Articles about Teaching Canadian Culture
Teaching Canadian Culture: Teacher Preparation
What is Canadian culture? How do we prepare teachers to teach Canadian culture? How do we teach about culture in the classroom? After presenting a new vision ofCanadian culture that is to serve as a framework for deciding what to teach in the L2 classroom, I discuss three important pedagogical issues: (a) consciousness raising-making both teachers and students more aware of the origins and role of culture; (b) teacher preparation-how adequately to prepare teachers to teach Canadian culture in a multicultural classroom; and (c) tolerance and conflicting visions-how to strike a balance between the dominant cultural paradigm and the new cultural knowledge and experience that arrives with each new Canadian.
Responding to and expanding on Courchene's article on how Canadian culture might be taught as a subject in ESL curriculum, Sauve (1996) states, "Culture is not about content. It is about the making and remaking of relationships in our society" (p. 23). She discusses some of the pitfalls in trying to conceive of culture as content: the impossibility of representing the specificity of culture according to region, age, gender, ethnicity, class, race, rural versus urban locale, and work, to name some of the variables at play (p. 18), and the unavoidable flattening out of the discursive convergence of the psychic and the social at the heart of cultural practices, an erasure that tends to occur especially when cultural content is taught in the delivery mode.
Working With the Cultures of Canada in the ESL Classroom: A Response to Robert Courchene
There is a problem of naming"aCanadian culture." First of all, there is the old problem of discussing culture at all, which Edward Hall (1973) put so well for us. He describes three different layers of culture: primary, secondary, CIlnd tertiary. The first by definition resides in our unconscious where we cannot access it in order to discuss it; the second is reserved for discussion with fellow members of our culture; and the third is the set of customs, values, and so forth that we most commonly think of when we talk about culture. So how possible is it to teach something when we cannot even be fully conscious of it? I am comfortable with the notion of enabling the acquisition of culture; I am less comfortable with the idea of trying to teach it.
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