Cross Cultural Reading: Part I

I have been waiting to write about this course, because I taught it the second year, and I had a whole first year to sum up.  When I was asked in the spring to teach some different courses in the fall, I was a little hesitant.  I had spent a frustrating year trying to get the hang of the courses I was already teaching, and after that year, I was finally feeling comfortable with Integrated English and Oral English.  I really did not want to screw up that nice feeling of finally knowing what was going on.  But how could I not teach a class called Cross Cultural Reading?

For those of you who don't know me outside of this blog, you should know that...

I.  Love.  Reading.

Although, recently, I usually get most my reading done on my kindle.  It travels better than my hard copy library. 

Back when I was less extroverted and considerably more socially awkward, and much less exposed to the great wide world, my idea of a perfect day was as follows:  a comfortable chair, a nice, quiet, well-lit section of the library, and a really good book.  And while a lot about me has changed over the years, I still love a good book (although now I'd rather read it on a beach in Thailand, while sipping something made from coconut and nursing last night's hangover, filling time before going off on some new adventure with friends).  So naturally, the idea of teaching a reading class was very appealing.

Okay, so this is not Thailand, but it's a beach (in China!) and it's till a heck of a better sight than stuffy library shelves. 

Another draw for me towards teaching this course was the 'cross-cultural' component.  After having spent a year in China, I had come to a few cultural realizations.  Okay, more like a thousand cultural realizations, but I am going to only focus on a couple. As I learned more and more about China and Chinese culture, I also realized my students had a very narrow view of American culture.  What they knew of America came from shows such as Gossip Girls, Vampire Diaries, Friends, and The Simpsons.  Therefore, many of them regarded Americans, on a whole, as beautiful, slutty, mostly Caucasian, gun-toting party animals, who were not too smart (except for Steve Jobs), kinda lazy, who ate nothing but McDonald's.  Of course, not all of our students believed this, but enough of them would ask us questions about America that would shove these stereotypes that they had of Americans at us on a fairly regular basis.  Cross Cultural Reading would give me the chance to expose them, through literature, to a more diverse America.

After a great deal of debate about what direction I wanted this course to go in I decided to focus on the theme of identity.  One, because it is a nice broad theme which would fit with several different literary works. But more importantly, I had noticed some characteristics among my students (other than their limited notion of American identity) that I really wanted to explore through different texts.  My classes are always predominately female (and in the case of this class, all-female) and I had noticed something about most Chinese girls over the past year.  There seems to be a very prescribed future for many of my students; they go college, get a good job that can support their family, get married by 25, and then have their child by 27.  Now, there is nothing wrong with this life projection, but not very many of my students expressed alternative futures.  My students would actually express some concern for myself, who is 25 and single and not planning on changing that anytime soon.  When I told them that I wasn't 100% sold on the idea of marriage and was pretty sure I did not want to have children, half of them were horrified and half of them thought I was 'cool.' So I focused on identity and I wanted to get them to recognize the forces that have shaped their identity as Chinese women by also examining some other characters and looking at what shaped their identities.

My Cross Cultural Reading Ladies

So I had two goals: Exploring the creation of different identities of women and exploring American identities.  Since the course would be conducted wholly in English, (my Chinese is much too  limited to explain literary complexities) I did not want to give them texts that were going to be too difficult both in language and in ability to relate to characters and content.  So, I decided to start in a happy medium; I chose to focus on Chinese American Literature for our two major books.  I figured that my students would be able to find some commonalities between themselves and the cultural background of the Chinese American characters.  I also knew that my students did not know much about the experience of Chinese Americans and so it would introduce them to a pocket of America that is not featured on Gossip Girl and Vampire Diaries. I also decided to focus on female identity with our short stories.  I figured I would combat language difficulties and maybe some difficulties relating to cultural context, with their ability to relate to female characters and through using shorter, easier to digest stories.

For this class we read: American Born Chinese, by Gene Luen Yang; The Joy Luck Club, by Amy Tan; Lamb to the Slaughter, by Roald Dahl; Hills Like White Elephants, by Ernest Hemingway; and Girl, by Jamaica Kincaid.

We began our first class (after explaining the course and the syllabus) with a writing activity where I asked them to write on the topic "Who am I."  This caused some consternation among my students, since they get worried about making sure their grammar/spelling is perfect and whether or not they are giving me the "right" answer.  And no amount of me telling them that I do not care about grammar for this assignment, and there is no "wrong" answer will convince them to calm down.  This was my pre-assessment, and as I expected, many of them gave me fairly shallow, broad answers to who they were.   We then finished our first class with a brainstorm activity.  I asked them to consider this question: What is a girl?  They then listed the various things they felt made up a girl or woman.  They listed things like quiet, neat, well groomed, serene, peaceful, nice, polite, smart, humble, sweet, kind, gentle, well-dressed, etc.  After brainstorming, I realized we were out of time for this class, so I asked them to write all of the ideas we'd brainstormed down and we would continue next week.  And thus concludes the first day of what did turn out to be one of my favorite courses.

Don't worry, I will be talking about this course in some detail.

Me and Shirley after our last class.