summer reading response

Since part of cultivating wisdom is recognizing what you don't know, I will note right here that our students are not going to be learning from me about how global markets operate and what the promises and perils of transnational production are.  I could use a course on that myself.  And I would relish any viable professional opportunities to study more of other languages and become better informed about the problems tagged as crucial for the next generation to solve (health epidemics, the environmental crisis, etc.).  The more space we can get to develop our own understanding with respect to these issues, the better.  For me, visiting scholarly domains other than my own is crucial— not just for personal edification but for the possibility of connecting dots across disciplines on behalf of the students when I sit down each summer to redesign my syllabi. 

 

For example, thanks to Sandy and Stephanie's book swap, in June I read Katherine Boo's Beyond the Beautiful Forevers about life in a Mumbai slum, and I'm still trying to figure out how and where to share the utterly new perspective it offered.  Wow.  It doesn't connect with anything that I do or teach, and yet I feel it somehow should.  I'll keep thinking.  I also just finished Susan Cain's Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, and that book has me wanting to put an asterisk next to each call for collaborative work that appears in our globalism readings.  Cain is no fan of constant group work.  But she does celebrate the early internet for fostering effective, globally "collaborative" work in a way that enabled bands of often introverted, solitude-craving problem-solvers to come together and contribute to the broader good in the ether— that is, without the distractions and stress of visible, synchronous interaction and after having completed a lot of good independent thinking.  Online collaborative work, I think, can continue to be a great complement to live cultural exchanges, as it makes collective production accessible and attractive to a broader spectrum of personality types across and within cultures.  The question is what that work should look like.

 

But back to Reimers.  I am most inspired by what Reimers articulates in the conclusion:  the idea that our educational purpose ought to be preparing students with the skills and the ethical dispositions to invent a future that enhances human well-being.  As an English teacher most able to contribute in the affective dimension —courting that capacity to recognize various perspectives and to communicate ideas effectively across diverse audiences— I find this purpose the most natural and appealing.  I do wonder what "actionable" exchange opportunities, virtually or via writing, look like for people in my discipline, though, when we do not speak the same language as those with whom we might most need to connect.  In Chapter IV of the Asia Society reading, for example, how did Alex learn responsibly about what makes his counterparts in Afghanistan laugh?  Did he deduce it from YouTube videos?  Did he Skype about it with Afghan students who know English?  I guess I am ignorant about how widespread English really is (never mind embarrassed that we are in a position to expect it to be widespread).

 

Some questions posed in the reading do strike me as a bit out of touch— or at least more troubling to older generations of educators than they likely are for our students.  Take this question from the reading:  "How can we nurture graduates who are able to manage cultural complexity and increasingly blurred markers of origin and ethnicity?"  I bet much of what older generations find "culturally complex" and "blurry" is just culturally normal for many of our students.  Five of my closest friends from college and I happen to have married partners who are from another country or who speak a primary language other than English— and we all met rowing, a sport not historically evocative of or immediately associated with "globalism."  How many kids today have truly homogenous home settings or communities?  I don't see our kids looking as "blurry" as some adults report feeling.  Our kids accept what they're born into, and what they're born into is quite a mix nowadays.  For better and for worse, many of them seem to find enough complexity in their own selves.  So I think the question is not whether they can manage others' complex identities, but how they will, and with what depth of understanding.  To be even partly in charge of this is humbling, for sure.

 

—Allison