Decompartmentalizing the Learning Experience: Crossing the Disciplines in Cultural Anthropology and English Composition and Literature
The Concept for Crossing Disciplines
Cross–disciplinary learning offers opportunities for students to make connections between the disciplines and to understand the collaborative nature of education. However, the traditional practices of the educational system often limit such learning environments. As a result, students often compartmentalize new knowledge or insights, failing to grasp either the obvious or subtle connections among disciplines. Although most students by the time they graduate make some connections on their own among various disciplines, as educators we believe that we can offer students a richer learning experience at the beginning of their college studies through a cross–disciplinary setting. Because of the cross–disciplinary nature of the courses we designed, students will be able to make these important connections among other disciplines much earlier in their university studies, significantly enhancing the way they think, organize, and broaden their understanding. Rather than compartmentalizing learning, students will be equipped to make broader interdisciplinary connections and be much more likely to include this new learning model in their construction of a wider, more inclusionary world.
At Kent State University—Geauga, we designed our courses to offer a unique collaborative learning experience between two disciplines: cultural anthropology and English composition and literature. Our initial courses focused on two racial–ethnic groups, the Vietnamese and South Carolina Gullah cultures. Students who signed up for the introduction to cultural anthropology learned about these cultures from the perspective of that discipline, and students who signed up for English Composition II (based on literature) read and wrote about these cultures. Students from both courses met regularly in one classroom and were thereby exposed to a cross–disciplinary approach in which theory and methodology from both disciplines intersected. The collaborative nature of these courses became especially valuable when students began writing the research paper, a requirement for both courses. We realize that for a variety of realistic reasons not all courses can be structured in a cross– disciplinary setting, but for those disciplines that do intersect, the experience enriches the students and is rewarding for the team teachers as well.
The Genesis of the Project
In the spring of 2002, the Office of Institutional Diversity at Kent State University challenged its faculty to explore new ways of introducing diversity into course work. The Office sponsored a grant program that asked its recipients to accept the “challenge of transforming [the] curriculum to prepare students for a world of transformation” (Building a Diverse and Respectful Campus Community 1). Specifically, the Diversity Advisory Committee directed us to 1) give insight into groups and dynamics previously excluded from the traditional corpus of learning and 2) examine pedagogical issues connected with the search for a more inclusive curriculum.
In addressing the first challenge, we selected Vietnamese and Gullah, two cultures that are often buried within other, more generalized focuses. Even today, almost thirty years after the Vietnam war, Americans know very little about Vietnamese culture and its people other than within the context of the Vietnam War. Similarly, little is known about Gullah culture outside the South Carolina Sea Islands, where it developed through the necessity of survival for enslaved West Africans and, because of its isolation, remained for many years untouched by outside influences.
The second challenge of the grant inspired us to do something different by circumventing the more traditional team teaching approach. The logistics of team teaching potentially complicate collaborative efforts, raising these questions: 1) Which discipline owns the course? 2) If two professors teach one course, how do they get paid? 3) How will students receive credit?
In addressing these concerns, we implemented the design of the project as team teaching two courses in which we would be able to cross disciplines and pave the way for students to be able to make intellectual connections between the disciplines. Because each course retains its identity, intersecting only at appropriate times, both remain within the purview of their home disciplines. This approach helped us avoid the “two professors but one course” salary and discipline dilemma. As well, students who enroll in either cultural anthropology or English composition receive credit for only the course in which they are enrolled. The benefit, however, is that students come to understand how disciplines often cross and complement each other.
Our primary goal was for students to be able to understand that disciplines do cross, that they cross often and naturally, and that cross– disciplinary teaching encourages cross–disciplinary learning. We specifically recalled our own learning experience during our student years, being shuttled from one course to the next, often wondering if or how they were supposed to connect. When does the light of recognition turn on in a student’s mind that what she learned in biology might have something to do with the novel she has just read in a literature course? When does a student connect the threads between anthropological concepts with an oral history he has read in a history course? What if we could hasten and encourage these connections? Would students extrapolate from this experience by making connections among other disciplines? Would cross–disciplinary studies encourage critical thinking? We were certain that students would make connections in a positive, intellectual way that would foster independent and critical thinking. Learning models such as cross–disciplinary teaching invite students to make these connections early in their freshman year so that they can recognize the intellectual potential now when it can benefit them most.
The Logistics of Crossing Disciplines
Both cultural anthropology and English Composition II focused on two racial–ethnic groups, the Vietnamese and Gullah people of the South Carolina Sea Islands. Students in Introduction to Cultural Anthropology and in English Composition studied these unique cultures and shared the research writing project together, based on the theories and methodologies of both disciplines. However, students received credit only for the course in which they were enrolled. Students during the first semester of our offering attended classes in the same physical space, and only occasionally did we separate them when, for instance, one class had a test and the other had a writing assignment. All other times classes were held together, with students listening to lectures about cultural anthropological theories or attending workshops about effective writing. We included directions on how to write an APA formatted paper and how to write an MLA formatted paper. Students watched films, discussed oral histories and short stories, and learned how to blend approaches from both disciplines.
We were somewhat concerned about students’ reactions to sitting in on two courses and receiving credit for only one. Some students in cultural anthropology believed—erroneously—that if it were not for the partnership with English, they would not be required to write a research paper. We were to learn at the end of the semester through student evaluations that although a minority voiced concerns or even objected to this arrangement, the majority of respondents reported that this method was advantageous to them, especially if they were to later sign up for the “other” course. However, the concerns of the few caught our attention, and the way in which we addressed these concerns are discussed later in this paper.
Providing Source Material at the Home Campus
When new areas of scholarship are introduced into a university curriculum, students need support material that is easily accessible to them. Although students are certainly encouraged to use the interlibrary loan system, we believe it is a positive sign of commitment to have materials readily available to students at the home campus. We set aside a substantial portion of the grant money to purchase important primary and secondary source material for our campus library. This immediate availability is especially important to nontraditional students who commute directly from work to the regional campus and are perhaps unable to get to the Kent Campus library in a more timely fashion. We firmly believe that when any course of study is offered to students, the local campus library should be involved. We found that many identified important books, unfortunately, are out of print. Nevertheless, we were able to circumvent this potential problem by ordering directly from book sellers who specialize in out–of–print books. The Geauga Campus library now holds a collection of books about the Vietnamese and Gullah cultures that rival other libraries in the university system.
Combining Theories and Methodologies for the Courses
Understanding Cultural Anthropology: With most of our supporting materials in place, we were ready to lay the groundwork for the two courses. This encompassed situating students in both courses to the basic theories and methodologies of cultural anthropology as well as in literature. Using Daniel Bates’ and Elliot Franklin’s text, Cultural Anthropology, all students were guided through the basics of cultural anthropology. Students learned first that culture is learned behavior and that it serves as a guide to understanding social behavior. From an anthropological perspective, students were encouraged to examine their own cultural conduct and ask: Why do we eat with a fork and a spoon and not chopsticks? How do we learn the appropriate behavior associated with men and women? Or, how do we learn our culture’s recommended gender signals? What repulses Americans by the mere thought of having a drink mixed with the blood of a cobra (a popular drink for Vietnamese men who want to enhance their virility), or drinking the blood of a slaughtered goat (a West African religious ritual)? The answer comes in one word: culture, the social heritage of a group of people. It is, therefore, learned behavior. Anthropologist Ralph Linton writes in The Study of Man that a sea creature cannot be aware of the existence of water because it is surrounded by it. In the same way humans are only vaguely aware of culture, and it is usually made obvious when we compare the elements of our culture to another (7).
Students were introduced to the abstract components of culture, including folkways, culture shock, ethnocentrism, and cultural relativism. Folkways are the customary and habitual ways by which members of a culture do things. For example, people tend to conform to standards of appearance by wearing similar clothing and hairstyles. But what about the occasional person who dares to be different, such as a Vietnamese woman who decides to wear only western clothing? If she is from a family who holds onto traditional customs, she can expect ostracism, negative comments, and maybe even rejection for breaking a social norm. All societies have folkways, and the content of that culture will form and direct relevant folkways.
By definition, culture shock is the whole set of feelings of alienation that one experiences in an unusual situation. The language may be completely foreign to our understanding. Ethnic foods may be unappetizing. If we are bewildered by the customs of another group, we may be inclined to judge them by our own standards and view them ethnocentrically. As Americans, we may find it strange that the Vietnamese have rooms in their homes that are set aside for their deceased ancestors, housing shrines to honor and immortalize them. Or, we may disagree with the unequal status of women in traditional Vietnamese society. The notion of the dowry, a financial compensation provided to the groom by the bride’s family to make her more attractive and less of a liability, appears to be demeaning to Westerners.
Comparisons between cultures is a useful way of drawing attention to diversity. But to eliminate ethnocentrism, cultural relativism must be employed. This is the understanding that all cultures and practices within those cultures are intrinsically valuable and worthy of research. Outsiders do not have to approve of the religious customs of Hoodoo practiced by some of the Gullah. People outside the culture only need to understand that it originated from West Africa and that it works for its practitioners in satisfying ways that outsiders are really not required to understand. Cultural relativism requires humans to be objective and explain variation, not to judge it; approval is not required. Understanding is. Cultures should be examined on their own terms without biased opinions.
By learning how to recognize their reactions and attitudes toward the “other,” students learned to respect the diversity and originality of Vietnamese and Gullah cultures without interjecting subjective western views. All cultures are different, and we learn the appropriate content of culture by virtue of being born into a particular society. Cultural anthropology provides us with the necessary tools to navigate through the endless variation and tremendous diversity of world cultures.
Students from both courses were next introduced to anthropological theory, which is based on scientific methods, empirical research, and provides the foundation for understanding cultural differences. Students learned that anthropologists use the same methodologies that the natural sciences use: hypothesizing, testing, and researching.
Empirical research was introduced to students through Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) which theorized the biological evolution and the relationship among all animal species. His research had an enormous impact on early cultural anthropologists who applied evolution to societies. Typical of the cultural evolutionists was Lewis Henry Morgan, whose Ancient Society (1877) classified societies into three different stages. He believed that technologically less advanced societies were simple and unsophisticated. Societies that had advanced technology and industry, such as western societies, were considered sophisticated. Morgan created a sequence of cultural evolution in which he believed that societies would pass unilinearly from barbaric, simple societies to advanced post–industrial cultures. However, because of their narrow vision, Morgan and the cultural evolutionists of their day lost sight of the wide range of cultural variation. We know today that because a society does not have advanced technology, that absence of development does not make them barbaric. Accepting standards such as Morgan’s made it easier for 19th century western societies to gloss over very rich and ancient civilizations such as the Vietnamese and African cultures. Although cultural anthropologists today think in much more tolerant and inclusive terms, celebrating each culture’s unique characteristics instead of judging difference from an ethnocentric point of view, it is nevertheless important to understand the evolution of anthropological thought. Knowing the history and development of cultural anthropology therefore helped students to understand their own initial ethnocentrism, where and how it originated (through how cultures legitimate themselves within the context of the wider world), and why biased concepts are unacceptable.
In an attempt to reach beyond ethnocentrism, another question raised by cultural evolutionists was why, if we are all members of the same species, do we exhibit such a range of cultural differences? Franz Boas recommended a new approach called historical particularism. One of the first anthropologists to develop the concept of cultural relativism, Boas believed that anthropological research should involve an intense examination of the culture being studied. Boas insisted that comparing preliterate civilizations to western society was of little, if any, value to the science of anthropology precisely because each is different and valuable in its own right. He further suggested that “individuals are products of their cultural systems and culture is the keystone to anthropology” (47). Boas was quick to recognize the uniqueness of Gullah culture by sending one of his Howard University students, Zora Neale Hurston, to Eatonville, Florida, to conduct ethnographic studies about the all–black town. Later, Hurston would rely extensively on her collected material for her novels, resulting in her fame as an important African–American writer of the Harlem Renaissance. The connection between Boas, an anthropologist who introduced new theories about culture, and Zora Neale Hurston, an African–American writer who incorporated her teacher’s theories into her literature, was not lost on our students. Her relationship to Boas demonstrated to our students the successful interrelationship of two disciplines.
Later twentieth century anthropologists are still focused on the wide range of cultural diversity. The cultural materialist approach takes into account the environment and adaptation to that environment. Anthropologist Marvin Harris describes food taboos and why the Hindu worship cattle and consider them sacred. He explains that “Indians have the sacred cow; we have the ‘sacred’ cat and the ‘sacred dog’” (39). By extrapolation, 80 percent of Vietnamese are Buddhists and therefore vegetarians. The Vietnamese, who still rely heavily on the water buffalo for cultivating the rice fields, do not hold this animal on quite the same plane of the sacred as the cow in India. Nevertheless, the water buffalo remains an intricate part of Vietnamese culture and is highly revered.
Both Vietnamese and Gullah cultures are identified as rice cultures. Rice is so critical to their survival and such an intricate part of their lives that many of their cultural expressions revolve around rituals of planting and harvesting rice. Rice stories may also prescribe one’s place and responsibility in society, such as the Vietnamese folktale in which a woman who, apparently caught dallying in her household chores, threw her broom at the giant rice grain who came to visit, rather than inviting it in. For punishment, the rice broke apart into thousands of grains, forever condemning rice growers to hardship when they harvest the grains. “Because of this misdeed, men must harvest with the sickle, and cultivate rice if they are to have any to eat; and the grain will be small because the woman hit it and it flew into smithereens” (qtd. in Durand 30–31).
Rice also symbolizes the relationship between people, the environment, and their gods. In another important Vietnamese folktale, “the square shaped paddies were an image of Earth and the blue sky an image of Heaven. Earth nourished the people. Heaven watched over them. These were the most precious gifts bequeathed them by their Goddess Mother and Dragon Father” (Hanh 53–54). When Harris points out that all humans create culture which they adapt to the environment, the Vietnamese folktale about rice becomes a focal point for that idea. He dismisses earlier beliefs that cultures are superior or inferior and instead focuses on the idea that diversity is essential and valuable, that “practices and beliefs can be rational or irrational, but a society that fails to adapt to its environment is doomed to extinction” (39).
Other more recent attempts to study culture can be examined from the idealist approach. People reared in a particular culture learn its appropriate rules. Americans do not eat dogs because their culture tells them that they are nonfood items: pets. However, the Vietnamese do eat dogs, and from their perspective they do not understand why Westerners do not use them as an important food source. Perhaps the practice began out of necessity, but it has become a part of their food culture. The same ideology about food occurs within all societies, and people learn to classify food from nonfood. Anthropologist Mary Douglas in Natural Symbols states that all humans organize the natural world into categories that they can explain and understand, and they thereby “create fixed taxa or boundaries, much as we distinguish colors such as red from orange” (53). Humans create boundaries and learn to understand the world from their own cultural perspective. It was our aim to invite our students to push against the boundaries of their own safe and familiar culture so that they could achieve an appreciation and understanding of cultures other than their own.
Understanding Cultural Studies for English Composition and Literature: American culture is experienced in literature in many ways, depending on the context from which the author writes, how the author chooses to represent his or her culture, and even the geographical place from which the story springs. Because of its heterogeneity, America is a wonderful place to explore concepts about and the evolution of American culture. To define what is American broadly, however, will always exclude another. During the great immigrant waves of the 19th and early 20th centuries, people were expected to drop their foreign–sounding names, forget their native languages, and to speak, act, and therefore become American, dissolving into the metaphorical melting pot. Despite the difficulty in defining what is American, we can be certain that many traits within the culture are held in common, such as a love of liberty and enjoying the freedom to speak, write, invent, and discover. Our spaces are vast, whether they are physical or metaphorical, and so even this idea of space influences our art as well as our philosophies.
While many aspects of being American do seem to have become blended, nevertheless, expressions unique to individual cultures that have enriched America have managed to flourish in places such as language and its highest artistic expression, literature. Instead of melting and forgetting their forebears, Americans are now proudly boasting of their hyphenated heritage. This pride is expressed in the literature, and today reading about Americans will include other cultures such as West African and Vietnamese cultures.
More recently, cultural critics have sounded the alarm that American culture has become too homogenized and bland. The modernization of American culture, it sometimes seems, has found uniform expression through a vast collection of shopping malls, small towns and large cities alike filled with McDonald’s franchises, and myriad other franchised outlets. To shop in one mall in one city is to shop in every mall. But that is only one image of American popular culture sandwiched within a complex country that is also filled with immigrant groups who still hold onto their ethnic roots in a variety of wonderful ways, one of them being through the expression of language and its literary productions.
One such culture, the Gullah, traces its roots from West Africa to the South Carolina Sea Islands. Gullah, ostensibly West African, has been shaped by the Sea Island experience. It is a culture that contains unique identifying markers about being Gullah, including within the context of slavery but certainly not exclusive to it because the Gullah people have continued to evolve beyond the slave experience. Through its initial isolation on the Sea Islands during the era of slavery, Gullah culture has survived into the 21st century despite the influx of tourists and other outsiders who are attracted by the beauty of the islands. During the middle part of the 20th century, “snow birds” from the north discovered the beauty of the islands and its mild winter climate. They bought land and turned it into a golfer and retiree paradise which steadily threatens the Gullah people’s ability to retain their land. Their way of life is undermined through cultural pollution and the forced dispersion of the Gullah people off the Sea Islands. Students are placed into an interesting position: to be able to read about a unique culture, one that bears studying and is worth celebrating; however, it is also a culture that is threatened by the outside world and is changing rapidly.
Gullah culture, however, is often submerged within the studies of a larger cultural context, homogenized into African–American culture studies. The study of African–American culture often subsumes the unique dynamics the Gullah people possess apart from other African– Americans: a highly developed creole language that is a mixture of West African languages and English; the blending of African religions with western religions (sometimes even a concerted effort by a minority of Gullah to preserve West African religions in its original form); art in the form of basket weaving, traced directly to Sierra Leone; and music.
Gullah culture evolved from necessity during the 18th and 19th century slave trade to ensure a people’s survival, and it blossomed into a unique Sea Island culture. The realities of the steady encroachment of the outside world are poignantly depicted in literature and film. For our students in northeast Ohio who will most likely never visit the South Carolina Sea Islands, the film Daughters of the Dust is a good visual introduction to a culture and family in transition. Set in the 1920s, the film presents the Peazant family in turmoil as some choose to leave the islands to search for a better life, while others choose to stay behind. The film presents a near–mythical landscape that is isolated from the rest of the country (and whose characters speak entirely in Gullah). The elder Peazants were born into slavery, and the younger ones who have been born after slavery reject the past and want no reminders of it. The family prepares food that is African in origin (such as rice) to be eaten at a picnic in which all family members will come together for the last time. Each worships God in his or her own way: an elderly man in the Islamic tradition; the matriarch of the family in the Yoruba tradition; and the younger, forward looking woman, who is repulsed by her grandmother’s old ways, in the Christian tradition. Students watched Daughters of the Dust before they read Gullah literature, thereby introducing them to the language and customs through a medium that offers a visual representation of the Sea Islands as well as the tempo of a lilting and pleasing language. Once they heard the language, they became better equipped to read the literature, connecting sound with meaning.
To get a clear picture of the Gullah culture and how it evolved, students also learned how the culture’s West African origins have been definitively traced through the language in which linguist Lorenzo Turner identified over “four thousand West African words, besides many survivals in syntax, inflections, sounds and intonation” (296). Turner’s linguistic studies debunked earlier ethnocentric or racist pronouncements that carelessly condemned the Gullah speakers as “slovenly and careless of speech [who] wrapped their clumsy tongues about it as well as they could, and enriched with certain expressive African words, it issued through their flat noses, and thick lips” (Jones–Jackson 135). Once students understood Gullah as a legitimate language in its own right, they developed a greater appreciation of the stories that use the grammar and phrasings in Gullah.
Gullah was once a secret language, spoken among slaves and to the exclusion of the white man. It later became a private language, spoken among people who held their identity in common. During the Civil War, when Laura Towne and Ellen Murray came to St. Helena Island in 1862 to found the Penn School to educate the freed slaves, they actively discouraged their students from speaking Gullah, condemning the language as “simple corruption of English” (Rose 96). While the Gullah language was once discouraged, today the sea islanders speak this rich and intricate language more openly and consider it a valuable heritage that connects them to their West African ancestral roots. This pride is also depicted in the documentary film Family Across the Sea, in which several members of the Gullah community returned to Sierra Leone in 1988 to visit their ancestral lands and discovered that they held their language and customs in common.
Our students also studied the Vietnamese culture, not in the context of the Vietnam War (ethnocentrism), but in the context of Vietnamese identity (cultural relativism). Instead of reading about the Vietnamese as the stereotyped enemy of the Vietnam War of the 1960s and 1970s, students got a sense of the Vietnamese people in their own environment as people who rear families, raise their crops, practice a rich spiritual life, and respect their elders. As with Gullah culture, we introduced our students to Vietnamese culture visually through film before we began reading the literature. One film that bears witness to the strong connection between family and land is through Le Ly Hayslip’s story, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places. Understanding Vietnamese culture entails understanding their world–view which “constitut[es] an all–encompassing cosmological scheme based on yin and yang, conceived as two primordial forces from which everything else in the universe was created” (Jamieson 11). This model “suffuse[s] the entire world with a coherent system of meaning” (11) that once understood as a model for achieving a balance in all aspects of life—family, village life, and national identity—allows understanding the Vietnamese and their literature. Within this context, one of the best ways to study another culture is by reading the expression of that culture, literature, but to fully understand subtle signifiers that are embedded into the text, one must also create spaces to understand the culture.
The text material from Bates’ and Daniels’ Cultural Anthropology helped contextualize the literature. The students’ literary studies began with a collection of short stories, Behind the Red Mist, written by Vietnamese authors who live in Vietnam in a homogeneous culture. These stories are about traditional life, the relationship between people and land, family and village. Other stories in the collection are written by Vietnamese of the diaspora who out of necessity have learned to adjust to cultures other than their own. Their stories mediate the struggle between the traditional world view of maintaining the life balance that their Confucian yin and yang principles require and the loneliness and feeling of alienation of living outside Vietnam. Students also read about the Gullah people in Patricia Jones–Jackson’s When Roots Die, as well as in an oral history collection, Voices of Carolina Slave Children. Jones– Jackson’s study of the precarious situation of sea island life and the tenacity of the Gullah people’s resolve to hold onto their land is remarkable. The Vietnamese and Gullah people have managed to retain their cultural identity despite cultural pollution, whether the intrusion is local, in the case of the Gullah, or global, in the case of the Vietnamese.
Culture, then, is expressed through characteristics of a particular group. Culture embodies a group’s tastes which include art, music, literature, language, religion, and philosophy. These tastes become expressions of a culture’s world view and, in the case of the Gullah, through their unique language, which has wound its way into American English through the adoption of words and idioms, such as “goober” (peanut), “gumbo” (okra), “do de ’fect to you” (put a hex on you), “out de light” (night time,) and “dayclean” (daybreak) (Gareth n.p.). Other expressions of Gullah culture are found in basket weaving, songs, story telling, literature, and belief systems. Cultural expressions of the Vietnamese people who live in Vietnam, as well as their influences upon the culture through the Vietnamese diaspora have also crossed into the American mainstream.
Cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz borrows from Max Weber’s idea that “man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun” (5). Geertz explains that studying a culture always involves a “thick description” (14), which he likens to peeling the layers of an onion, and that “as interworked systems of constructable signs [. . .] culture is not a power, something to which social events, behaviors, institutions, or processes can be casually attributed; it is a context [emphasis added], something within which they can be intelligently—that is, thickly—described” (14). The concept of a thick description demonstrates why the definition of culture and reading about cultures (especially through literature) is always complicated and ever evolving and reshaping itself but remains always contextualized.
We also introduced students to the historian Gene Wise, whose method of historiography calls attention to what he terms “explanation forms.” Wise cautions readers to be aware that texts “offer explanation of their structure and behavior—to show how they are put together, how they respond to stress, how and when they may change, how they respond to this situation and that [. . .] in American historical–cultural studies’” (xi). This method of inquiry is certainly applicable to the study of a culture’s productions. Wise recommends three steps to careful analyses of history. First, one should read the text in question, employing a close literary analysis inside the text. Second, one should step outside the text and connect to the surrounding world and lives. Third, one should move back into the text to check how outside realities compare to or affect the constructed reality inside (114). Wise goes further, stating that “that book [. . .] is a form of human behavior, acts of a particular person [author] putting a particular construction on reality. The inquisitive reader is therefore asked to discover the human choices that led to this distinctive construction of reality” (364).
Culture critic Stephen Greenblatt suggests that readers ask a series of questions about any given text, questions we suggest our students should apply to their own reading:
• What kinds of behavior, what models of practice, does this work seem to enforce?
• Why might readers at a particular time and place find this work compelling?
• Are there differences between [the reader’s] values and the values implicit in the work [that the reader is reading]?
• Upon what social understandings does the work depend?
• Whose freedom of thought or movement might be constrained implicitly by this work?
• What are the larger social structures with which these particular acts of praise or blame might be connected? (226)
Finally, Greenblatt states that “if any explorations of a particular culture will lead to a heightened understanding of a work of literature produced within that culture, so too a careful reading of a work of literature will lead to a heightened understanding of the culture within which it was produced” (227).
We challenged our students to learn about two cultures that to Americans seem at once strange and yet familiar. In the case of Vietnamese culture, most Americans have been exposed to it only through a recent war. However, reading Vietnamese literature presents a pathway to learn about a people whose culture is much older than ours, a culture that has much to teach us about Southeast Asia and its people. In the case of Gullah culture, we are certain that students found much that was already familiar, as many of their cultural expressions (such as the folk tales of Uncle Remus) have found their way into mainstream American culture. The Gullah people are fortunate in several ways but most fortunate because their initial isolation on the South Carolina Sea Islands has helped them preserve their culture. Although mainstream American culture encroaches steadily, the Gullah people are actively involved in preserving their culture. Our students were able to learn about a people whose culture comes from an African heritage that is much older than theirs, yet claims its unique space in American culture. Culture, then, gives people a sense of belonging; it marks them as “Vietnamese,” or “Gullah,” or even “Vietnamese–American,” or “African–American.”
Developing Teaching Strategies With Literature
Culture critic Edward Hall, who agrees with Geertz about the importance of context, states that in interpreting meaning in language, “the problem lies not in the linguistic code but in the context, which carries varying proportions of the meaning. Without context, the code is incomplete since it encompasses only part of the message” (86). As our students studied the theories and methodologies of cultural anthropology and cultural studies that we have discussed in this paper, they became much more comfortable, i.e., contextualized, with reading the literature and more confident about their analysis of the literature because we provided them with the tools to do so.
We divided readers into groups of three to four students and asked them to analyze the assigned stories, using the concepts of cultural anthropology and culture studies. Each group was given a series of prompts to direct them. At least two or three groups were assigned the same story but were given different prompts. This way students were able to discern how one story could be analyzed from several perspectives. After they had time to discuss the story among themselves and formulate their responses, we then opened the discussion to the entire class.
In the collection of Vietnamese stories, Behind the Red Mist, the short story “A Sigh Through the Laburnums” addresses the practice of infanticide. As readers from a western culture who abhor the idea that the female child is worthless and a burden to her mother, we asked our students to explore their reactions to the story by recognizing their own culture shock and ethnocentric responses. Once these reactions were recognized, we then asked them to apply the concepts of cultural relativism to the story and, in the case of female infanticide, if cultural relativism applied. Using the same story, we asked another group of students to think about Edward Hall’s statement that “ultimately, what makes sense (or not) is irrevocably culturally determined and depends heavily on the context in which the evaluation is made” (214). We then asked students to apply that idea to the story.
In Voices of Carolina Slave Children, we asked one group to address the fact that these oral histories come from the WPA project of the 1930s, decades after the institution of slavery, the main subject of the stories. Historian Gene Wise indicates that “history [is] constructed. If we can see such work as people’s reconstruction of their past, not the past recaptured, then we can admit that a book [oral history] happens in the mind as well as in libraries” (78). We asked our students to question how the memory of slavery might change, that is, to be a reconstruction versus a recapturing of those memories. Another prompt asked the group to consider that “an important part of understanding a different culture is learning how things are organized and how one goes about learning them in that culture. That is not possible if one persists in using the learning models handed down in one’s own culture” (Hall 123). We asked students what steps they would take as an outsider of Gullah culture to ensure an understanding beyond a superficial response. We asked them to think about barriers and to consider what strategies they might use to surmount them.
The responses to these prompts in group discussion were thoughtful and substantive, and students felt more confident with their responses precisely because we gave them the tools to deconstruct the literature in meaningful ways. In fact, approximately the first half of the course was spent familiarizing students with the foundational material that prepared them for reading the literature during the latter part of the course. Materials included formal presentations and lectures about culture theory and methodologies, films depicting the culture students were studying, and open discussion among students and professors. Once the foundation was laid, students then read the literature.
Students began their semester–long assignment, the collaborative writing project, early in the course. Although it was not a requirement, we strongly encouraged students to select someone from the partner class and to identify early in the semester which culture they were most interested in. By beginning early, they were able to read widely and constantly inform their work with material as their learning curve ascended. Aside from the primary and secondary library sources, lectures and presentations were readily available on the course Web site for students to download study material, directions for writing the research paper, course syllabi, and scheduling changes. Students quickly became comfortable with both of us, and they invariably approached either of us for advice or to schedule a conference
Identifying the Benefits of Cross–Disciplinary Learning
Designing these cross–disciplinary courses has had some surprising results. We were confident from the inception of the idea that teaching these courses would be a challenge, but we both admit that we had no idea the project would be so much fun—and such hard work. The time that we have invested in designing the course so that our students could understand the cross–disciplinary nature of the subjects was enormous. One of us had not team taught before, and the other had a brief, awkward experience at another institution. We simply did not know what to expect, and we understood that team teaching could not be for everyone. We were not even sure if team teaching was meant for us or whether we were a good mix. Yet, the idea of collaborating and practicing cooperation in front of our students, who would in turn use us for role models when it came time to collaborate with their own partners, appealed to us. One happy aspect we discovered about each other is that we both very much enjoyed learning new ideas from the other’s area of expertise, reading new books, and experimenting with new ideas. This openness to new learning models may be taken for granted among university professors, but we all know colleagues who are in various stages of burnout. Collaborating has given us renewed energy in the classroom and a new vision about what teaching and scholarship can become when it is shared.
Listening to Feedback in the Student Survey
At the end of our first semester, we administered a qualitative assessment survey which asked students to assess the collaborative, cross–disciplinary nature of the courses and to reflect on their learning experience. Out of seventeen respondents, all but three students reported that the experience was positive; all agreed that they would recommend the courses to others. One student reported about the collaborative writing project— sometimes not a popular idea among students—that “even though there are drawbacks, a partner brings new ideas and may clarify your writing.” Another reported finding “significance in learning different cultures and not looking at these cultures ethnocentrically.” Another student indicated enjoyment in “reading from the actual cultures, instead of just reading an anthropologist’s view of the culture.” Another reported benefiting “from group work in the form of discussing books and bringing ideas together.” Another said that “the English course allowed me to use what I already know to learn anthropology easier.” And another said, “It has been a while since I have taken an English class, so it was a pleasure to have a little refreshment about grammar.” One student expressed misgivings about having to write a research paper in an introductory class (cultural anthropology). Another student felt deserving of credit for both classes. These issues were legitimate concerns that we knew needed to be addressed before the next semester.
Were we, in fact, good role models for the collaborative learning method? “We learned from both instructors. Both are culturally learned,” wrote a student. Another observed that “Renate had actually been to Vietnam, which makes her instructor content valid. Molly also has traveled extensively to many countries, which makes her lessons very interesting and informative.” Another reported, “I liked the team– teaching because I could go to both teachers for advice on the research paper.” Finally, a student summed up the course this way: “The stories people tell can say a lot about their culture and be more interesting than straight textbook reading.”
We asked one final question of our students: “Would you like to see other courses taught in the cross–disciplinary way?” We had some interesting suggestions:
• English and history
• History and foreign language of one country
• The sciences
• Native American studies and history
• Two separate cultures affected by war
• Civil War customs and literature
• Math and geology
The primary goal that we wrote into our grant proposal was that we wanted our students to see connections between disciplines, for them to be able to decompartmentalize the learning experience and learn to think connectively. We believe their response to this last question demonstrates that this goal has been met.
Acting on the Instructor Self–Assessment
Acknowledging Student Concerns: Teaching the literature and culture of two groups affected both the introduction to cultural anthropology and English composition courses in many ways. Some students were not sure which culture to research until they had been exposed to both. This hesitancy resulted in a time constraint for students who were unsure as to which culture to research. Other students picked their culture quickly. We also felt that just as we were getting into one culture, moving beyond introductory material to the more detailed, substantive material, we had to stop and move to the other. There is so much material to cover, so many ways to present such a wide variety of material in the form of lectures, presentations, films, and literature that we found ourselves adjusting the schedule several times to accommodate additional materials we wished to include. We concluded that we need to offer one culture for each set of courses. We therefore arranged our course offerings for the following semester in the form of two sections, one for each culture.
We were also concerned that one student misunderstood the research paper requirement and that two others expressed concerns about sitting in one class for two courses yet only receiving credit for the course for which he or she selected. Although these students were in the minority, these are valid concerns that we needed to address quickly and conclusively before the next semester. One student in particular felt sure that if the classes had not been taught in the cross–disciplinary manner, he or she would not be required to write a research paper, what he or she felt to be an English requirement.
Applying Experience to the Next Course: At the beginning of the new semester, we made sure that students understood that the research paper requirement is normally applicable for both courses, whether the courses are taught together or separately. We explained the writing requirements in the previous semester’s syllabi, announced the requirement at the beginning of the course, and redoubled our efforts to be clear about this requirement.
Ironically, an unexpected mix-up occurred with scheduling for the following semester that we have decided to use to our advantage. One set of courses is scheduled at the same time (the way we requested), but the other set is scheduled at a different time during the same day. We felt that the inadvertent physical separation of one of the courses has become an opportunity to further test the optimum way to teach these courses in the cross–disciplinary fashion. We are keeping the time–compatible classes physically together the way we did the previous semester. The other classes are taught separately, and we visit each other’s classes as guest lecturer when the material necessarily crosses the disciplines. Students in these separate classes are aware of the partner class, and we are encouraging mixing study partners. However, we wonder if, because these students do not meet together at all, they may be reticent about working with a study partner from the other course.
We hope to counteract the unexpected separation of the classes through the Web site that links the two courses. Students from both sets of courses access their Web sites often. We have added a chat option and periodically announce times the chat room is open for real–time discussion, encouraging cross–disciplinary learning that way.
Changing Texts: Other changes we have made are textual in nature. The text for the cultural anthropology course has been changed to Barbara Miller’s Cultural Anthropology, and students are reading additional literature, such as Charles Colcock’s Gullah Folktales of the Georgia Coast and Charles Chestnutt’s Conjure Tales and Stories of the Color Line. Both these books are written in the Gullah language, which is initially somewhat difficult to read, but we hope that the extra time that will be required to read and discuss these stories will give students a chance to digest this new material at a more thoughtful pace. Because students are now introduced to the Gullah language in their readings, we are keeping the film Daughters of the Dust for language orientation. We opted to keep Voices of Carolina Slave Children this semester, but we have identified the text as somewhat problematic because we wonder about the compiler’s motive for selecting an unusual spate of happy perspectives.
In the Vietnamese section of the courses, we have added Gary and Monique Lockhart’s translation of social realism, The Light of the Capital. Its three stories of 1930s Vietnam bear witness to the cruelties of French colonialism upon the peasant population. Students seemed to really enjoy social realism of the 1930s, so we are currently attempting to locate other literature of the same period. We have also added Nguyen Kien’s The Unwanted: A Memoir of Childhood, an autobiography of an Amerasian. We have completed the reading list with Andrew Pham’s Catfish and Mandala, in which a Vietnamese–American returns to his native Vietnam to offer his view as a “Viet Kieu” (Foreign Vietnamese).
Conclusion
Students are resilient and open to new ways of thinking. Our courses are much talked about on our campus; some students have even signed up for the course which teaches the culture they are most interested in, a choice they did not have the previous semester. We hope that the concept will catch on, if not in the formal way we have done it, then at least in smaller yet significant ways that promise students the opportunity for cross–disciplinary critical thinking.
Works Cited
Bates, Daniel G., and Elliot M. Franklin. Cultural Anthropology. 2nd Ed. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1999.
Boas, Franz. The Limitations of the Comparative Method of Anthropology. 1896. New York: Free P, 1966.
Building a Diverse and Respectful Campus Community. Kent, OH: Kent State University Diversity Incentive Funds, 2001–02.
Darwin, Charles. 1859. On the Origin of Species. New York: Antheneum, 1967.
Daughters of the Dust. Prod. Julie Dash. Geechee Girl Productions, 1991. Douglas, Mary. Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology. New York: Pantheon P, 1970.
Durand, Maurice M., and Nguyen Tran Huan. An Introduction to Vietnamese Literature. Trans. D. M. Hawke. New York: Columbia UP, 1985.
Family Across the Sea. Prod. Tim Carrier. SCETV Commission, 1990.
Gareth, Virginia Mixon. Gullah fuh Oohnuh (Gullah for You). Orangeburg, S.C.: Sandlapper Publishing, 1997.
Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic, 1973.
Greenblatt, Stephen. “Culture.” Critical Terms for Literary Studies. Eds. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990. 225–232.
Hall, Edward. Beyond Culture. New York: Doubleday, 1981.
Hanh, Thich Nhat. A State of Earth and Other Legends of Vietnam. Berkeley: Parallax P, 1993.
Harris, Marvin. “India’s Sacred Cow.” The Social World. Ed. Dan Robertson. New York: Worth Publishers, 1981.
Jamieson, Neil. Understanding Vietnam. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993.
Jones–Jackson. When Roots Die: Endangered Traditions on the Sea Islands. Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 1987.
Linton, Ralph. The Study of Man: an Introduction. New York: Appleton, 1936.
Morgan, Henry Lewis. Ancient Society 1877. New York: World, 1963.
Rhyne, Nancy, ed. Voices of Carolina Slave Children. Orangeburg, S.C.: Sandlapper, 1999.
Rose, Willie Lee. Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment. London: Oxford UP, 1964.
Thai, Ho Anh. Behind the Red Mist. Trans. Nguyen Qui Duc. Ed. Wayne Karlin. Williamantic, CT: Curbstone P, 1988.
Turner, Lorenzo. Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1949.
When Heaven and Earth Changed Places. Prod. Oliver Stone. Warner Productions, 1993.
Wise, Gene. American Historical Explanations: A Strategy for Grounded Inquiry. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1980.
Biographies
Renate W. Prescott holds a Ph.D. in American Culture and is the English Coordinator at Kent State University—Geauga. She teaches English composition courses, Vietnam War literature, and American culture, Vietnamese literature, technology and American culture, and the great books courses. Prescott was in Quang Tri Province in Vietnam in the summer of 2001 with the D. O. V. E. Fund (Development of Vietnam Endeavors), whose humanitarian efforts built several schools, an emergency medical clinic, and provided a village with wells for clean water. She may be reached at rprescott@geauga.kent.edu.
Molly Sergi holds an M.A. in history and teaches history, anthropology, and sociology at the Kent State University—Geauga. Sergi has traveled extensively in Europe and the Near East.