presentation on Kumaravadivelu's MacroStrategy, Raising Cultural Consciousness

1. Kumaravadivelu’s (2003) macro-strategy
Dr. Rohit Bagthariya
Assistant Professor, H M Patel Institute of English Training and Research, Vallabh Vidyanagar

2. What
is
Culture?
Dr Rohit Bagthariya

3. Culture
Culture with a capital ‘C’
Societal construct
Creative endeavours
Dr Rohit Bagthariya

4. Culture
Culture with a Small ‘c’
Personal construct
Patterns of behavior, values, and beliefs
Dr Rohit Bagthariya

5. Culture Teaching
Cultural
Teaching
Cognitive
component
Affective
component
Behavioural
component
H.H. Stern (1992)
Dr Rohit Bagthariya

6. Culture Teaching
According to Stern (1992) One of the most important aims of
culture teaching is to help the learners gain an understanding
of the native speaker’s perspective.
Dr Rohit Bagthariya

7. Limited View
Cultural Identity
– National Identity (e.g. US, India, other countries)
– Linguistic Identity (e.g. English, Hindi, other lang.)
• It ignores multicultural and sub cultural variations
within national or linguistic boundaries.
• It also ignores the rich diversity of world views
that learners bring to the classroom
Dr Rohit Bagthariya

8. Dr Rohit Bagthariya

9. Cultural Understanding
Dr Rohit Bagthariya

10. Cultural Understanding
Robinson, Claire and Holliday seek to expand the
horizon of culture learning and teaching in the L2
classroom by attempting to go beyond a
preoccupation with native speaker perspectives.
They emphasize how human beings interpret their
cross-cultural experiences and how they construct
meaning in cross-cultural encounters.
Dr Rohit Bagthariya

11. Cultural Understanding
Instead of treating culture as collection of
static products or facts that may be
objectified and presented to learners in
discrete items, it should be viewed as a
process, that is, as a way of perceiving,
interpreting, feeling, understanding.
(Robinson)
Dr Rohit Bagthariya

12. Cultural Understanding
Robinson (1985) talks about
“cultural versatility”
“Expending one’s repertoire of experience and
behaviours, not subtracting anything”
Dr Rohit Bagthariya

13. Color Purple
• Robinson (1991) develops a theory of second
culture acquisition as the integration of home
and target culture in a synthesis she refers to as
the Color Purple
• It’s a productive, cognitive, perceptual and
affective space that results from meaningful
cross-cultural contact
Dr Rohit Bagthariya

14. When one
becomes
aware of
one’s own
culture
When one
recognizes
that a
person from
another
culture has
a different
lens
Neither person can
escape his or her own
cultural lens, but each
can choose to overlap
lenses in order to
understand better the
other’s perspectives and
arrive at shared meaning
Dr Rohit Bagthariya

15. Third Culture
• Kramsch (1993) describes the third culture as a
conceptual space that recognizes the L2 classroom as
the site of interaction of multiple worlds of discourse.
• She advises teachers to encourage learners to create
this third culture while, at the same time, not allowing
either the home culture or the target culture to hold
them hostage to its particular values and belifes.
Dr Rohit Bagthariya

16. Critical Cultural Consciousness
Dr Rohit Bagthariya

17. A true understanding of the
cultural dynamics of the L2
classroom can emerge only
through
“Critical Cultural
Consciousness”
- B. KUMARAVADIVELU
Dr Rohit Bagthariya

18. Critical Cultural Consciousness
• The development of CCC requires the recognition of a
simple truth: there is no one culture embodies…
 all and only the best
 all and only the worst
• CCC enables to learn and grow, to change and evolve,
so as to meet the challenges of today’s emerging
global reality.
Dr Rohit Bagthariya

19. What
is the
global
reality
today?
Dr Rohit Bagthariya
Economic & Cultural
Globalization
Disappearing
borders
Shrinking time
Shrinking
space
Global electronic
communication
Internet

20. Critical Cultural Consciousness
• What the individual needs more than anything else to make
proper use of that resource is a critically reflective mind that
can tell the difference between information and
disinformation, between ideas and ideologies.
• What guides an individual in such a critical self-reflection is his
or her own value system sedimented from his or her own
cultural heritage.
Dr Rohit Bagthariya

21. Critical Cultural Consciousness
One’s learned knowledge and experience of other cultural
contexts not only expands one’s cultural horizon but also clarifies
and solidifies one’s own cultural heritage.
 Understanding other cultures = understand our own better
 Understanding our own = understand other culture better
Therein lies real and meaningful cultural growth.
Dr Rohit Bagthariya

22. Teachers and learners as Cultural Informants
Dr Rohit Bagthariya
Instead of privileging the teacher or native speaker as the sole cultural
informant, as the traditional approach to cultural teaching would do,
we need to treat the learner as a cultural informants.
Teacher Native Speaker Student

23. Teachers and learners as Cultural Informants
Dr Rohit Bagthariya
 We can privilege our learners by identifying the cultural knowledge
they bring to the classroom.
 Raising CCC in its true sense then entails going beyond the
textbook’s frame of reference and attempting to bring the learner’s
home community into the classroom experience.
 Two main function of CCC: Self-reflection & Self-renewal
 Not confined to learners but teachers also!

24. Reference
• Kumaravadivelu, B. Beyond Methods: Macrostrategies for
Language Teaching. London: Yale University Press. 2003. Pdf.
Dr Rohit Bagthariya

25. Thank You
Dr Rohit Bagthariya