CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE
First, explore your concept of culture.
CLICK HERE to read “Practice Intercultural Communication” from the Level Two Peer Tutoring Fundamentals and Integration Workbook by Kwantlen Polytechnic University which can be accessed HERE
Use it to start reflecting on what culture means to you.
Our cultural perspective is something that has been ingrained in us since birth. It’s something you can’t shake, no matter how empathetic you are. But beyond disagreements, the rest of the world may not think the same way you do.
For example, in the section “Effective Cross-Cultural Communication” by Linda T. Barr of the Handbook for Training Peer Tutors and Mentors, Barr states “in collectivistic cultures, communication is more likely to be understood as highly contextualized: words are no more important than tone, pauses, and body language. Knowledge of cultural expectations and dictates makes words unnecessary at times. Meaning is imbedded in physical cues and unstated messages. Speakers may expect the listener to know the intended meaning and may talk around the point. There may be less openness and more use of silence in the conversation than in individualistic cultures. A good example of imbedded cues is illustrated by the Japanese approach to writing position papers. Rather than stating and proving a position, in Japanese culture students paint pictures with words to lead the reader to the point, which may be unstated . . . Unfortunately, [people] may be so conditioned to view their behaviors as ‘normal’ that they ascribe negative motives to behaviors that do not match their cultural values and communication style” (123).
“Although cultural norms are not the same for any two cultures and may in fact vary between subcultures, collectivist cultures share a perspective that is often at odds with the individualist norms prevalent in North America. Successful interaction between individualists and collectivists requires sensitivity and accommodation, but the value of these attributes can be generalized and used effectively across socioeconomic, regional, age, and gender boundaries as well” (122).
WATCH the video below to see some international students talk about their writing experiences in college:
(Link to “We No Speak Americano – Understanding International Students’ Writing” posted by user “laz3638”)
Our culture affects the way we think about language and academia. This can manifest as linguistic bias.
To learn more, read about Catherine Savini explores her struggle with linguistic bias in her article “10 Ways to Tackle Linguistic Bias in Our Classrooms.”
READ the following quotes from Savini’s introduction:
“A couple of years ago, I worked in the writing center with a student on a paper about her identity development. She received high marks for content but lost points for writing. As I read her paper, two things struck me: first, she had grown up in Boston, but her parents were from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. At home, she spoke Lingala, which she hid from her friends after she was mocked. Second, many of her sentences were indecipherable. She wrote, for example, ‘I didn’t have an indistinguishable surface hair from different females in my class and they wouldn’t converse with me or simply give me disposition since I didn’t seem as though them.’
After a decade of working in writing centers, I knew to ask, ‘Did you use the thesaurus to write this?’ And she told me that, in an effort to sound academic, she had used the thesaurus for every single sentence in this essay about her own identity development. Teachers had told her not to write like she speaks but to translate her Black vernacular English (BVE) into standard academic English (SAE). I suspect that most of us would feel a flash of rage if we heard the insults slung at her for speaking Lingala, but many of us would also mark her down for writing in BVE. Why?
I spent decades operating with this cognitive dissonance. As a white, middle-class English professor, I’ve corrected a lot of sentences and made a lot of assumptions about people’s intelligence based on how they speak and write. As a Ph.D. candidate in English, I began to recognize the pain linguistic racism inflicts thanks to Gloria Anzaldúa, Amy Tan and James Baldwin, but somehow their work never caused me to question my approach to student papers.
But now, on my predominantly white campus, I regularly hear stories of linguistic prejudice perpetrated primarily against students, staff and faculty of color. It’s not just speakers of BVE; multilingual students have told me that if they are talking with a peer in their native language, they switch to English as soon as they enter an academic building. When one student explained to her professor that her sentences tended to be long because she is a native Spanish speaker, the professor responded, ‘You are not in Puerto Rico anymore.’ Two Spanish-speaking students told me that their high school guidance counselors told them that they wouldn’t be able to succeed in college. (They have.) Many of these students have come to my writing center demoralized by papers covered with ink, marked with low grades and scrawled with directives to ‘go to the writing center.’
But we must teach students to write standard academic English, and we must mark them down if they do not meet those expectations — otherwise, they will not succeed in the real world, right? That is the traditional argument in favor of requiring all students to write in standard academic English in the classroom. Renowned literary scholar and public intellectual Stanley Fish defends this stance, explaining that it’s wonderful that people speak multiple languages and dialects, but the classroom is the place to learn to communicate in SAE.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, transdisciplinary scholar Vershawn Ashanti Young rejects standard language ideology as racist, arguing that we should invite students to weave multiple dialects. He calls this “code-meshing.” Responding to the argument that learning standard academic English will protect students of color from prejudice, Young writes, ‘But dont nobody’s language, dialect, or style make them ‘vulnerable to prejudice.’ It’s ATTITUDES. It be the way folks with some power perceive other people’s language. Like the way some view, say, Black English when used in school or at work. Black English dont make it own-self oppressed.’ According to Young, if we value Black vernacular English and other dialects, we can shift racist attitudes rather than reinforce them.
A middle stance involves teaching students to communicate in standard academic English without degrading their dialect or home language by providing students with opportunities to use their dialects and languages in an academic setting and by exposing the power structures at work.”
Some of these ideas are useful to tutors, for instance, Savini recommends they can:
- “Ask students about their language backgrounds,”
- “Don’t view students who are learning English or who speak/write in Black vernacular English as a problem that needs fixing”
- “Work harder to understand students who are multilingual/multidialectal both in writing and orally”
- “Ask […] what is making the writing unclear to you”
- “Learn about linguistic bias and its impact”
Savini discusses each of these points in greater detail and provides resources for looking deeper into this subject in her article.
Questions to Think About:
How can you help students who may have a different cultural perspective understand their professors’ expectation without invalidating their perspective?
How does your cultural perspective affect the way you read and write? The way you think about academic writing? Your values?
RACISM AND ANTIRACISM
Race (especially in America) is an important and potentially politically charged subject of discussion. And there are many different ways of thinking about race. The question of how race is even defined is a very important one. In fact, some believe that race is a cultural construct. But what does that mean? Mostly just that race has no meaning outside of the meaning a culture assigns or creates for it. That doesn’t mean that race does have powerful, real effects, though.
LOOK at some resources exploring race below:
(Link to “The myth of race, debunked in 3 minutes” posted by user “Vox”)
Antiracism is a way of opposing racist power, policy, and ideas that’s become more prominently recently. Ibram X. Kendi explores this topic in detail in his book How to be an Antiracist. Consider some of the ideas he expresses in the quote and video below:
“I still identify as Black. Not because I believe Blackness, or race, is a meaningful scientific category but because our societies, our policies, our ideas, our histories, and our cultures have rendered race and made it matter. I am among those who have been degraded by racist ideas, suffered under racist policies, and who have nevertheless endured and built movements and cultures to resist or at least persist through this madness . . . The gift of seeing myself as Black instead of being color-blind is that it allows me to clearly see myself historically and politically as being an antiracist, as a member of the interracial body striving to accept and equate and empower racial difference of all kinds.”
p.38 of How to be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi
(Link to “Ibram X. Kendi (author of How to Be an Antiracist) at the FYE® Conference 2020” posted by user “CommonReads”)
Questions to Think About:
What is your understanding of race? What does the idea that race and Blackness are not “meaningful scientific categories” mean to you?
How does race interact with other kinds of oppression?
How are students of all races affected by race?
WORKS CITED
Barr, Linda T. “Effective Cross-Cultural Communication.” Handbook for Training Peer Tutors and Mentors, edited by Karen Agee and Russ Hodges, Cengage Learning, 2012, PAGE RANGE.
Kendi, Ibram X. How To Be an Antiracist. One World: New York, 2019.
Savini, Catherine. “10 Ways to Tackle Linguistic Bias in Our Classrooms.” National Council of Teachers of English Blog, 8 Feb. 2021, https://ncte.org/blog/2021/02/10-ways-tackle-linguistic-bias-classrooms/.
