Educating Global Citizens
“What do you mean ‘native language,’ Ms. Brubaker?” asks Nikie, one of my juniors. This strikes me as a strange question, but I answer scores of questions (many of them strange) every day, so I plough forward.
“The first language you learned, what your parents speak, your mother tongue,” I respond, using a teaching technique I call ‘the kitchen sink’: meaning if you say it four different ways, hopefully one of them will translate.
“What’s Natalie’s native tongue?” she asks. I turn to Natalie who is sitting behind me, discussing her essay on the connections between language and identity, with a classmate.
“Hey! Natalie! What’s your native language?” I ask, hoping to demonstrate to Nikie that this isn’t really a hard question. She stares at me, eyes wide, blank. Uh-oh, I think. I’ve taught them to use terms like diglossia and incipient bilingualism but they can’t tell me what their native language is? With rising panic, I fall back on the kitchen sink method. “What do your parents speak, what was the first language you learned?”
“Well, my Dad speaks German and my mom speaks Chinese, I guess the first language I learned is English, but now I mostly speak Cantonese.”
“When did you start learning Cantonese?”
“When I was six.”
Oh. Right. I can feel my brain clicking away as it struggles to adjust to the new paradigm before me. It isn’t the term native language that is the problem, it is the whole concept of a ‘native language.’ I live and teach in Hong Kong, a city that operates in two languages, Cantonese and English - and is rapidly assimilating a third, Mandarin. My school, the Chinese International School, delivers curriculum in two languages: English and Mandarin, neither of which is the primary language of the majority of the residents of the city. In my homeroom of 24 students, 22 hold passports in countries other than Hong Kong, and they include Malaysia, Japan, Canada, France and Sweden. Hong Kong has been part of China since 1997, one of a few areas designated a ‘Special Administrative Region,’ but whenever I have to pick my country of residence from a pull-down list on the internet, I select Hong Kong. In fact, when I receive packages from abroad that have ‘Hong Kong, SAR China’ written on them, more often than not, someone in the postal service has scratched out the second half of the phrase. Why should the idea “native language” be anything but complicated?
In the expatriate community, you find yourself answering the question “Why Hong Kong?” on an almost daily basis. After nearly two years here, I’ve developed a one-minute answer that combines a professional interest in teaching in a global context, a commitment to spending part of my adult life out of the US, and a sense of adventure that resulted in my walking off a plane onto a continent I’d never visited, in a city where I didn’t know a soul, with two suitcases and a two-year contract. My job, as my school’s mission states, is to ‘educate global citizens’ through the lens of my specializations, English Literature and Drama. But sometimes, as I look around my classroom (Prisca: fluent in four languages, working on the fifth and sixth, Audrey: fluent in three, plus a couple dialects) I think, “I’m the one you all look to for answers?”
My students are, by nature, global in a way that I will never be. While I marvel at their ability to negotiate cultural differences and languages in the classroom, they seem, in large part, unaware that this is anything unusual. They are unimpressed by my twelve-time-zone relocation from New York to Hong Kong because it is one that most of them will make when they go to college in the US or UK.
What does it mean to educate global citizens in a world where the very language we use to describe these students, global, bilingual, citizen, is being outrun by the changing reality these words attempt to define?
A kind of answer came to me in the classroom a few weeks ago. I was teaching The Woman Warrior, a memoir by Chinese-American author, Maxine Hong Kingston, written in the mid-1970’s. It was a risky choice. The book is steeped in cultural and linguistic references my students know better than I and is deeply critical of many aspects of both Chinese and American culture. It is scary to walk into a classroom knowing that you are about to try and teach a text that, in some ways, your students know more about than you do. It requires a different posture. You can’t pretend to have answers. Instead, I found myself using a new vocabulary:
“Tell me. I’m listening.”
“How does that translate?”
“Can you explain how this is different from what you’ve experienced?”
“Does this resonate?”
Rather than a guide, I myself became a traveler, modeling for my students the process of a conscious, curious learner in a culture not her own. My students developed a new awareness of themselves as they compared their complex loyalties and identifications to Kingston’s – and for me it opened up whole new landscapes in my student’s lives that I wouldn’t otherwise have had access to.
I still answer hundreds of questions a day. I’m always surprised by how fervently my students want me to know, how much they want me to have answers. In this wildly fluid age, there is real satisfaction in certainty. But being a global citizen today isn’t about answers. It’s also not about passports. Sure, it has something to do with heritage and where you’ve been. But it is also about attitude - a willingness to know the limits of language and experience to adequately describe the world around us. And the best way to teach that is to show students what they can teach you.
comments
Excellent essay! I'm an American currently living in Shanghai. I can completely relate to your mindwarping cultural realizations. As a foreigner living in China, new cultural contradictions and confusion seem to pop up everyday!