An Imperialistic Endeavor?
Teaching English can be a mutually beneficial cultural exchange
By Sarah Menkedick
- Milk
Fat
Luxury cars
Rich people
No smoking
This was the picture of the United States conjured up by my high school English class at the Lycee Boisjoly Poitier on the French island of La Reunion. A bunch of rich, fat, milk-drinkers cruising around in Hummers and BMWs on a self-righteous quest against the evils of tobacco.
“Alright,” I said, “what do Americans think about the French?”
- Smokers
Wine
Baguettes
Paris
Thin/beautiful/romantic
Strikes
I looked around my classroom of teenaged boys, most of them skinny little things in scruffy jeans, with messy black hair and permanently skeptical expressions.
“How many of you smoke?” I asked. No hands.
I crossed out “smoke” on the board. “How many of you drink wine?” I asked. Another strike. Then I did the same thing with my own list. Do I drive a luxury car? Strike. Rich? Strike! Fat? Strike. Milk drinker? Strike!
Once we’d established that I did not in fact guzzle a half gallon of milk every morning nor did they ride around on rusty old bikes with baguettes sticking out of their backpacks, we could all be a little more interesting and a little more human. This discussion placed culture at the center of language learning and at the center of our exchanges in the classroom. That group of 17 skeptical boys and I went on to talk about Creole culture and religion, the ways in which La Reunion differed from mainland France, and also about African-Americans, Mexicans immigrants, the Midwest, and other parts of American life and culture that aren’t frequently explored in ESL textbooks.
This lesson gave me the kind of connection I was looking for, both inside the classroom as an ESL teacher and outside the classroom as a traveler. The travel bug had hit me hard in college when I spent a year studying abroad in Aix-en-Provence, France. After a solo trip across South America to learn Spanish, I decided that as much as I loved traveling, I wanted more contact and a deeper connection with local peoples and cultures than a traveler, who always seems to be packing up and leaving just as things get interesting. Teaching provided that connection.
I began teaching English as part of an assistant program that offers native English speakers with intermediate or better French skills the opportunity to teach in France. I was placed at a high school on the island of La Reunion, a little-known Dom-Tom (the French term for overseas territories) in the South Indian Sea.
The assistant position was the ideal first step; assistants don’t need a teaching certificate, they aren’t alone in the classroom (at least in the beginning), and they have the support of a professional team of teachers behind them. In my time on Reunion, I grew more confident in the classroom and started thinking about the ways in which an ESL instructor teaches not only language but also culture.
I remembered this lesson later, in Oaxaca, Mexico, where I took on my first full-time ESL position after receiving my TEFL certification. In Oaxaca, my lesson on stereotypes suddenly seemed a shallow attempt at cultural interaction, and I began to question the impact of my role as a teacher overseas. The state of Oaxaca has 16 official languages, and indigenous cultures have a strong, vibrant presence despite the government’s historic attempts to incorporate them into one homogenous Hispanic culture. I guiltily wondered if, by teaching English, I was contributing to the demise of these native languages and cultures and the subsequent embrace of an increasingly universal American language and culture.
But in talking about this issue with other teachers, I came to see, first in Oaxaca and later in Beijing, that teaching English, and teaching the Anglo culture that is all wrapped up in it, did not necessarily have to be an imperialistic endeavor. It could also be a way to create beneficial cultural exchanges and to encourage both teachers and locals to see their cultures differently.
I learned this through watching my students in both Oaxaca and Beijing struggle to define and analyze their cultures in a foreign language for a foreign audience. Like nearly everyone who is immersed in daily life in their home country, my students tended to take their culture for granted. Being able to explore their culture through a foreigner’s perspective allowed them to articulate what it was about Oaxaca or China they loved, identified with, or disliked. I remember the baffled look of a student in Oaxaca as I struggled to identify typically “American” foods. Hamburgers? Mac’ and cheese? I grew up eating brown rice vegetable casseroles and Fibars during my parents’ health nut phase. My student was somewhat traumatized by this. She found it distressing to think of a culture that didn’t have a deep attachment to traditional foods, and she and her classmates explained the significance of mole, of the bread made specifically for the Day of the Dead, of tortillas and atole. I believe that the student left that class with a different appreciation for Oaxacan food and its history. Or at least a sense of gratefulness that she’d grown up with big mole feasts instead of Fibars.
My students and I were able to have these discussions because I made culture a central focus of my classes. Throughout my year in Oaxaca, and then during my year in Beijing, my students taught me about their lives, dreams, and priorities as individuals and about the political, social, and historical issues facing their cultures.
I, meanwhile, taught them who I was, where I fit into American culture, why I had chosen to live in Mexico and China, and the parts of America—both the seldom seen and the easily recognized—I was familiar with. Seeing culture as a set of specific choices, rather than a pre-determined framework, empowers people to make changes. It also empowers them to see that culture is not fixed and that traditions, customs, and beliefs can be altered or destroyed if people are not passionate about protecting and honoring them, or if they decide that they are no longer valid.
Part of this process of empowerment comes with a new language; as students learn, they develop a new personality in English and a new form of self-expression. Which brings me to the second worry of language teachers: are we leading to the extinction of local languages by teaching English? Particularly in Mexico, local languages have suffered a tremendous blow, although more from the government-sponsored programs to eliminate indigenous languages than from the growth of English.
In my years of teaching, I have come to believe that if teachers are passionate about local culture and particularly local languages, then the best thing they can do in the classroom is teach their students about the power of language. A language embodies an entire network of symbols and historical, local references, and it expresses the character of a people. It is literally the worldview of a particular culture and people concretized into words and sounds. I believe that in learning another language, students should come to reflect on their own language and have a chance to talk about it in the classroom. What age-old expressions does this language use to teach lessons? What slang do they use? How do they describe things? Allow students to think about language, enjoy it, play with it, and respect it.
Beyond talking and thinking about language in the classroom, I encourage students to share their language and their culture with travelers. There is great potential for understanding and a deepened sense of empathy with other peoples through travel, but often a shared language is needed to make that fully possible.
Many English teachers will end up in places where there are a number of foreign travelers who speak English but who do not have time to learn the local language. In my case, in China and Oaxaca, many people did not speak Spanish or Chinese. Students can act as a way inside the local culture for these visitors, clearing up uncertainty that lingers when a person doesn’t speak the local language and giving tourists a way to appreciate what they see and experience with the insight of a local. This can help tourists understand important issues more clearly and from a different perspective (for example, the issue of immigration in the Oaxacan Sierra from the perspective of a Oaxacan student). It can also clarify stereotypes, prejudices, or misunderstandings that occur because of language differences.
Teachers, meanwhile, have the opportunity to understand and respect the local culture in a deeper, more nuanced way through teaching. I have found that the more you teach, the more attached you grow to a place and its people. In my time in Oaxaca, I experienced three weddings; visited friends and friends’ relatives in distant villages; learned to distinguish the Mixtec, Zapotec, and Aztec cultures; made a wonderful group of Mexican friends; and met my fiancée, who is from the village of Guelatao in the Mexican Sierra.
So to the teachers who are feeling qualms about contributing to an increasingly Americanized global culture, I say it depends on you and the way you run your classroom. It depends on the way you represent, think, and talk about culture and language. It also depends on how you use what you learn from your students. Encourage your students to see their culture through your eyes and to analyze it as if it were not a given. Learn the local language. Make local friends. For each bit of your own culture you share in an English expression or metaphor, learn, value, celebrate something local.
As one of my first lessons taught me, keep hacking away at the stereotypes. When you have doubts about your impact, draw up your own board of stereotypes about ESL teachers and dispel them in your own unique ways, both in and out of the classroom.
Sarah Menkedick graduated in 2004 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a joint major in History and History of Science. She studied abroad her junior year in Aix-en-Provence, France. This experience inspired her to head overseas again immediately after graduation; in the past four years she has traveled, taught, studied, and lived on five continents. In the future, she plans to attend graduate school for Anthropology.