\nCommunicating across cultures<\/em><\/h4>\n
\u201cMy students were upset,\u201d says Bwire, who taught English and literature in Nairobi for 10 years before coming to the United States for his doctoral studies. They lived in a big city with plenty of buses, and they thought the Alaskans were mocking them for not knowing what one looked like. \u201cThey were like, \u2018These guys think we come from Africa and we live in a jungle. They think we don\u2019t know what a school bus is. How dare they?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n But the Alaskans meant no offense. Bwire and his Kenyan students learned two lessons from that exchange \u2014 about what constituted a school bus in rural Alaska (anything that brought students to school, which, depending on the season, might be an ATV or a dogsled); but also about implicit miscommunication (how one person\u2019s school bus can be another\u2019s insult). That second lesson is the one he emphasizes to his TCNJ students.<\/p>\n \u201cImplicit miscommunication is alive and rife in our classrooms,\u201d says Bwire, an assistant professor in the Special Education, Language and Literacy Department, where his goal is to help TCNJ students \u2014 many of whom will go on to work in the polyphonic public schools of New Jersey \u2014 avoid this occupational hazard.<\/p>\n What you say in one language about one culture can mean something very different when translated into another language for another culture, and your attempt at communicating across the gap can be garbled inadvertently \u2014 like that school bus, or another example he uses, the Swahili word \u201cpole,\u201d which means \u201csorry,\u201d but not quite in the same way that \u201csorry\u201d means in English. When Bwire sees somebody trip on a sidewalk, his instinct is to say what common custom in Kenya taught him to say. \u201cI would say \u2018sorry\u2019 because that is pole translated. But unlike sorry, pole doesn\u2019t incriminate me, it doesn\u2019t say I caused you to trip, I\u2019m not apologizing for your tripping. What\u2019s happening is that I am saying I sympathize with what you\u2019ve just gone through,\u201d he says. \u201cThe English word \u2018sorry\u2019 doesn\u2019t carry the cultural nuances of the Swahili word.\u201d<\/p>\n Bwire\u2019s own travels across cultural borders \u2014 he speaks four languages and spent five summers in Vermont earning a master\u2019s degree \u2014 sparked his interest in what became his academic field: sociolinguistics, with a specialty in transcultural literacy. He did part of his doctoral dissertation research in that Alaskan school-bus village, where he learned some Yup\u2019ik from the elders.<\/p>\n \u201cThe objective is to get my students to understand that human language is broad, that we cannot be Anglocentric, monolingual-norm, Western-centric in our understanding of how human language works,\u201d says Bwire. And he wants them to remember those lessons when they are teachers themselves. \u201cOne of the things I get my students to do is to reflect and ask themselves to what extent are they expecting that a student in their class should perform like a native speaker of English when they are non-native speakers of English?\u201d<\/p>\n Sounds, like meanings, also change across languages, he tells his students, and some of those sounds are difficult for non-native speakers of a language to reproduce, and can sometimes lead teachers to misjudge a student\u2019s progress. Recent immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries, for instance, form the \u201cD\u201d sound by touching the tongue to the teeth rather than to the ridge behind them, as native English speakers do, a pronunciation that might lead them to be wrongly placed in a remedial class. \u201cWhat message are we giving a student who is bilingual by telling them that your bilingualism is a disability?\u201d Bwire asks.<\/p>\n He further demonstrates this point by playing an audio of his own fumbling attempts, under the guidance of the Alaskans, to make the guttural sounds that are common in Yup\u2019ik.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have to understand that we live in a world where there are other people, and know that there is that kind of broadness beyond us, beyond my language, beyond my culture, beyond my geographical boundaries, beyond my beliefs and practices,\u201d he says. \u201cA better understanding of self and other in the world can lead to better communication for everybody.\u201d<\/p>\n At TCNJ she created her own curriculum of classes in South Asian, Islamic, and East Asian art. \u201cI got very interested in this idea of global art history,\u201d she says. \u201cIt led me to think about teaching differently. Why can\u2019t we take a specific time period and look at it globally?\u201d<\/p>\n To teach about the 16th century and not venture too far beyond the Sistine Chapel, or to see the 20th century through the lens of Jackson Pollock, is to ignore the ways that artists in the rest of the world were expanding the language of beauty and extending the boundaries of expression. \u201cIt gives the idea like I had when I was an undergrad that we only study Western art because that\u2019s all that exists, rather than that was a conscious choice made by people,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n The conscious choice she made was to introduce students to art from cultures they might have previously encountered only from other, narrower angles. \u201cWhich cultures are celebrated in art history, music, philosophy, and literature classes and which cultures are only taught in classes like terrorism or religious studies?\u201d asks Hutton, who started teaching Islamic art in the year of 9\/11. \u201cWhat\u2019s it like to be a student who has a connection to that culture and only sees that culture presented one way? That\u2019s something that really shaped my entire teaching career, but I only get more adamant about it over time.\u201d<\/p>\n As recipient of the Gitenstein-Hart sabbatical prize for faculty research, Hutton spent a year as part of a large team of authors working to rewrite the narrative of art history. Her global perspective will gain a wider audience this year with the publication of the textbook \u2014 \u201cthe first major art history survey textbook written in the 21st century,\u201d according to the publisher \u2014 of which she is a co-lead author: The History of Art: A Global View<\/em>. \u201cWith its own history rooted in European imperialism, art history has long idealized the art of Western Europe and White North America at the expense of art of other cultures,\u201d the book\u2019s introduction reads, emphasizing that it will instead examine \u201cthe meaning and significance of art from all six inhabited continents and their many cultures.\u201d<\/p>\n Hutton has also introduced a new seminar that explored those deeper issues of racism and Eurocentrism in art history. \u201cHow can we make art history less racist?\u201d she asks. \u201cI don\u2019t care if my students memorize a canon of objects that they can recognize when they go to a museum. I see what I do as making them global citizens and getting them to see the world in a new way that maybe goes beyond the way certain cultures are presented within our culture.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cInitially people would say, \u2018Well what can you possibly do in the sciences about racism?\u2019 and that\u2019s what we may have thought initially, too,\u201d says biology professor Donald Lovett. He and other faculty in the biology department \u201cbrainstormed ideas on how to be more explicit in pointing out biases and misunderstandings,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n A failure to acknowledge the scientific contributions of women and people of color; the shameful legacy of eugenics; false notions about race; biological studies that ignored nonwhite populations \u2014 there was much ground to cover. Turns out, the biology department already had a vehicle that neatly accommodated addressing the issues: the introductory course for biology majors, Bio 201: Foundations of Biological Inquiry, which had been redesigned several years earlier by two professors in the department, Wendy Clement and Tracy Kress.<\/p>\n \u201cWe wanted to be inclusive about the diversity of learning styles,\u201d Clement says. \u201cThere\u2019s definitely a lot of work to be done, but I do think there is the framework to incorporate diversity now.\u201d<\/p>\n In the Foundations class, professors guide students through questions and lead them toward answers, rather than providing the answers first in lectures. The texts include primary research articles, many by scientists who are neither white nor male.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s that inquiry-based approach that they\u2019re using to build those new activities and awareness, so I think it definitely gave a model to use to tackle that,\u201d Kress says.<\/p>\n All four sections of the class use the same set of slides, and among the new ones added this year, in a discussion about the scientific method, is this: \u201cHow does one determine race? There is no genetic basis for race; it is a social construct.\u201d<\/p>\n Later slides then expand on the point by showing how three different high-altitude populations \u2014 in Tibet, Bolivia, and Ethiopia \u2014 evolved different ways of adapting to life in thin oxygen. \u201cThis shows you that there is tremendous diversity among individuals that goes beyond the boxes of race,\u201d says Lovett, who taught Foundations in the fall semester. \u201cWhat that did was very explicitly, but subtly, say that race is not a real thing and science is not going to be used to talk about one race over another.\u201d<\/p>\n COVID-19 offered another vivid lesson. As the virus started spreading last spring, the death rate was especially high among Blacks and Latinos. \u201cThere were actually people who were trying to find out what it was about minority groups that made them more susceptible, until some people took a step back and said, \u2018Wait, it has nothing to do with race,\u2019\u201d Lovett says.<\/p>\n What made them more susceptible was economics \u2014 jobs that couldn\u2019t shift to home computers, cramped living spaces where the virus spread more easily.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat we\u2019re trying to do is help people identify systemic racism and implicit bias, even when scientists would insist that the research is unbiased,\u201d Lovett says. \u201cOur goal is to help students identify that, but also affirm to our students of color that we\u2019re trying to reverse this, that we are not merely standing on the sidelines.\u201d<\/p>\n Photos: Peter Murphy<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sometimes all a class needs is a new perspective.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":299,"featured_media":11686,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11596","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11596","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/299"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11596"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11596\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11689,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11596\/revisions\/11689"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/11686"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/Bwire_2698_DSC4498_v3-731x1024.jpg\"){kind=spacer}
Deborah Hutton <\/strong>
\nBringing art out of the corners<\/em><\/h4>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/Hutton_2699_DSC5367_v3-e1612552801313-231x300.jpg\")
Wendy Clement, Tracy Kress, and Donald Lovett <\/strong>
\nBrainstorming biology\u2018s bias<\/em><\/h4>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/Lovett_2695_DSC3416_v6-300x200.jpg\")