Were the Goals of MMCE Accomplished?

Objective 1: Build a cooperative learning community so we can learn from each other and teach each other. (I, II)

Positive:

Participants wrote the following about group work in their MMCE evaluation forms:

• Ｔｈａｎｋｓ　ｔｏ　ｏｕｒ　ｇｒｏｕｐ　ｍｅｍｂｅｒｓ，　Ｉ　ａｂｌｅ　ｔｏ　ｅｎｊｏｙ　ＭＭＣＥ！Ｍｙ　Ｅｎｇｌｉｓｈ　ａｂｉｌｉｔｙ　ｉｓ　ｉｎｆｅｒｉｏｒ　ｔｏ　ｏｔｈｅｒ　ｓｔｕｄｅｎｔ．Ｂｕｔ　Ｉ　ｄｉｄ　ｍｙ　ｂｅｓｔ．
• I felt it was good class that we formed ourselves in groups of some country.

In Meetings 7,8,9, 13, & 14, MMCE was entirely group work. As the generally modestly high evaluation of these classes indicates, participants in this course seemed to enjoy group work and the camaraderie between group members was very good. Furthermore, groups for the most part were able to complete their tasks and the tasks called for cooperation among all participants.

Negative

Although there was time for members of a group to talk to their own members there was not enough time for participants to speak to members outside their group as the below quote indicates:

• What I think can be improved was that we had little chance to communicate with other groups. I know there are no time to discuss with every one, so if we had much time, I wanted to talk with other groups

Furthermore, sometimes students felt like I was talking too much and they wanted to do more group work.

• Please keep this in your mind , MMCEis not English conversation class , but many students want to have more time to speak the contents in English , and improve their English. SometimesMMCE seemed to be a teacher-centered , not students -centered.

Conclusion:

Overall, I think we built a fairly strong learning community. Although there were problems with MMCE sometimes being teacher-centered, the fact that participants wanted to talk with eachother more is very postive. The fact that they wanted to discuss the content more indicates that they had interest in the conten! One discovery I had was that all-class discussions do not work; group discussions will work well but they have to be planned carefully. A group discussion activity that is not thought out carefully by the facilitator can backfire. (EX: Although the Anbura and Leba cultural simulation activity was highly evaluated by some participants, because I did not think carefully enough beforehand about how the activity would be carried out, some people did not enjoy or understand the activity.) Why don't all-class discussions work? One obvious barrier is English but I believe this is not as big an obstacle as the latent image of the instructor as unquestionable authority figure that participants seemed to have. In the first meeting I said that we were all colearners but myself and the participants were not quite able to reach the same status as colearners.

Objective 2: Begin to understand the practice of multicultural education (V) (I realize now that I should have changed the word "practice"to "necessity".)

Conclusion: In the syllabus it was written that we would learn about multicultural education by practicing it. The main idea behind multicultural education is to respect individual differences and see those who have different cultural backgrounds as deserving of the same rights as the mainstream culture. Participants comments from the "Examining National Stereotypes" discussion seem to show that many gained an empathy for people of such countries like Kenya, Guatemala that they had not had before. Furthermore, the meeting where we talked about Cultural Relativism and National Stereotypes, MMCE members really seemed to understand the dangers of stereotypes:

I saw American TV, and it was terrible shock to me!! When we were watching TV, I though Japanese didn't like this. I understood American people had this stereotyp. But cutting fingers thecked glasses and seven to three hair are not common. After we saw Japanese TV (MechaMecha-iketeru), I was used to seeing this program. All members wear wigs. Afro, blonde hair, brown hair so on. And they put big noses. And their tension was very high!! For foreigner, they may think this is not true. I thought that we had different stereotypes each other.

Although we addressed the theme of not making hasty judgments about another culture(Meetings 7 - 10), we were never able to adequately address the topic of foreigners living in Japan. In the future, non-Japanese living in Japan should be the one of the sub-themes of the "Investigating National Stereotypes" discussion. Also, before the Invesitigating National Stereotypes discussion, it would be a good idea to call some foreign residents of Japan and have them speak of their experience living in this country. That will give us a chance to study multicultural education a little beforehand and also consider how homogeneous a society Japan really is.

Objective 3: Learn from our classmates about the cultures and countries they are studying ( I, IV )

Conclusion:I believe that this goal was met for the most part as the comments below indicate:

• We could know about many countries. I hardly knew about Guatemala, China, Kenya etc.
• At first, I have no knowledge of Guatemala. As this lecture was carried out, I could get many information of Guatemala and learn that different country have different values.
• I liked the class that talking about each country with each group members and a guest.
• And also, I learned many things about countries, especially Kenya, so I could broaden my world view, I think.
• I was able to examine a country of three countries (Western Samoa, New Zealand, Australia) in MMCE.
• We could know about many countries. I hardly knew about Guatemala, China, Kenya etc.

Since all members learned about countries through peer teaching activities, I felt that goal 3 was reached.

Objective 4: Understand the daily life, traditions, history, and culture of our countries of concentration. (III)

Consideration:

According to Omaggio-Hadley(2001), cultural studies can have the following pitfalls,

1. Cultural education is primarily "facts only" about the target culture(s). As a result, students are unprepared when they meet members of a target culture whose behavior is an exception to a generalization.
2. The information only approach tends to perpetuate stereotypes about the target culture rather then break stereotypes.
3. The subcultures of the target culture are not recognized.
4. Learners do not realize that they are looking at the target culture through the lens of their own cultural biases and not looking at the target culture through the viewpoint of a member.

MMCE conssisted of 7 groups studying 7 different countries and quite honestly it was difficult for me to keep up with all the groups at once. I thought that more than 5 members per group would be counterproductive and there were 36 members to begin with so I made seven groups. Because there were so many groups going in so many directions I struggled to encourage them to look beyond the random facts when analyzing countries and consider people's daily life and the continuos history of the culture. For example, in meeting 14 the CLGs had to consider the similarities and differences between the countries that they learned about. Only one group, England, considered the facts of different countries as more than just random pieces of information and were able to find similarities between England, Colombia, and New Zealand; they found that all three countries were composed of various ethnic groups. This indicates a weakness in the design of MMCE and not with the participants. I understand now how this flaw can be fixed:

1) Groups are assigned a country in the second meeting.

2) For the "Making Inferences about Other Cultures" (done in meeting 5 last year), groups will examine a picture from their country of concentration rather than their region of concentration. This means that the instructor will have to take his time to find "guests"who come from the countries in the pictures, can attend MMCE for two weeks and comes from a country that is not in the news much in Japan. As there are a lot of international students at Iwate University from many different countries, this is not impossible!

3) During the making inferences about other cultures exercise, CLGs will hear what the other CLGs have learned about the family in the picture and consider the similarities and differences.

4) When the guests come, CLGs should be encouraged to ask the guests about aspects of their daily lives in their home country and compare them to Japan.

Conclusion

Although this goal was not completely met, most MMCE members wrote as a reflection for meeting 14, (See Meeting 14, Learning Outcomes) that they felt there was a lot that they still needed to learn. As the quote on the top of this page indicates, the study and teaching of culture are acts of inquiry. I hope that MMCE members continue their inquiries.

Objective 5: Develop

• a) the skills necessary skills to interact with people from other cultures (For example - the skills necessary to elicit information about a certain cultures without offending anyone) (III),
• b) (IV) the ability to share your learned information with other people.
• c) (VI) the ability to investigate generalizations about other cultures and form your own opinions about them.
• d) (III) the ability to lead discussions and cooperative learning activities. (VI)

Consideration

To try to accomplish these goals I emphasized the below model of communication:

We did two fishbowls (Meetings 3 & 4) to practice communicating in groups and I think that this was helpful for b) and d) and to some extent a). C) was a theme throughout meetings 5 - 10. Furthermore, the Examining National Stereotypes Discussion was particularly beneficial for a). Overall, I thought that Goal 5 was targeted throughout the term.

Objective 6: Learn about different ways to look at cultures. (II)

Consideration

We looked at cultures and a micro and macro level. Hofstede's theories on national cultures was a controversial topic. Some members understood the theory and agreed with it, othere were against the theory, and others did not understand it. These theories on dimensions are not something that are acquired instantly by the learner but are usually understood over time. Sometimes, this can be understandably difficult for people to accept. If Hofstede is to be taught, less lecturing and more cultural simulations followed by an explanation of his dimensions would be a better way.

We should have also considered some counterarguments to Hofstede's argument...