers. He is young. He has a backpack.”
Except for the one student whose sweater happened to be a dark brown, the description fit everyone in the class. When I made it to the teacher’s lounge after class, the other English staff laughed at my blunder—apparently a common one among foreign teachers.
This intense conformity is a prominent feature of life in Chile, but as an English teacher, I see this cultural trait as a silently destructive force in the language classroom. I am, like most other young North American English teachers living abroad, a believer in the interactive model of language learning. From the time that I began studying languages at the age of 12, I have been taught that one learns by doing. My high school French classes, where I answered to Mireille, were taught in the target language. I won’t deny that I overdosed on grammar worksheets, but I also completed my fair share of halting, badly pronounced presentations and role plays.
Later, my life experience and personal learning style confirmed this approach to me, as I was only able to achieve a measure of success in French after studying abroad in France. In Chile, I set my classroom goal as the establishment of a communicative, immersion-style space where my students could grow comfortable with the language. As a WorldTeach volunteer, I had a month of training before I was thrown into my classroom. This training, too, focused on teaching through immersion, discussion, and interactive methods. I was excited, I was ready to go, and I showed up to my first day with a bag full of colorful props and tools.
I fell flat on my face.
Day after day, I would come in with role-plays, games, and activities which they would refuse to complete. Occasionally something would work, but more often than not, my students simply stared at whatever index card or prop they’d been given. Anything that did not involve work on paper was simply not going to happen. The silent but tangible pressure of group identity hangs in the classroom at all times, restricting my students from trying anything new or unusual.
I passed my first semester trying to force my students into the “American” mindset—that one could actually achieve social prestige by standing out and being creative during class presentations. I kept on with the games, the skits, and the dialogues, all of which continued to be done to the minimum, if at all. Behaving far younger than their average early twenties, my students would stare at me skeptically as I explained an activity, as if I had designed it with the goal of ruining their social lives. No matter how much I pestered them and explained the benefits of my methods, they were still happiest on the days when I brought in a dreadful PowerPoint presentation to explain some dry grammar rule.
Now, nearing the end of my second semester, I have come to see that I cannot force my Chilean students to be anything other than Chilean students. With an education system that discourages student interaction, a culture that suppresses individuality, and, beyond this, a patent lack of interest in the English language—my courses are mandatory—there is simply no way that my students are going to develop into a group of uninhibited, communicative creatives. I have passed into a new stage: compromise. I still speak only in English. They are still expected to speak in English at least a few times in every class. Now, though, I allow them to write out their ideas before calling on them to present. I have cut out the unstructured role-plays. If I want them to do a dialogue, I make a bullet-point list of just what I expect them to include. I am relying on the text more, which they like.
All in all, I find my classes to be deadly boring. My students, though, are more comfortable than before, and they seem to be progressing more. I still feel that communicative language learning is the most effective technique. But after nine months of struggle, I have come to see that giving up a bit of idealism in favor of practicality is not selling out. Accommodating the realities of my teaching situation creates a learning environment that is more effective than my previous approach. By accepting the culture of my students as learners, I have been able to bring them to accept a small dosage of my culture as a teacher. In this way, we are moving forward, slowly, but with understanding.
Meredith Hutcheson graduated cum laude from Allegheny College in 2006 with a B.A. in English literature. Following brief stints in non-profit work, she began pursuing her joint fascinations: writing and traveling. After six months backpacking New Zealand and recording all of her experiences for a future product, she moved to Chile to learn Spanish, teach English, and continue her development as a writer. Currently living in the port city of Valparaíso, she is a WorldTeach (www.worldteach.org) volunteer at the trade institute DuocUC, a business English teacher through the private institute CCI, and a copy writer for a local entrepreneur.