Culture: asking the big questions

Yesterday I spoke to a friend who teaches English at a private school.  I told her about my desire to add more to the cultural component to my online Spanish classes by adding videos.  She asked an excellent question:  what was the point?  What did I want my students to walk away with by adding these videos?

I'm wrestling with the answer.  The big answer is I want my students to have a bigger understanding of the world around them.  I want them to understand that people are different and by being different we all create a beautiful mosaic.  

According to the state, students in 1411 should able to identify & discuss the values, customs and traditions of the Hispanic world.  How can they do that if they don't know what those values, customs and traditions are?  The book is great, but sometimes I wonder how much students actually take away from the "culture sections."  

Before speaking to my friend I started making the culture video to go along with Ch 1:  Hispanic culture within the US.  I opened up the ebook and did a screencast lecture glossing over the 3 cultural elements that the text highlighted.  When I started revising the closed caption it struck me that the video wasn't good.  These same elements were covered in assignments that the students will do.  What did I add?  Not much.  I deleted the video.

My thought process went down this path:  what I could bring to the cultural experience of the class?  I can brig my own personal expertise.  Instead of offering broad strokes of culture like the book does, I can add smaller strokes from my own personal experience.  

When I was at Baylor in my undergrad, a Spanish professor was Dr. Jiménez.  He was a Cuban immigrant and when he spoke of his own personal experience I could understand culture in a way that was much richer than what the books offered.

I'm not an immigrant.  I'm not Hispanic.  In future semesters my goal is to bring in Hispanic speakers who will speak of their own life experiences.  Students can hear first person accounts of Hispanic culture by those who live those values, customs and traditions.

For now, I've decided to add a cultural video showcasing a Hispanic person in the US.  Last summer I tutored a student in 2312 and we worked on a reading about Sonia Sotomayor.  I learned a lot about her story.  I could tell about her.  However, I've never met her.  I've never looked her in the eye.

When I taught 2nd grade bilingual children in Forth Worth I had first-hand experience with families who immigrated to the US and are Hispanic.  I'm considering the following:  a student's grandpa who insisted I teach the students about 16 de septiembre (Mexican Independence Day), a student who told me about Christmas in her home in which everyone shared one big gift and a mom who sent me a sandwich on a field trip just to be sure I had enough to eat.

I tend to be too impulsive in general.  I get excited about an idea and I take action before really thinking things through.  My friend's advice is very good:  what do I want these videos to really convey?  I'm going to allow this idea to marinate before making the video.

In the spring I made many, many videos explaining concepts.  Students watched them and I'm glad I made them.  These culture videos are going to be different.  Instead of explanation of how to do things, these are next level:  understanding other cultures and giving them the knowledge necessary so they can identify and discuss the values, customs and traditions in the Hispanic world.

When I used the Cengage curriculum in my hybrid and face to face classes we would watch a culture video and I would draw Venn diagrams so we could compare and contrast cultures we were learning about with our own.  Those were my favorite class periods.

I now have a new curriculum and it's more challenging to have these discussions online. An idea for the future would be to have a live class conference in which I facilitate the discussion as I did face to face but do so in the online format.  That may be a good topic for our class wrap up.

This is a valuable concept to wrestle with.  I'm going to keep wrestling.

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I chose to make the one about the value of family, highlighting the shared Christmas gift.  You can watch it: https://screencast-o-matic.com/watch/cY1j2uC18a