View Content #25623

By Stephanie Knight, CASLS Assistant Director

COMMUNITIES: Communicate and interact with cultural competence in order to participate in multilingual communities at home and around the world

The standard above, taken from the ACTFL World Readiness Standards for Learning Languages , provides a beneficial frame within which to consider this month’s InterCom topic, erasing the perception of boundaries between language learners and the target culture. This topic is oftentimes tricky for teachers because they must not only lead learners to interact with cultural competence, but also avoid advocating both cultural appropriation and cultural voyeurism. The space between these two cultural learning extremes may not always be clearly evident.

In order to contend with this difficulty, we advocate that teachers work towards developing curious critical dispositions in their learners. Such an approach entails working through comparative cultural analyses between the target culture and one’s own as well as engaging learners in a variety of critical thinking protocols (see Harvard’s Project Zero for more information) that encourage learners to develop awareness of target cultural norms, personal cultural norms, and the overt or implicit biases they carry when considering said norms. These biases are not to be admonished but rather confronted and recognized to facilitate deep learner understanding of, and engagement in, the target culture.

This week’s Activity of the Week provides a beneficial first step in developing curious and creative dispositions in learners.