This is this first of a three part post in which two people discuss the difficulty of presenting history and culture in classrooms.
Adam: I have a question for you. I loved the timelines on the walls in all the classrooms. I can really see how that would help kids visualize history and how time passes and all that, but I noticed that a lot of what was on the timelines seemed kind of, I don’t know, one-sided. Like, the artists and composers and poets were mostly male and white, and a lot of the events were just Western–Greco-Roman moving to European moving to American. It seems a shame for kids not to learn that other places and people have stories too.
Jessica: Yeah, I’ve noticed that about our timelines, too. I don’t know. I feel conflicted about that. I will say that our texts are world history texts, and we do read stories of history from all over the world, but what’s on the timeline is what we emphasize and connect together and want students to really come away with–ideas and events that we can continue to trace as they develop through the centuries, and you’re right that that is more or less Western and male.
Adam: It just seems like emphasizing all the European and American stuff communicates to kids that other cultures aren’t important, or that theirs is dominant, or should be, and that’s not true.
Jessica: I can see that point. But sometimes I wonder if it’s a more difficult question about culture. Like you said “their culture,” but what is their culture? Why is “Western Culture” their culture? And what is the educator’s place in teaching about culture?
With teaching, students’ time and attention is your currency, and when you spend it on one thing you can’t spend it on something else.
Given that, it seems like there are two options– you can teach students THAT lots of cultural traditions exist and that they are all beautiful without really studying within any one culture, really reading the books and seeing how they connect together or understanding the schools of art or anything.
OR you can choose a tradition and dwell in its narrative flow, not because you necessarily think that its narrative is better than another but because it’s important for students to be able to recognize patterns and trace the development of ideas over time.
Adam: Can’t you do both? Why not deeply engage with great works from different cultures, and have conversations about what ideas they represent while you’re doing it?
Jessica: Well, that sounds great, but…I don’t know. There’s that time thing. And it can end up incoherent. And also, if your educational practice is Socratic and conversation-based, you need to know the stuff yourself in order to ask the right questions.
Now, me, for instance. You don’t need to convince me that Japanese poetry is worthy of study. But I don’t know Japanese, and I’m not familiar with the mental framework required to appreciate it deeply. I can toss a Japanese poem in translation at my class once in a while (and I do), but we can’t approach it at the same depth. We have to take its richness on faith.
But when we get to Keats, or Beowulf, or even the Aeneid in translation, there’s so much more of it built into the structure of our language and patterns of thought. My hope is that studying those things doesn’t just re-enforce cultural structures, although it does that; I hope that it teaches students that all ideas have a lineage, that they are part of a chain of thoughts that changes just like the morphing of family features over generations.
My students are in the “Western Culture” family partly just because they speak English and English is inside it, if not for more reasons. I hope they realize that, being inside this flow, they can change it from the inside if and when they want to, as others have done before them. And I believe that knowing one culture (which is at least somewhat their own) deeply, thoughtfully, with both appreciation and honesty, makes students more able to appreciate other cultures when they do encounter them.
Whatever way you approach texts with students, you’re teaching them to approach other texts that way. So if I model approaching texts with appreciation and humility, my hope is that that “hermeneutic,” if you will, will transfer to other reading, other languages, and other cultural exposure.
Part Two of this conversation coming soon.