Blog Post 1: TESOL and Culture

Dwight Atkinson’s article discussed the significant relationship between culture and TESOL which many times is misunderstood or ignored. Reading this article was very helpful for me as a future educator. It required me to think and reflect on my own ideas and beliefs about what culture truly is and how to adopt culture into my teaching.

In the reading I began to see culture as a rapidly changing enmity and started thinking about the relationship between different cultures. As the article pointed out there is no such thing as an isolated culture. Cultures are affected by those around them and have continuously evolved. I thought this portion of the article was particularly interesting and reminded me of one of my favorite courses here at Illinois State.  I took Human Geography as a general education requirement my first semester at this university. In that course I remember looking at groups of people around the world and how they have interacted with others around them over time. We also looked at some cultures that have more recently been affected by the introduction of technology. I remember learning about one area of the world where a company had installed computers outside some of the buildings. The community was impoverished and the residents had never seen a computer before. Children surrounded these computers and used them together throughout the day. You can see how much these these few computers on the streets have affected their culture and the children using them since their instillation. One study done by Appadurai found while looking at previously localized groups of individuals that globalization had a substantial effect and made a fundamental change in their culture.  I liked how the article said cultures have never been pure or separate but are always being influenced by what is around them. Culture does not simply exist on its own or remain the same but are in a constant state of development and interaction.

On the first day in this class we wrote down our definition of culture on an index card. The definition I wrote down has already changed.  Specifically after reading this article, I have realized that “culture” does not have a clear definition. The article is filled with scholars trying to define this one term and yet there still is no one agreed upon one concrete definition.  One change I have made to my own definition comes from a realization- that culture can be individualistic. One part of the article states that cultures are not “neatly bound and mutually exclusive bodies of thought and custom” which are shared by each and every member. Cultures are not groups of brainwashed robots who think, feel and act the same way but instead consist of living, breathing, unique individuals.  

In the conclusion of this article there is a reference to the relationship between a forest and its trees. When I read this I saw the overall forest representing a culture but each tree representing a member, unique from the rest. This article helped me see that culture is actually very individualized. As a future teacher it is important to know this because you cannot assume something about an individual, or about your student based on what you believe their culture means. Each person has their very own culture and their own set of beliefs, values and norms. One comment Zamel made which was stated in the article was “teachers and researchers who see students as bound by their cultures may be trapped by their own cultural tendency to reduce, categorize and generalize”. Educators need to be careful not to make assumptions and as one of the six principles in the articles states “All humans are individuals. Teachers and researchers need to view students as individuals, not as members of a cultural group". This statement goes along with the second principle “Knowing students individually also involves knowing them culturally.”  As teachers we need to embrace all students’ individual cultures. We must look past this view of a culture as a forest filled with identical trees but instead look more closely and see the  individual trees, our students, each different from another.