One of the best experiences I had while volunteering at MSU was working with students in the Intensive English Program (IEP), formally known as the IELI Program. While in my Honors First Year Experience class, the director of the program came in and asked if any of us were willing to put time into tutoring students in English. I eagerly signed up as I wanted an opportunity to expand my global citizenship competency and meet other students on campus. I tutored three students in the Fall of 2015 and continued the program in the Fall of 2016, tutoring two other new students. Although part of the program did revolve around English spelling and grammar work, the main point of the program was to have students from different cultures interact with each other through interpersonal experiences. Through my experience in the program, I expanded my self-awareness and knowledge/understanding of culture greatly through different interactions with each student.
Coming from a small town meant I had almost zero experience with people who came from cultures different from my own. I realized while tutoring students I often asked them questions that revolved around what I thought was important in my own culture, such as family, holiday traditions and religion. I realized I value holidays and consider them family time while others viewed them as a time to gather with friends rather than family. Students shared with me that their favorite way to share their culture was to make traditional dishes to distribute with others. One of the students didn’t know what “Mac and Cheese” was, so we made lunch together one day and talked about how in Japan, hot dogs were literally called “American Dogs”. I also attended a potluck with over 20 international students (I was the only white native English speaker there) which was an amazing experience to share not only food, but friendship with one another.
Marriage was also something I often discussed with several students, such as subjects on polygamy, arranged marriages, and different traditions performed at weddings. One of my students told me his mother had found him a bride, an arranged marriage. I hid my reaction very well and was happy for him, although it completely baffled me. He spoke of how he would go home and meet her and decide if he liked her, but I don’t know if he even had total power of choosing or if his and her parents had the final say. If he did decide to marry her, they first would go to the hospital for testing to make sure that their children wouldn’t have abnormalities, which is also something that my culture does in situations, but not all the time, so I could relate to this aspect of marriage. Then, if everything worked out he planned on marrying her over spring break, that he would fly back to his home country, get married and come back to the U.S. for school all in the course of one week. It made me aware of how in my own culture, I want to get married, but if someone asks, I want to have at least a year to plan the wedding.
Some stereotypes I was able to identify while talking with students revolved around the Muslim religion, the presumption that study abroad meant you were extremely poor or extremely rich, and that students came from areas of warfare or poverty. One student did come from an area of warfare, something he was diligent in sharing with others to help them understand what is happening in the Middle East. I remember at one point, he didn’t even know if his family was alright after electricity had been cut off in their town by the terrorist group ISIS (they were thankfully fine!). As time went on, I began to realize that my culture does not understand how hard learning English is and why others choose to learn it over others. As a power language, English is like a standardized language across many cultures to share knowledge with one other, especially through scientific articles. Students in the program often learned English as a second language not because they wanted to, but because they felt “forced” by others. Such as a student from Japan shared with me that they were pushed by their parents, their schools, and the world that they needed to learn English to fit into a higher social class in life.
Part of interacting with students from different cultures meant needing to discuss different “taboo” subjects such as religion and political standpoints to even further our cultural understanding. In high school, I never grew extremely close to any of the foreign exchange students who came. I felt like I was in this bubble and I refused to let anyone who wasn’t in my culture in because it was a scary concept. Now, as I tutor students from Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Columbia, I can see how wrong I was and I really enjoy listening to their stories. One of the most important issues that we talked about was the attacks on Paris, as two of the students that I tutored are Muslims, and ISIS resides where they live. We talked of how they do not consider ISIS as part of their culture, but that it is one of its own entity. We also talked a lot about politics and how the government was ran in the Middle East. I was not afraid to jump in and ask questions no longer, although my students often instigated the conversation between themselves and wanted to prove and explain their opposing view-points to me. We used Google translator to understand harder concepts and researched topics we were unsure about, such as how different governments were run in various countries.
I was impressed towards the end of my time with the program by my growth in cross cultural communication when working on an activity that asked students to pick the answer that aligned with what “Americans” would choose. The question was “Your teacher has scheduled a test on the same day as a major religious holiday for you. What do you do?” The options were, a) you take the test, b) you talk with your teacher to reschedule the test, c) you skip the test, or d) you drop the class. An individual across any culture could pick any of these options as a full-grown adult; it just would depend on how deeply you felt about that part of your culture and identity. The activity itself stereotyped Americans into one large group based on the “American Dream”, and that we would just take the test anyway because it is the normal thing to do in our culture. Yes, I may choose to take the test regardless out of habit to put my education first, but my best friend who is also American may not. I understand that the activity was meant to teach international students typical American customs compared to their own customs of handling conflict and decision making in their own country, and most students probably didn’t have a problem answering the questions. However, I don’t believe learning the “right” thing to do in American culture is beneficial to learning cultural understanding.
Being a tutor in the Intensive English Program has taught me to greatly change my mindset when it comes to cultural understanding. I learned how to identify different stereotypes I held, how to recognize what part of culture was important to others, and to not be afraid to ask questions while having an open mindset when interacting with persons who have a different culture than my own. There are cultural topics that I still have questions about even after this experience and I feel are very significant. Such as why do others learn English, how does everyone outside my own culture view my culture and others around them, and does cultural acceptance increase when a person studies a second language along with intercultural interactions? I hope to continue to explore these questions through different experiences on campus, in my career in dentistry, and will hopefully study abroad one day.