Teaching culture beyond nationalist boundaries ... - CERCLL

Teaching culture beyond nationalist
boundaries: Stereotyping and
national identities
Peter Sayer
The University of Texas at San Antonio
Bryan Meadows
Fairleigh Dickinson University

Controversial statements as a casein-point
for intercultural awareness
• Controversial incident on BBC show
• The response: Discourse generated by
controversy
• Analyze textual series: Nationalist
stereotypes and humor
• Incident as case-in-point for intercultural
teaching

Top Gear
• Automotive show produced by
the British Broadcasting
Corporation (BBC)
• Viewed in 100+ countries
• 1,000,000 viewers
• Won 2010 National TV Awards
for “Most Popular Factual
Show”
• Three hosts discuss, test, and
evaluate cars using abrasive
humor

The Mexican car
controversy
• January 2011 Top Gear reviews
the Mastretta
• Excerpt rebroadcast in Mexican
media and blogs
• Today: Look at the original clip
• Shed light on the role of
nationalism in shaping
commonplace conceptions of
'culture'.
• What are the implications for
teaching intercultural awareness
in language education

January 2011 episode of Top Gear
(see handout)

Analysis
A critical language pedagogy approach (Norton & Toohey 2004; Osborn
2006) in order to...
...provide an account of how nationalism gives structure to the
discourse that develops surrounding the TV episode.
…in so doing, shed light on the prominent position of nationalism to
shape commonplace understandings of culture – in that it circulates
covertly as the commonsense.

Data for Analysis
Three inter-related texts:
1. the TopGear episode
2. BBC public pronouncement, and
3. online discussions regarding the episode.

Nationalism
Post-structuralist turn to the social sciences has recast
'nationalism' as an...
• ideology of social organization that privileges a global
patchwork of discrete nations, each one internally coherent
and externally distinct from one another (Billig 1995, Kedourie 2000,
Meadows 2010).

Text One: How does nationalist ideology
shape the TopGear exchange
Two premises are at play in the TopGear exchange:
1. one may organize humanity into discrete unique 'nations'
2. one may map such nationalized characteristics to nonhuman
objects

Text Two: A defense of the nationalist
commonsense
The BBC public pronouncement not only takes up the
nationalist premises, but acts to defend them.
Rhetorical organization:
1. disparaging remarks about individuals is NOT okay
2. disparaging remarks about groups of people (‘nations’) IS
okay
3. Not only is this okay, we take such acts as characteristic of
our ‘nation’.
(i.e., nationalize the very humor itself.)

Text Three: Online discussions keep
the nationalist premises intact
Line of argument: Nationalist accuracy
1. If it's true then it's not slander
2. But Top Gear statements were untrue!
Both sides grounded in referentialism (Hill 2008)
Line of argument: Personal intention
1. they meant no harm!
2. intention or not, stereotypes are harmful
Both sides grounded in personalism (Hill 2008)

Analysis conclusions
Two nationalist premises give structure to the discourse.
Notably, the basic premises of nationalism are never
challenged.
The parallels to racist humor are undeniable. (The Top Gear episode
as a parallel case-in-point.)
Next, we will re-frame the episode and resulting discourse for
the pedagogical potential that lies underneath.

Incident as case-in-point for
intercultural teaching
A nationalist worldview—nationalist in the sense of
being based around the unit of the nation-state—
imposes a solid bond between language, culture,
and nationality. A process that casts doubt on this
worldview relaxes those bonds and invites us to
reassess the connection between a target language
and target community. (Ryan 2006: 27)
How can we use the Top Gear controversy to get
students to think about the underlying assumptions
of national stereotypes

The “targets” of L2 teaching
• Language = Culture
• Culture = Nation
• Language = Culture = Nation
• Target L = Target C = Target N
• 1 : 1 : 1 that glosses multilingualism
and multiculturalism

The “targets” of L2 teaching
• Dissatisfaction with both “Food & Festivities”
and “National Norms” approach to culture
• “Othering” and “essentializing” of (target)
cultures in language teaching
• McKay & Bokhorst-Heng (2008): Sociallysensitive
EIL pedagogy
• Dervin (2011): A dialogic engagement that
goes beyond “cultural essences”

Culture as sociocultural practice
• Street: Not what culture is, but rather what
culture does
• “Culture is an active process of meaning
making and contest over definition, including
its own definition. This, then, is what I mean
by arguing that culture is a verb” (Street,
1993, p. 25).
• So… shift students’ view towards cultures
and languages and nations as social
practices

Languaculture
• Languaculture (Agar, 1994, from Friedrich’s linguaculture).
• Risager (2006): Languaculture recognizes both bounded
nature of language and culture, but also that they are
elements that do not belong to each other.
• Example: A German lesson on the Tour de France taught in
Denmark.
• “In foreign- and second-language teaching a multidimensional
linguistic and cultural contact will, in all
circumstances, be involved, one in which sex, social class,
life experiences and mastery of language will be able to
play a role” (Risager, 2006, p. 24).

Other approaches to L2 culture
• Lazarton (2003): , students discussed local laws
about being governor, drug use and drug
trafficking, and Catholic religious practices. In each
case, the cultural content was less about national
cultures than about aspects of (sub)cultural
practices of particular social groups.
• Roberts et al. (2001) propose a pedagogy that
casts the students as ethnographers.
• Teacher’s role: not to teach culture, but rather to
problematize it

Teaching culture beyond nationalist
boundaries: Stereotyping and
national identities
Peter Sayer
The University of Texas at San Antonio
peter.sayer@utsa.edu
Bryan Meadows
Fairleigh Dickinson University
meadowsb@fdu.edu