教學相長

Zhuangzi tells the story of a boy who, enamored of the way the people of another village walked, left his village to learn how to walk as they did. After years of trying, he found that not only had he failed to learn their way of walking, but he had also forgotten his village’s way of walking; he had to crawl to return home.

As an American who lived abroad for most of the last twenty years, I often think about what that story might have to say to people who attempt to live in another culture and learn the practices identified with that culture. I wonder who one becomes when one becomes more fluent in the language(s) and cultural practices of another culture. I am both personally and professionally interested in issues of cross-cultural communication and rhetoric, and in the kinds of things that can and may happen when people from one culture attempt to “walk”—or talk—like those of another culture.

On a personal level, living in Taiwan for 16 years and attempting to walk and talk the way they did there gave me the opportunity to know more about the culture. I was even welcomed as a member of a Chinese family. As a result, I became in some ways defamiliarized from American cultural and communication practices (to the point that I started calling myself a “former native speaker”). I also had the opportunity to experience being obviously different from the majority of people around me (though I hasten to add that it was a privileged difference). Whether it was overhearing a young boy in the countryside explaining to another why I was clearly an “American” and not (?!) a “foreigner” (as he patiently explained to his friend, 「美國人的鼻子比較尖」), or whether it was watching my nephew arrive at an age when he had to come to grips with the fact that his uncle was “different,” I got a sense of what it was like to be both a part of and apart from a culture that I increasingly identified with.

Professionally, I have been able to use my own state of defamiliarization as a tool when working with multilingual students (both in Taiwan and now at Northeastern). Sometimes this involves minor issues like why Americans insist on using letter-size paper instead of A4 (which almost everyone else in the world uses). At other times it involves thinking together about differences between educational systems and about the expectations of an American university. And at other times, it involves coming to terms with—and writing back against—how we are represented by others, sometimes “in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power” (I’m sure I don’t have to cite that quote!). Like the students in my class, I feel I have to balance walking in the way of my home village with walking in the way of (an)other village(s). Like me, they have to develop, from those various ways of walking that they’ve tried to learn, their own way.