Week 5 2/2/2021 Cultural Miscommunication

 Miscommunications can happen anywhere, any time.  For me, I don't even realize that it is a miscommunication until later.  In the moment, it is very frustrating because 2 people don't see eye to eye.  They often want to explain themselves, get angry, or give up and cut out that person, refusing to deal with them.  In even extreme cases, a miscommunication can end in death.  There is a book by Stephen R. Covey that is called 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.  One of those habits is to seek understanding before being understood. This can go a long way to avoid and dissolve misunderstandings.    

Add an entire new culture to the mix and you end up with even more misunderstandings.  Cultures are so different, that even a simple thing can turn into a misunderstanding.  A teacher with many backgrounds and cultures in their classroom will surely encounter misunderstandings.  It may be between 2 students, a parent and teacher, or student and teacher.  One way to be prepared is to get to know the different cultures and expectations in your classroom.  This may prevent some misunderstandings all together.  It can also help to resolve them before someone is upset or hurt.  I think a good idea would be to have discussions where the class can talk about things.  I would start by having the students each find a compliment to give to someone else.  As the discussion goes on, the teacher can ask the class all kinds of questions.  You can include "what is something that bothers you in our classroom?" This may be a time they can ask "why do we______ or why can't we ___________? Another idea is to have culture days in the classroom.  Each student can bring in their favorite traditional dish, or make a presentation about how they celebrate a holiday, or anything they want to share.  This teaches us that we are all different, so when differences arise, we can deal with them better.  

A funny story that relates to this topic happened to me recently.  I volunteer in the ESL classroom in a middle school.  Our class happens to be in the HomeEC room where they have a kitchen to teach home economic skills.  Every now and then the teachers does a cooking class with the ESL students.  Her plan was to make mini personal pizzas with the students.  She decided rather than making dough, to bring English muffins.  The students would put pizza sauce, pepperoni, and cheese on the English muffin and then heat it in the oven.  When she told the students about the cooking day they were going to have, the students were very confused.  They wanted to know why it was an "English" muffin, they thought it would be gross to make pizza on a muffin.  The teacher tried to explain that it wasn't a sweet muffin, but similar to pizza dough.  They still didn't understand why it was called an English muffin.  She tried to explain to them that it was just a name and it had nothing to do with learning English.  The students were still skeptical. The next day their skepticism vanished as they made little pizzas and ate them, and they were good!

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