Teaching Students About the World
We are language and culture assistants. The emphasis is usually on language, but culture is equally as important. It is easy to teach big C culture (food, holidays, etc.). Little c culture is harder to teach. It has to do with social norms, different perspectives and daily life. I was able to teach both big and little c culture this year. In addition to holidays I taught about structural differences between the U.S. and Spain (which largely attribute to different lifestyles). Geopgraphy and history classes are great places to include these types of lessons.
This year I was asked to teach about U.S. demography. I took it upon myself to include a comparison to Spain and closer look at my home state's demography as well. The best part of this lesson was using animation in PowerPoint and asking students to guess the information before it was given to them. Namely, to ask them to guess which country had a better statistic. Higher infant mortality rate? Lower death rate? They nearly always guessed the U.S., but the answer was always Spain. This lesson showed students the value of their own country and debunked some harmfully inaccurate ideas that they (and many people) have concerning the United States.
After giving students the facts, I gave them more information as to why these statistics are what they are. This is important because it both futhers the complexity of the lesson and answers the questions the students were likely to have. The question, "Why does the U.S. have a higher infant mortality rate than Spain?" opens a discussion for private versus public health care.
This lesson also allowed us to discuss an imporant current global topic -- Covid-19. How did they countries handle this situation differently? What were the results of these actions in each country?
Lastly, we learned about immigration in the United States. I showed them trends and gave them numbers. Afterwards, we watched a video about the economic importance of immigrants-- another globally relevant topic.