2011/10/23

Title: Toward a Deeper Understanding of Culture

Speaker: Renée Sawazaki

Sawazaki introduced her unique model for teaching cultural understanding, the Culture Tree, and demonstrated how this model can serve as a guide for student deduction of cultural traits when analyzing stories. The Culture Tree model came about in part due to perceived insufficiencies in the Iceberg and Onion models of cultural understanding. All three models illustrate both hidden and visible parts of culture. However, only Sawazaki's model highlights the link between these aspects: the trunk of the tree. Sawazaki originally developed this model for a university course on cross-cultural understanding and later incorporated the teaching of this model along with the use of folktales in her EFL classes. Using this model as a lens allows her students to more fully explore the connections between the beliefs and actions of the cultures they study.