Putting the "E" in JET:
Culture in the Classroom
1. When teaching about an event from another culture’s perspective such as New Year’s Day, would you recommend picking a specific culture, or look at a variety of different ones to give a broader view? Or would you just stick to what your own country does?
This heavily depends on the context of the class itself. The key question is: What do you want the students to have learned by the end of the lesson? If you want them to get a sense of all the different ways an event is celebrated around the world, then you would go for a broader approach, with less depth of information for each culture. If you want the students to learn about a specific culture in detail, however, then you would only focus on that culture, but in much greater depth. If you choose to have your lesson focus on one culture, the next question is: Am I comfortable teaching about another culture? If yes, then go for it; but if not (which is perfectly reasonable), then I would suggest teaching about your own country. (You could also use this question to help you decide between a broader or narrower focus too, to be honest – the most important thing, in my opinion, is that the students are learning about other cultures, full stop.)
Best of luck with your lessons!
2) How do you recommend incorporating more culture into lessons for ALTs who don’t have a lot of say in the classroom or are told the lesson plan last minute? Would you suggest bringing it up as a suggested separate lesson to the textbook lessons?
If you don’t have a lot of say in what goes on in the classroom, you may or may not be successful in asking for a separate lesson. It’s certainly worth asking, particularly around the time of well-known cultural events like New Year’s or Halloween, but just be prepared to have your suggestion knocked back. (And don’t feel bad if that does happen – it will likely be for some reason out of your control, like a teacher feeling under pressure to finish the curriculum on time.) If you don’t have any luck getting time dedicated to a cultural lesson, there are still ways you can bring more culture into the classroom. I think I mentioned in the presentation that you can try incorporating references to cultures or events in worksheets and practice sentences/dialogues, but I’m not sure if you are the one making those sorts of materials or planning model conversations.
I do have two other suggestions, though, based on things I have done in the past. The first is a slightly more aggressive approach, which may or may not work based on your teachers. If we are teaching about a culture or event that I know something about, I sometimes just jump in once the JTE has finished talking and give the class a small bit of extra information (just a short sentence or two). Some of my teachers have been fine with this, but not all; if you go for this approach, you really need to be able to judge your teachers’ reactions to this to check you’re not stepping on any toes by interrupting their lessons. Use this approach with caution.
The second suggestion I have, however, has never caused any problems, and has been an effective way to teach students about culture without causing any waves. While I’m walking around helping students with their work (either individual or group work), I will share any relevant cultural information with them directly. This works especially well if you can catch them already talking about a cultural difference – but even if they aren’t, I often just chime in with “In Australia, we do XYZ instead,” which gets them interested. As an extra benefit, this approach helps me feel more useful in the classroom, too. I hope that this helps a little bit. Keep pushing to bring culture into the classroom! Best of luck.
3) Sometimes I use PowerPoint presentation to teach students about cultural events around the world but often the language is a bit too hard to teach. Would you recommend coordinating with a JTE to partially translate some slides to make the presentation easier to understand? Best regards
I would absolutely recommend co-ordinating with a JTE, although the amount of Japanese used in the presentation should (in my opinion) differ based on the age level and academic level of the students. What I quite often do with cultural PowerPoint presentations is include the Japanese translation of key words with the English word – that way students are still seeing and hearing the English, but they have the benefit of being able to understand it straight away, which cuts down on explanation time. If you don’t want to clutter up the slides, you could also have your JTE translate important or difficult parts of your presentation (but definitely co-ordinate with them beforehand – they are English teachers, not professional interpreters). You could also co-ordinate with a JTE to create a list of important words and phrases used in the slideshow, with the English and Japanese side-by-side. I’m so pleased to hear that you are teaching students about cultural events, and I hope that these suggestions help. Best of luck!
4) I was interested in this presentation because teaching about other cultures is important but I guess I was wondering if there are more things we should be aware of when teaching culture so we don’t misrepresent anyone or any group. Like trying to avoid superficiality? Is that something important when we’re just teaching it at schools where students probably will never interact with that culture outside of school in their lives. Intercultural competence is important so how can we teach that while being mindful of the fact that when we are teaching it, we are explaining something that we haven’t always experienced ourselves?
These are great questions, and definitely things I have thought about myself. Obviously we don’t want to perpetuate stereotypes, so I think the first step when teaching about a culture we aren’t personally familiar with is to do some research to work out what is true about that culture (even if it seems like a superficial generalisation), and what is an untrue or harmful stereotype. I completely understand wanting to avoid misrepresenting a person or group. I’m from Australia, and when I first arrived in Japan, I was really hesitant to talk about First Nations Australians and their cultures in class, as I’m of European descent. However, I slowly realised that if I didn’t talk about these peoples, no one would, and the students would never get to learn about these wonderful cultures. In the end, I decided to talk about First Nations Australians in class, but only where I could be confident of sharing accurate information.
Unfortunately due to time constraints I had to cut the following information from my presentation, but hopefully it will help you understand more what I meant by teaching culture to foster intercultural competence and the benefits it brings, even to students who may never experience another culture. Intercultural competence, according to the website I took the diagram I used in the slideshow from (https://www.monash.edu/arts/
One of the easiest ways to overcome these miscommunications is to be aware of other cultures that exist, which is where we come in. Even if students never experience a particular culture in person, they may meet someone with a similar way of thinking as that particular cultural group – and the awareness that such cultures exist can help them understand the other person better, and think of a way to overcome the communication barrier. It may help to think of teaching students awareness of other cultures, rather than about the cultures themselves, in order to see the value in teaching about culture. I hope you find this answer helpful, and that it’s clear enough despite how theoretical the second half ended up being. Best of luck with your lessons!