One of the most important aspect of bring an L2 educator is how to appropriately incorporate culture into the classroom that is authentic and based on stereotypes and cultural appropriation. The reading for this week's blog was a journal article but a chapter titled "Popular Culture as Content-Based Instruction in the Second Language Classroom to Enhance Critical Engagement" by Anne Peirson-Smith in the book Faces of English Education: Students, Teachers, and Pedagogy. What she suggests is regardless of the L2 and the people who speak it, there are six ways of thinking about culture to elicit respectful and engaging conversations in the classroom setting.
-culture that is like by many people
-"inferior culture" that is left over from "high culture"
-mass produced commercial culture
-culture which originates from the people
-culture which results in change - the intersection of culture and power
-everyday life, from a postmodern perspective, where there is no distinction between high and low culture
These discussions help push L2 learners beyond stereotypes and preconceived notions. They require students to be patient in their research, listening to others, and how they speak. In the chapter, discussions took place in the classroom setting itself and also in Facebook discussions where students could directly share articles, websites, and links to help answer the above-mentioned directives and prove their point.
Question: are there any other cultural questions or concerns to be addressed in a language class that were not mentioned here?
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