Personal Reflection
by: Stephen Birk
Challenges come in all shapes and
forms. My life challenge is to teach and understand people from different
cultures and backgrounds. I have recently been teaching English to foreign
immigrants the past couple of months at the Columbus Literacy Council. This
experience has challenged me to think in new perspectives and really branch out
of the way I usually do things or would expect things to be done.
When I first started at the Columbus
Literacy Council, I did not really know what to expect. I was thinking that I
might teach a few people from Africa and a few people from Asia. I was sorted
into teaching the grouping of students in level 2 with another volunteer. There
are 5 different levels of students being taught at St. Matthias Church, where
we all gather to meet. The five levels are; basic, level 1, level 2, level 3,
and level 4. After a student passes level 4, they are deemed as competent as an
8th grader would be in English. Level 2 was basically around 4th-5th
grade English by our American educational standards. This in itself was a little bit daunting at
first but as I eased into the class it became less intimidating. The people I
got to work with were very friendly but sometimes hard to understand. I had to
get used to hearing words pronounced sometimes very differently. Their
pronunciations were getting in the way of their understandability. As the class
kept advancing it was easier to pick up on their accents and easier to deduce
what they were saying. Another difficulty I encountered was when I tried to
explain a concept or idea that may have been higher than the student’s English
competency. This was frustrating at first, but I realized that higher level
concepts were probably not of the most importance to some of the students and I
decided to deal with just Basic English unless otherwise asked for a deeper
explanation of things. These challenges have helped me be more aware that
everyone learns at a different speed and may not understand everything you tell
them a first time. Every culture and mother language has different linguistic
variants that you need to realize and adjust to. This volunteering/teaching
experience has given me some insight on how to more efficiently communicate
cross culturally.
There are many differences in
American culture and the culture of the immigrants at the Columbus Literacy
Council. I have worked with and taught people from Ghana, Togo, Somalia,
Myanmar, and China. These students have all been very unique and culturally different.
The African cultures seem to have the most relation to each other. I was
talking with Douglas, from Ghana, and Ahmed, from Somalia, and they were both
talking about whenever they would eat food in Africa it would always be fresh.
If they slaughtered a cow, they would take the entire cow and pass it out to
everyone in their village, family, or grouping. They would never save any for
the next day, the food would all be eaten that night or be thrown away by
morning. This was the same for fruit, if they picked any fruit in the morning,
they would share it and not even save any til the afternoon. This concept kind
of shook my thinking for a second because I was so used to going to the grocery
store and coming back and putting lots of things in the refrigerator to store
for weeks at a time. This culturally different idea let me see into the African
culture briefly and it was a truly amazing experience. There are vastly
different experiences in Africa though. The married couple from Togo had a
different experience to share. They lived in a nice home with most amenities
that we have in America. They had a computer with internet and even a phone. I
hadn’t realized that African countries were becoming more globalized and
starting to use the advanced technology that we have in more 1st
world countries. I have also learned that tribes mostly rule the lands in
Africa. Africa’s centralized government isn’t that strong yet and is sometimes
corrupt. As explained to me by the married couple from Togo, there are all sorts
of religious affiliations in Africa, which I had not really even thought about.
These cultural differences helped me understand a bit more about my students
and what their backgrounds were like.
Many of my ideas and “truths” get
challenged every day. This volunteering experience has taught me that whatever
I think is true one day, may not be true the next. Everyone has a different
story and experiences things differently so there is no universal “truths” in
my eyes, unless you count math. Also I didn’t realize there was so much
cultural diversity spread throughout what I thought to be the same kind of
culture, such as the African culture. I believed that almost every in Africa
lived fairly similar to each other but this was certainly not the case. My world
views have also been expanded with all the stories I hear from my student’s
home countries or their homelands. This cultural assortment of people has
really challenged my ideas of how people normally live. Some of these students
walk a fair distance to get to class or some of them have 15 brothers and 6
sisters. Their lives are all but “normal” and I love learning about each and
every one of them, they have taught me to never assume something just by your
looks.
Overall the beginning of my
experience was a little intimidating but I got to grow and learn with my
students. Volunteering at the Columbus Literacy Council is a great experience
and anyone getting into ESL should definitely consider starting there if they
want to get their feet wet. I can’t wait to learn more things from this
Master’s program and be able to delve deeper into instructing these students.
Life is a bunch of experiences combined and this experience has really brought
to life another way of viewing the world and has opened myself up to want to
experience more new things and ways of living. The diversity of this earth will
never cease to amaze me and will always be in the spotlight of my curiosity.
No comments:
Post a Comment