Eyes Open and Uncover author Ceri Jones joined us for a webinar focusing on how best to present and explore cultural topics with secondary students, looking at ways to encourage learners to be curious and critical of the world around them, and understand different customs and communities.
Firstly, Ceri explored different cultural themes, asking: what is culture? and examining responses from participants. A succinct summary emerged to think of culture as a way of life, with age and geographical locations all playing a part. Another important theme highlighted was how the process of making connections between cultures is very helpful for students through their various stages of development, and to encourage students to think of this in their own context and environment. A good method for getting students to think about culture is to ask them to select global/universal themes, such as food, technology, music, festivals, families for example.
Focusing on the topic of food, Ceri highlighted the theory that large brands which have a local and global appeal adopt a ‘glocal’ strategy combination, to service both local and global communities, and encouraged participants to think about their local variation on a classic dish, such as a fast food burger-how does this differ in you local area? Ceri also drew attention to the way in which food is delivered, as a method for expanding a conversation topic to all learners, with each individual likely to have an experience or an opinion on this.
One task for students could be: research the top 5 most popular foods delivered across different cultures, how do these compare?
Ceri decided to focus further into the topic of food delivery, concentrating on the working life of the dabbawala in India, and how important these deliveries are to people across cities every day. Encouraging students to collaborate in groups and compare their different ideas of food and how it can be transported is a useful method for opening up new cultural ideas to learners.
Then, Ceri considered how different foods could be brought together to expose people to various cultures around the world, and the idea of what a typical British food could be was brought into the discussion. This was particularly useful for highlighting how different people have different theories, as many countries can have cross-cultural food influences.
To conclude the webinar, Ceri provided insights into how discussing culture is an interesting way to engage students and improve motivation by drawing from their own experiences, with familiarity as the key for maintaining interesting research and language discussions.
As cross-cultural symbols and icons needs careful management, this can be explained to young teenage learners as they will benefit from learning the boundaries of their culture, and how this is helpful for understanding others.
Watch the full recording below to see and hear examples in action.
Read Ben Goldstein’s article about Global Competency, if this piece has inspired you to find out more!