Week 6: Culture and written discourse: International Rhetoric, multilingual writing

     I had the chance to read Kubota's Unfinished Knowledge: The Story of Barbara. The most interesting part of this weeks reading for me was the story about the teacher Barbara and her encounter with three students from China, Korea and Japan. Since this teacher had lacked experience with other cultures she was quick to make the assumption that there was something wrong with the students- either low intelligence or some cognitive deficit that prevented them from thinking logically. What really surprised me is the fact that she didn't even stop to think that maybe English wasn't their first language and they were still working on improving their writing skills. Developing oral proficiency skills takes a lot of time and effort as well as improving writing skills. 

     Later on in the story I began to feel a connection with Barbara because she was in a similar position to me in the fact that she was needing more experience in cross cultural experience. Most of us students are taking this class to learn and prepare ourselves for our future classrooms that will most likely be more culturally integrated than today's classrooms. Us future educators will be more informed and ready to embrace other cultures with a strong background knowledge on nonnative English speakers and their various cultures. The only experience with other cultures that I have is mostly the Spanish culture so in that sense I too feel the need to branch out more to learn about more culture. 

     In the Kubota article, Carol tells Barbara "When two people from different cultures meet, misunderstanding tends to occur, because we tend to judge the other person with our own cultural frame of reference. However, neither culture is right or wrong, or good or bad. They are just different." I really thought that that particular quote stood out in describing why there are so many misconceptions. Seeing that Barbara grew up in a white community, she had the expectations for those students to be writing as a native English speaker. 

     The Connor article was hard for me to understand. I didn't grasp the whole idea about what rhetoric is and how teachers can incorporate that into lessons.