I must admit, I am having a blast working with these culture classes. It is especially fun because David, the new teacher has taken over my two oral English classes so now I am down to only teaching 12 hours of culture class a week (6 classes - each class is two hours). I only teach weeks 2-14 so that is not a whole lot of time to really cover all of the English-speaking countries and their cultures. I am taking it as more of an introductory course with the goal being to learn a little about some different countries, think critically about our own culture, investigate some cultural differences and, hopefully, have some fun with some games, skits, music and debates.

Although it is more work to design my own syllabus and framework for the course, it is also way more fun. Each week I tackle a different country and try to balance some of the harder information like politics, history, religion and government with some fun pictures of places to visit, food (of course) and random trivia. For example, they really liked hearing music from bagpipes, watching some Irish dancing, contemplating the existence of "Nessie" and watching people kiss the "Blarney Stone." Hilarious.

We've covered a few different countries so far so this week I decided to talk about basic cultural differences between China and Western countries. I get really excited about this topic because it's so interesting and I knew the students would like it too. We started off with some group work and discussion questions:

1) List the top three societal values in China and the West (in your opinion).
2) What are some things you like about China and some things you don't like? Why?
3) What are some things you like about Western culture and some things you don't like? Why?
4) Do you think your culture will change significantly by the time you have children? If so, how?
5) In your opinion, what are the three biggest cultural differences between China and the West?

The conversations that we had from those questions were awesome and could have taken up both class periods. I was impressed with how detailed and deep some of the students were willing to go and that made it really fun.

For the second half of the class I gave each group a picture that was designed by an artist named Yang Liu. She grew up in China but them moved to Europe and has used her artistic ability and mixed background to examine cultural differences in an exhibit entitled "East meets West". For the following pictures I asked each group or pair to explain the meaning and choose to agree or disagree with the artist's representation. Sometimes it's so hard to define what's different between Western cultures and China - especially in another language so these pictures provided a really nice transition to a more complex discussion. Have a look for yourself and see what you think (Blue side is Western culture and the Red side is Chinese culture).

5 comments

1. Anonymous on September 28, 2010 at 3:21 PM

   these graphics really do an awesome job of visualizing the differences in culture, very cool!

    
2. Rebecca B on September 28, 2010 at 9:09 PM

   Very neat- I like the depiction of the differences in culuture overall. The only one I really disagree with is "on our travels." The stereotype of the Chinese tourist is always with a camera, is it not? It might not be completely true, but I believe both cultures see their travels "through the eye of the camera" more often than not.

    
3. Anonymous on March 29, 2016 at 2:40 PM

   Maybe its because I am not white but I am African American and my family ,social, and personal life more reflected that of what the eastern side depicted than it does the western.

    
4. Anonymous on February 25, 2020 at 8:33 PM

   Im Chinese and this is SO correct.

    
5. Anonymous on March 11, 2020 at 4:04 PM

   great job