Cultural aspects in a multicultural classroom in Switzerland
When I had to choose a topic for my TEFL article I immediately thought on choosing culture as the main topic. As the first thing to mention is that I have another cultural background as I am from Bosnia and Herzegovina and also the other fact that I was going abroad and thought I could experience some culture clashes or a culture shock. In cultural shock there are four stages you have to pass before feeling good and safe in the new culture. First stage also called honeymoon stage is the beginning where you are very interested in the new culture. The next one is called irritation and hostility. That’s were problems might show both in home and at work. Then there is gradual adjustment. It’s were you are getting to know the new culture better and getting used to it. The last stage is called biculturalism, which is the stage that expatriate recovers fully and achieves an ability to function effectively in two different cultures (Rasmussen og Mikkelsen, Focus on culture). But it didn’t experience it as the Swiss culture reminds a lot of the Danish and Danish mentality after my opinion. You can experience these shocks or clashes if you go to another part of Switzerland. But I found some other interesting things regarding culture clashes. I am going to write the article focusing on Quadra lingual Switzerland as the country studied. I will in this paper go through a case about a cultural clash and analyze it. I will also go in to depth with the importance of teaching culture and the importance of developing intercultural competence.
Research question for the article:
Which cultural aspects does a teacher need to be aware of when teaching in a multicultural society and classroom environment and how can you as a teacher teach culture?
In a classroom environment you need to know the children and therefor also be aware of the culture that is in the classroom. You need as a teacher to know the culture of the country or part of the country (Especially Switzerland) you are working in. In Switzerland there are 4 official languages and every language has its own ideology and culture of course (Watts, The ideology of dialect in Switzerland). So teaching in Zürich isn’t the same as teaching in Fribourg (French speaking part) for example. You also need to be aware the culture of the pupils and attitudes, behavior, ideology and values of the specific culture. Different cultures, religion, culture between countries are some of the cultural aspects you need to adapt as a part of your teaching. Especially in Switzerland teaching is more difficult after the flow of people coming to the country to settle (for example after the war in Yugoslavia), but also the fact that there are so many different nationalities and languages. These facts makes it challenging for a teacher to learn pupils, so culture is in Swiss classrooms on of the most important aspects you need to be aware of, if not the most important.
Case (My mentor observing a student):
This story is a case from my mentor. She told me the case one day and it has a big relevance for my article so it was practical to use it. She is observing a student, who is doing his final practice in English and is soon to become an English teacher in Switzerland.
It is an English lesson in a 6th grade. The students are all excited and anxious because they are going to meet the practice teacher. The class is multicultural and about 60 % of the students has another cultural background, so it is a difficult and challenging teaching situation for the student. The atmosphere in the classroom was good to start with and the children were exciting to prove themselves to the “new” teacher, as a lot of children are when a new teacher has arrived to teach them and they were all kind to the student teacher. But as the lesson was going on, the children started to be more and more unmotivated and their concentration was away from the teacher and switched to a loud and attention-seeking pupil with Bosnian background. The student teacher tells the pupil to be stop and it works in the start. But after while the pupil continues to be loud and the student teacher asks him, in a friendly way, to stop being so loud, because he is interrupting the other students from listening and doing their work. It works again, but only for a while and the student teacher can’t really understand why he doesn’t understand him. The pupil is not concentrated and starts to throw a paper at one of his friends from the class. The student teacher is out of decisions and a girl with Arabic background stands up immediately. She starts to yell at the boy and says that he is being very disrespectful towards his fellow students and the “new” teacher. A friendly gesture from the girl and it makes the teacher happy. The girl sits down and the student teacher walks towards her. He thanks her and takes his arms around her, a thankful huge and friendly gesture, because the girl was doing a good thing for the classroom environment and a good thing for the learning process of the classroom. But this shocks the teacher observing. It doesn’t shock her, because she thinks it is a pedophilic action of the student teacher, but she is thinking on the girl’s cultural background. How will the girl react to this? It will be a normal for a Swiss child, but would it be normal for her and her cultural values? The thing that went through the mentor teacher’s mind was if the girl will go home and say this to her parents, so she needed to contact the school inspector, so no doubt was to be find, because she knew the student and that his intention was friendly. The teacher reacts to this and talks with the student teacher about this after the lesson. He gets very sad, because his attention wasn’t bad at all, but it was just an action of him being thankful to the pupil for being a good and positive character in that situation.
In this situation the cultural aspects comes into play and the student teacher wasn’t aware that some of the pupils had other values and morals than the Swiss children. This kind of situation can turn into bad things and be misunderstood by some parts. In this situation the girl could have misunderstood the teacher’s action as a sexual thing.
The culture of the country (Switzerland)
Switzerland is one country. But still when you have learned something about the country, you can’t really conclude that it has one culture. If you can say it is divided in parts, depending on the spoken language in the part. Every part has its own language ideology (so two parts that are German speaking can have different language ideology and beliefs). Therefor the culture is also different and there isn’t a real Swiss culture, but the culture is defined in the part of the country you live in or come from. The 4 official languages in Switzerland is German, French, Italian and Romansh. Officially, German is spoken by around 65% of the total population. Unofficially, of course, the “mother tongue” of the majority of German speakers is one of over 30, mostly Alemmannic dialects, which are, generally speaking, mutually intelligible. On the other hand, the linguistic “distance” between stand German and the Swiss German dialects is great enough to cause considerable difficulty in mutual comprehension between a German-speaking swiss national and a German speaker from beyond the Alemmanic dialect area (Watts, The ideology of dialect in Switzerland). So therefor there so many diffrences in Switzterland as for the langauges, but also the cultures, not only for the Swiss persons, but also the immigrants living the country and who came to country because of poverty or war in their home country. Therefor Switzerland is a very multicultural and quadralingual society and in the most situation for a teacher, the classroom will also be so.
The culture of the pupil
In this situation the girl’s cultural background is Arabic (Muslim). In Islamic cultures the growing up for girls considers to be very strict. A physical contact with males, before marriage, could be considered as a sexual act of any kind and it can sometimes end in bad things. It is forbidden. It is only allowed for the females to be in physical contact with the father, brother, her husband (when married) and her children. That’s why usually girls aren’t in the same room as boys, because of this fact. Islamic culture is itself a contentious terms. Muslims live in many different countries and communities, and it can be difficult to isolate points of cultural unity among Muslims, besides their adherence to the religion of Islam. The girl’s family could be very religious and they could also be non-religious. But you need to be aware of “what it”, and in this situation, the girl’s parents could have stated to the girl through her childhood and explained her that it is forbidden to any kind of contact with males and if a situation happened that a guy touched her in any kind of way, she should tell them. Islamic culture devotes its life to the religion and is very firm in the rules and they follow them always. So everyone needs to respect this fact and know that it is not something the culture appreciates.
Understanding of culture
A teacher needs to respect and understand the pupils in every way. The pupils for example have different learning styles, different learning strategies and different cultures. It concludes in the end that all students have different ways of working and also understanding their surroundings and the actions happening. Culture as a concept may contain both lifestyles and behavior, social and ethnic identity, national history, heritage, language, socialization and professional life and much, much more. Culture is on the one hand a way to see and experience the world, on the other hand, a way of producing meaning of meaning which is rooted in certain cultural value systems and human relationships (Bente Meyer, Kulturforståelse og interkulturel kompetence). In the case the culture of the student teacher could see and experience his action as a way of saying thanks in a loving and kind way, but the culture of girl could have seen the action as something insulting or sexual. This could be called a class between the two cultures, because they have different views and values.
At this point, a teacher needs to have insight of the different cultures in classroom and needs to have an understanding of the culture and its ideology. Understanding of a culture is divided in three parts. One result of the last 25 years of discussion of the cultural dimension is that there is broad consensus that the cultural dimension has three aspects: knowledge, attitudes and behavior. These three aspects are interdependent. Feelings and attitudes has connection to the knowledge they have and their behavior is partially determined by your knowledge and your ability to empathize (empathy). On the other hand, the behavior you show will form the basis for developing your knowledge and feelings (Karen Risager, Kulturforståelse i sprogundervisningen – Hvorhen?). When looking on culture, a teacher’s job in a multicultural is therefore very difficult and challenging as two pupils from the same culture, doesn’t have to be the same persons. Geert Hofstede made a figure for his mental programme theory. He is of the belief that although we share basic feelings with all other individuals and although we share certain characteristics with other members of our culture we all have different personalities (Rasmussen og Mikkelsen, Focus on culture).
That is fact you can’t rebel against and it also proven for student’s choice of learning strategies, just to mention another situation. Choice of learning strategies can have connection to culture or learning strategies, but a research showed that the connection wasn’t so tight as people thought(from learning strategy course in Zürich).
But not only the teacher needs to be aware of the children’s culture, but he also needs to be able to teach his about culture, so they can develop an intercultural competence. It is not only important for the teacher to be aware of the cultural aspects in his classroom and the society as well, but the children also need to get an insight into different cultures, values and beliefs, so they can use it in the classroom and the life outsight the classroom as well. It is especially important when teaching in a multicultural classroom as you have a big chance of doing in Switzerland.
Teaching culture in language learning
When teaching English as foreign culture you mostly focus on the cultures of the English speaking countries (USA and India for example). Then you can take up other cultures in some other subjects as history or religion, because if you have to teach all cultures in language learning, you will not learn other practical things.
Until World War II, culture used to be seen as the highly literate component of language study. In the seventies, it became synonymous with the way of life and everyday behaviors of members of speech communities. Nowadays it has become embroiled in the controversies associated with politics of the ethnic identity, religious affiliation and moral values (Andersen, Lund og Risager, Culture in Langauge learning). That’s why the national curriculum also requires more culture in language learning, because of the relevance and significance of culture.
The importance of intercultural competence is also stated by Michael Byram, professor of the University of Durham. According to Byram, awareness of sufficient of cultural aspect on language teaching, has been getting increased for the last century on education and political and economic development as well, where the world is globalized and people should live as a world citizen. In this context intercultural competence for both teachers and pupils has become more important. Byram says that intercultural competence is to be able to see relationships between different cultures - both internal to a society - and is able to mediate, that is interpret each in terms of the other, either for themselves or for other people. He also briefly define that intercultural competence involves five elements such as attitudes, knowledge, skills of interpreting and relating, skills of discovery and interaction and critical cultural awareness/political education (Byram, Assessing intercultural competence in language teaching).
Understanding of the “others” are important in Switzerland is important. Ursula Meyer, my practice teacher, also states the importance of being aware of other cultures and having a intercultural competence. Some years ago she worked in a school, where she had a class of 50 % pupils with other cultural backgrounds. She states how difficult it was here, as she as teacher had to be aware of different abilities, attitudes, knowledge and awareness, just as Michal Byram mentions. For example a thing she really had to do was to teach some of the children with another cultural background in a slower and easier language with easy vocabulary. She noticed this process after some couple a month and she knew right away that it was an aspect she needed to respect and take into consideration.
The children’s knowledge about other cultures is very important, but she means that in this class the pupils were lacking in their development of their intercultural competence. But a thing they have in Switzerland is people who can take cultural problems or aspects into consideration and take to the children about it. They are called “Culture translators”. They have a broad knowledge of different cultures and also the countries culture, so they can put the two cultures having a clash up against each other and show the differences for the pupils involved. These culture translators talk with the children about the differences and letting them now that is all right to have another culture, but you also need as a cultural person to know how to understand and respect other cultures.
Another thing that is very important to do and also a valuable to have in class, is to use the intercultural competences of the children. It will mean that you use the different cultures of the children and use them in teaching situations so they can talk about their culture and also listen to the culture of their fellow pupils, so they also hear get a sense of differences in the world and in the real life.
