Honor 401: Language and Culture
In my senior year of college, I enrolled in Honors 401: Language and Culture with Dr. Dahlman. I chose this class because I wanted to increase my knowledge in global citizenship, and I thought that the language and culture component would be relevant to my major and the populations that I want to work with. The class required one hour of service learning per week, and I was hoping that this would be an opportunity to apply what I had learned in class about global citizenship to real life. This class was beneficial for me and fulfilling the requirements of the Global Citizenship Rubric, but the most meaningful thing I learned was that the root of all that we do in the Honors program with rubrics and competencies is for students to gain empathy for others and a creative mind that is always looking to do something to increase knowledge or make someone’s life better. I learned about language, culture, and acting as a global citizen through every action I accomplish through service learning, book discussions in class, and a case study that I conducted on a language learner.
A requirement of this class was service learning outside of class for a minimum of one hour per week, and we were assigned short reflections about our experiences called “Service Learning Journals”. For my service learning experience, I decided upon tutoring as a “language partner” for the Intensive English Program. I have tutored for this program before, and it is always different, and I always learn something new from the students. This year, my language partner was from Pakistan, but before coming to Mankato State, he was living in Saudi Arabia. I loved learning from him because we were so culturally different, but we also had moments in which we talked about our similarities as human beings and college students. Through this experience, I stepped out of my comfort zone and I tried to actively use concepts from level four of the "knowledge and understanding" area. I learned about asking complex questions about culture that stepped beyond the safe boundaries of food and clothes. I was so inspired and eager to learn more, that I sought out to learn about the experiences of others who were from the same country or practiced the same religion as my language partner. He told me that he enjoyed that I knew others from the same communities from which he was a member. I had so many valuable experiences, and I really applied what I had learned in class and from the rubric.
In the beginning of the class, we all voted upon reading a book related to language and culture. The majority of the votes went to the book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. This book is about a real-life story about a Hmong family, in which a child was diagnosed with a rare form of epilepsy. The book recounts stories about the family, the US medical system, the difficulty with translation, and the history of Hmong culture. The author implicitly urges readers to become self-aware of their biases, especially toward culturally diverse people, so that they can avoid the tragedies that happened to the Hmong people in the US and in the US medical system. As someone who is going into a healthcare profession, I felt a personal connection to this book. I talked to a friend in my major who was Hmong, and she said that this book was the reason that she felt so much motivation to pursue her major of choice. The discussions in class were very beneficial because they offered an outlet to talk through the events of the book, make sense of them, and then talk about why they mattered now and what we can do about them. In terms of the Global Citizenship Rubric, I grew in self-awareness because I actively tried to realize and recognize that my opinions from the culture I was raised in will impede my understanding of others, and the book gave clear examples of how this can be detrimental. Also, in terms of the communication aspect of the rubric, what I had learned about language and culture being so tightly associated with one another was reinforced with real life examples and issues in translating and interpreting.
Our final project was a case study paper about a language learner on a concept related to language and culture. It took a lot of brainstorming and deliberation to choose my topic, because I could find at least one research question for each topic that I wanted to know more about. I connected the research question to the case study subject who I wanted to interview and an area of interest in my major. I chose the topic “Language Acquisition and Socialization,” and I narrowed my topic of focus to cross-cultural parentese: American culture and Mexican culture. I chose this topic because I saw it as an area of research that I had never seen before. As I was writing my case study paper, the topic of focus, the research questions, and the interview questions came so easily to me. This class was meant for the fulfillment of the global citizenship competency, but I also felt a connection to the research competency. I understand that research is an exploratory activity, and that creativity and an open mind are fully necessary to conduct meaningful research. As for the global citizenship competency, I learned a lot about language, because my topic was about differences in parentese depending upon language, and how language cannot simply be translated because of the intricacies of culture that are woven through every word.
Through this class and associated activities, I have grown in the global citizenship competency as outlined by the Global Citizenship Rubric. I have made growing as a global citizen a conscious decision, likewise as I have made recognizing my thoughts, actions, and prejudices as products of my culture and my first language. I have increased motivation to fulfill my competencies on research and global citizenship, because I see what a difference they can make in the world, and how they can serve others and increase knowledge in the world. Overall, I am thankful that I took this class, and I plan on using the skills I learned to further develop all of my competencies.