Cultural Competency

"Where I come from..." is a common prompt used in educational contexts to put language and imagery to express a very broad notion of our own identities.  Understanding our identities, how they developed, with which influences, how they are 'shape-shifting' always, and the pulls of social influence on them is a core and recursive practice in ED 75a and ED 175a.  As internationally acclaimed novelist and activist Chimamanda Adichie poignantly put in her powerful TED Talk "The Danger of a Single Story" (2009) "All of these stories make me who I am. But to insist on only these negative stories is to flatten my experience and to overlook the many other stories that formed me. The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story."  As such, to be an educator of any kind of multilingual humans, our job is to push back against what we think we know about others and to grow our overall cultural and linguistic competence. This is a job that is never complete and as such, the resources in this section will support you on this lifelong journey.

Brandeis Office for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion have numerous resources that can support our understandings of the constructs (institutional and with regard to personal human biases) that affect teaching and learning English.  Please reference the terms at the link above and other important resources as you reflect in and out of this course.