Cultural Literacy and Empathy in Education Practice [1st ed.] 9783030599034, 9783030599041

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-vii
What Is Cultural Literacy? (Gabriel García Ochoa, Sarah McDonald)....Pages 1-20
Cultural Literacy and the Case for Empathy (Gabriel García Ochoa, Sarah McDonald)....Pages 21-45
Destabilisation and Reflection (Gabriel García Ochoa, Sarah McDonald)....Pages 47-68
“Organic” Cultural Literacy—A Case Study (Gabriel García Ochoa, Sarah McDonald)....Pages 69-121
Embedding Cultural Literacy in Higher Education (Gabriel García Ochoa, Sarah McDonald)....Pages 123-159
Embedding the Curriculum in Cultural Literacy: Reading Across Cultures (Gabriel García Ochoa, Sarah McDonald)....Pages 161-176
Back Matter ....Pages 177-186

Citation preview

Cultural Literacy and Empathy in Education Practice Gabriel García Ochoa Sarah McDonald

Cultural Literacy and Empathy in Education Practice

Gabriel García Ochoa • Sarah McDonald

Cultural Literacy and Empathy in Education Practice

Gabriel García Ochoa School of Languages, Literatures Cultures and Linguistics Monash University Clayton, VIC, Australia

Sarah McDonald School of Languages, Literatures Cultures and Linguistics Monash University Clayton, VIC, Australia

ISBN 978-3-030-59903-4    ISBN 978-3-030-59904-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59904-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

It takes a village to write a book, in particular a book like this one. We started working on What is Cultural Literacy? in late 2017. Our belief then, as it is now, is that learning how to bridge differences across disciplines and cultures is key to addressing the great challenges that humanity faces. Throughout the journey of exploring and elaborating on this idea, raising awareness about it, and getting it to print, we have had the good fortune of collaborating with remarkable people, whose kindness and support have been crucial to the publication of this book. We would like to thank Shabnam Safa, Ema Stefanovic, Danielle Radivo, Ross Huggard, Emma Casey and Camille Murphy. Thank you for trusting us with your experience and your stories. None of this would have been possible without your goodwill and support. Many thanks to our colleagues at Monash University, in particular Dr Cathy Sell and Meaghan Harding. We are very grateful to the anonymous reviewers who provided constructive, useful suggestions that helped us better shape this book. Thanks to Dr Gwyn Fox for her kindness and attention to detail. To our students—past, present and future—this is for you and because of you; you teach us considerably more than you think! Many thanks to our editors at Palgrave, Camille Davies and Liam McLean for gently guiding us through the process of production. And last, but of course, by no means least, our deepest gratitude to our families, Mia, Pieter and Scott; at the risk of mixing metaphors, you are the pylons and hinges, motors and catalysts for everything we do.

v

Contents

1 What Is Cultural Literacy?  1 2 Cultural Literacy and the Case for Empathy 21 3 Destabilisation and Reflection 47 4 “Organic” Cultural Literacy—A Case Study 69 5 Embedding Cultural Literacy in Higher Education123 6 Embedding the Curriculum in Cultural Literacy: Reading Across Cultures161 Conclusion177 Index183

vii

CHAPTER 1

What Is Cultural Literacy?

We begin this study with a personal anecdote by one of the authors of this book: A few years ago I travelled to Antwerp for a conference. It was a long journey from Australia (as most journeys that start in Australia are wont to be, unless one is going to New Zealand). A 14-hour flight from Melbourne to Dubai, followed by a 4-hour layover; seven hours from Dubai to Amsterdam, a train ride from Amsterdam to Belgium, and then the taxi to the hotel. At this point you probably would forgive me for being tired, jet-­lagged, and quite possibly, delusional. As most frequent travellers know, the best way to stave off jet-lag is not to give in to sleep, no matter how tempting. So, after dropping off my bags and taking a shower I went for a walk. Strolling around a new city is usually exciting enough to keep me awake, but I got lost looking at the fold-out map, trying to find the Rubens Museum. Instead, I found myself in one of the busiest shopping strips in Antwerp, before a storefront that announced itself as a proud purveyor of “Australian Home Made Ice Cream”, no less. Intrigued, I went in. I was born and raised in Mexico, not Australia, but I had become a naturalised Australian a few years prior, after falling in love with the many wonders offered by the country, while fully unaware that ice cream was one of them. I was greeted by a smiling shop attendant. Somehow, we managed to strike up a conversation in an unholy pidgin of French, Bengali, Dutch, Spanish and English. The attendant explained that he was

© The Author(s) 2020 G. García Ochoa, S. McDonald, Cultural Literacy and Empathy in Education Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59904-1_1

1

2 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

half Belgian, half Indian. He grew up in Bengal, and halfway through his studies in dentistry he decided to become an engineer. He moved to Belgium to study for his engineering degree. On weekends he worked at this shop, making the authentic, Australian ice cream he had just sold to the Mexican-Australian. In Antwerp.

The most remarkable element about this anecdote is that it is not remarkable at all. With increasing frequency we come across colleagues or acquaintances with cultural or disciplinary backgrounds that may be completely different from our own, people who hail from the most remote corners of the Earth (e.g. Australia), for whom one’s well-known, perfectly “normal” turf may seem entirely unfamiliar. The skills, knowledge and abilities involved in understanding and interpreting these differences, and learning how to approach them as potential sources of richness in intercultural and interdisciplinary collaborations, is what we refer to as cultural literacy, which is the main subject of this book.

1.1   The Origins of “Cultural Literacy” The term cultural literacy is not new, and it is important to establish where we stand in relation to previous approaches. E.  D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy, published in 1989, became the topic of much debate in education. Even though the term “culture wars” would not be popularised until 1991, with the publication of James Davison Hunter’s influential book, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, the “war of cultures” was already being waged in the United States, and Hirsch’s book was fresh ammunition, particularly after his ideas were championed by Dr William Bennett, Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Education during the president’s second administration. This was a dubious honour for Hirsch, a self-­ professed progressive (Hirsch 2015). Hirsch’s purported progressiveness, however, is often obtuse in his writings. Cultural Literacy opens by identifying a major problem in the American education system: literacy rates, which had been rising in the “developed world” in the 1980s, had plateaued in the United States. According to Hirsch, there was a direct relationship between the lack of growth in the number of literate Americans and the concepts that schoolchildren were being taught in school. He argued that if schools taught important knowledge that is central to national culture, this would result not only in higher literacy rates, but an increase in students’ ability to learn

1  WHAT IS CULTURAL LITERACY? 

3

across every subject. Their capacity to contextualise would be enhanced, which would in turn allow students to learn new information and knowledge with greater ease (Hirsch 1989b, 456). Hirsch refers to this important core cultural knowledge as cultural literacy, which he defines alternatively as “a universally shared national vocabulary” and “the shared culture of the common reader” (1989b, 26, 36). It is the “background information” we possess, which allows us “to take up a newspaper and read it with an adequate level of comprehension, getting the point, grasping the implications” (1989a, 2). Simply put, linguistic literacy is dependent on, and directly related to this conceptual, cultural literacy. This communal core knowledge, Hirsch argues, extends across every field and medium, including sports, science, arts, literature, film, television and classical and contemporary texts. It is often assumed that once they become linguistically literate, students will be able to grasp this basic cultural canon, but according to Hirsch, the evidence has proved the contrary, and consequently, pedagogical measures must be taken to address this problem. Due to this ignorance of core cultural concepts, schoolchildren have been unable to understand the basic workings of society, which poses long-term problems if they are to become its future leaders and custodians (Hirsch 1989a, 7). With an early interest in interdisciplinarity, Hirsch argued that cooperation between professionals from different disciplines and backgrounds was crucial for further social advancement, “If we do not achieve a literate society, the technicians, with their arcane specialties, will not be able to communicate with us nor us with them. That would contradict the basic principles of democracy, and must not be allowed to happen” (1989, 31) Hirsch was stressing the importance of being able to go beyond the boundaries of one’s own discipline in order to engage in a dialogue with others. Like Hirsch, in this book we strongly support interdisciplinarity, but our approach is markedly different from his. As we shall discuss later on, instead of proposing a standardisation of knowledge, we propose a modus operandi of openness to different types of knowledge. Hirsch repeatedly argues that increased cultural literacy is wholly to the advantage of minorities and the poor, that it is not the property of any particular social group or stratum (1989a, 11). He states that “literate culture is the most democratic culture in our land: it excludes nobody; it cuts across generations and social groups and classes; it is not usually one’s first culture, but it should be everyone’s second, existing as it does beyond the narrow spheres of family, neighbourhood, and region” (1989a, 21).

4 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

This is where Hirsch’s arguments start to become contradictory. The core cultural information that Hirsch argues is “the most democratic” in the land is broadly associated with the American upper-middle class (1989a, 19). As he argues that this information is open to all, he also asserts that the degree to which minorities and marginalised members of society are able to become culturally literate, will determine their ability to escape the cycle of poverty and thrive in society. Clearly then, cultural literacy is not as democratic and inclusive as Hirsch suggests if minorities and marginalised members of society do not have access to it to begin with. In an article published in 1985, “Cultural Literacy Does Not Mean Core Curriculum”, Hirsch discusses the members of the “club” who traditionally have access to cultural literacy in the United States: To make the idea of cultural literacy explicit is therefore to issue an open invitation to not yet fully literate people, inviting them to join the company of literate people. I say open invitation because in the past, knowledge about cultural literacy has been closed off and restricted to those who have already belonged to the club. In the normal course of things, literate people can become members of the club only after years of reading and conversation with other literate people … In the past, people outside the club might have wished for a more efficient way to acquire this shared background information, but they have lacked a guide. My article was just a first step in calling attention to the importance of the shared information that literate Americans take for granted. Once we are conscious of the fact of cultural literacy, and of the importance to disadvantaged people of our not keeping a knowledge of its finite contents the exclusive secret of the well educated, perhaps some excluded members of our society will be more encouraged to become members of the literacy club. (1985, 48)

As Hirsch accurately points out, the problems and ramifications of illiteracy go beyond the inability to read and write or to do so poorly. An illiterate person is unable to partake fully in society (1989a, 12). Thus, Hirsch’s long-term goal was that all American citizens would become culturally literate, that they could pick up any piece of writing, or watch any television show written for “the average person”, and understand what it was about (1989a, xvi, 12). His intention was to empower schoolchildren of marginalised backgrounds by giving them access to the canon of literate American culture. His contention is that in so doing, their linguistic literacy would improve, they would become better readers, writers and communicators and they could reap the rewards of knowing how to operate

1  WHAT IS CULTURAL LITERACY? 

5

efficiently in a liberal Western democracy like the United States; essentially, they would know how to “play the game”. As Cook puts it, in Hirsch’s view, through cultural literacy American schoolchildren would eventually be prepared to “engage productively in political discourse and join in the ongoing democratic conversation of the United States” (Cook 2009, 487). On the one hand Hirsch suggests that cultural literacy is available to all, but on the other he argues that it has traditionally been the privilege of only a chosen few, and that it should be made available to all, as a form of empowerment. What Hirsch fails to address are the systemic reasons why cultural literacy has not been available to everyone and how allowing minorities and other disenfranchised groups to “join the club” does not necessarily change the club’s rules, but may, in fact, perpetuate them. What biases, unconscious or not, have affected the club’s workings and identity? In order to promote cultural literacy effectively Hirsch wanted to create a national canon that would encompass all the information culturally literate Americans should be acquainted with. He advocates “tolerance” of multiculturalism in education, but stresses that this should not be its aim. According to him, the primary responsibility of schools is acculturation (1989a, xviii). He further argues that “to teach the ways of one’s own community has always been and still remains the essence of the education of our children, who enter neither a narrow tribal culture nor a transcendent world culture but a national literate culture. For profound historical reasons, this is the way of the modern world” (1989a, 18). Here, Hirsch’s assertions show a profound misunderstanding of the necessary skills to navigate social diversity. Rather than teaching students the necessary skills to navigate difference, he wishes to standardise that difference through nationalism. Furthermore, there is also an unfortunately myopic view of the intricacies and needs of “the modern world”. Hirsch goes on to say that “educational policy always involves choices between degrees of worthiness. The concept of cultural literacy helps us to make such decisions because it places a higher value on national than other local information” (1989a, 25). The problem is who determines what core information is “worthy” of being taught and for what reasons? According to what parameters? And how can these ideas and their inherent flaws be questioned if they are being taught as the national doxa? This is extremely problematic. The type of uniformity of knowledge proposed by Hirsch is dangerous. In World Literature Studies, canon formation is an ongoing subject of debate because of these very reasons. Who writes the canon?

6 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

What biases and cultural assumptions go into it? And how can these biases not continue to favour certain groups above others, instead of empowering those who are marginalised? The creation of a national cultural canon can easily develop into the officialisation of national cultural hegemony. To Hirsch’s credit he is not unaware of the implications of his suggestions. He knows that the approach to literacy he proposes is not only a linguistic skill associated with cultural facts, but also a political choice. He discussed this prior to the publication of his book, in his article “Cultural Literacy”, where he states, The big political question that has to be decided first of all is whether we want a broadly literate culture that unites our cultural fragments enough to allow us to write to one another and read what our fellow citizens have written. Our traditional, Jeffersonian answer has been yes. But even if that political decision remains the dominant one, as I very much hope, we still face the much more difficult political decision of choosing the contents of cultural literacy. (1983, 167)

Hirsch identifies the problem, but he does not address it in his article. He goes on to argue that the contents of the cultural literacy canon need to be decided through much “discussion, argument, and compromise” as part of an ongoing public debate (1983, 167). However, nine years later, with the publication of Cultural Literacy the problem was partially resolved, according to Hirsch, when he compiled what became infamously known as “the List”, an appendix to his book that served as an inventory of events, concepts, places and figures, “from some idealised, textbook version of American culture” (Cook 2009, 487). As Ellwanger and Cook suggest, through his List Hirsch seemed to be dictating “a particular narrative of the past” (2009, 472). The List has more than 60 pages of definitions ranging from “1066” to “Zurich”. It was later expanded and published as the Dictionary of Cultural Literacy. Hirsch’s idea was that the List would not be set in stone, but revised according to the shifts and fluctuations of American culture. Again, this raises a number of questions: who determines what goes into it? Following what rationale? What definition of “American culture”, and what are the implications of such a definition? In “Reflections on Art and Education” published in 1990, Hirsch discusses these very issues in regard to his idea of cultural literacy,

1  WHAT IS CULTURAL LITERACY? 

7

This brings me to what I conceive to be the great weakness of the cultural literacy idea as an agent of curricular decision. Cultural literacy is descriptive, it tells us what educated people already know. It does not tell us whether that knowledge ought to be changed. Cultural literacy is descriptive, and therefore can only improve culture in the sense that it brings a wider range of social classes into mainstream culture. In social terms, that by itself is surely an improvement of culture. But cultural literacy says nothing about how to improve mainstream culture itself. The tasks of art education in deciding upon a definite curriculum is simultaneously to raise everyone to a level of existing mainstream culture and to attempt to advance existing culture beyond its current level. (5)

Instead of questioning the inherent biases of an educational system that favours certain groups above others, and addressing those biases, as Hirsch acknowledges, his approach is in a sense, continuing them by suggesting that schoolchildren of marginalised groups should be taught how to be literate in the workings of that system. It was these ideological problems that turned Cultural Literacy into political ammunition and made the book worthy of “one of academia’s most dubious honours–the right not to be read” (Ellwanger and Cook, 475). Robert Scholes, one of the early reviewers of Hirsch’s book, points out that Cultural Literacy “upon a first reading, is a book of extraordinary plausibility. Its tremendous appeal stems from the way it describes a large and serious problem, to which it offers a simple, easy and inexpensive solution” (1988, 328). Unfortunately, easy and inexpensive solutions to serious, complex problems, particularly social issues that have been gestating for centuries, are very rare, and Hirsch’s idea of cultural literacy was not such a solution. Some of Hirsch’s ideas are not without merit, and it is important to be critical enough to point them out. At the core of Hirsch’s theories is the foundation of a public discourse and the hope that the majority of the population would be able to access it. As Cook argues, Hirsch’s ideas also highlight an important point: familiarity with the mainstream culture of a nation is crucial if we wish to have a “politically engaged, transformative or transgressive discourse” that can generate authentic social change (2009, 496). These are very laudable goals, but as stressed before the particular idea of a “public discourse” that Hirsch proposes is dictated and circumscribed by a social elite, a very specific sub-culture, and this has very problematic implications.

8 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

1.2   Cultural Literacy Redefined The definition of cultural literacy proposed in this book is markedly different from Hirsch’s. Firstly, our aims are very different from his. We do not seek to establish a cultural canon in the hope that by learning it students will become more linguistically literate, or with the belief that this will help them engage with public discourse; far from it. Our work does not address linguistic literacy at all. We are interested in the skills and knowledge that help our students understand cultural differences and draw meaning from them. We do not believe that the complexity of difference should be flattened or harmonised. There is great richness in that complexity. Without further discussing the moral issues involved in Hirsch’s proposition, let us stress that the pragmatics of his suggestion are untenable. As the last 30 years have demonstrated, what Hirsch suggests, the regularisation and equalisation of canonical national knowledge simply cannot be done, particularly with the level of migration and transnational communication that we experience today. What we can do is teach our students how to understand cultural differences, and how to draw meaning from them, the skills and knowledge necessary to approach the unfamiliar without trepidation. Our approach to cultural literacy is an amalgam of different sources. We align ourselves with Tony Schirato and Susan Yell’s approach to the term, first published in their book Communication and Cultural Literacy (2000). We have also been strongly influenced by the Cultural Literacy in Europe Forum, chaired by Naomi Segal, and by her ideas as outlined in “Cultural Literacy in Europe”, and her introduction to From Literature to Cultural Literacy (2014). The year 2007 saw the beginning of a new approach to cultural literacy, vastly different from Hirsch’s, with the start of a project that sought to follow a group of scholars interested in taking their research in literary studies past the mere study of texts. The project was based in Europe. The academics involved wanted to explore new ways in which literary studies could contribute to the grand challenges that humanity is facing. In 2009 the project was funded by the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) and by the European Science Foundation (ESF) (Segal et al. 2013, 4–5). A steering committee was established; one of the first steps taken by the committee was to rename their field of research “Literary and Cultural Studies” (LCS) and to define what this new field entailed (Segal 2014, 4). The work of that committee has evolved into what is now known as the Cultural Literacy in Europe Forum. The Forum comprises a considerable number of

1  WHAT IS CULTURAL LITERACY? 

9

academics, and contrary to its name, many of them are based outside of Europe (the authors of this book are members of the Forum, and until early 2020 chaired its Special Interest Group in Higher Education). The committee defined LCS as a field that studies society and culture through “the lens of literary thinking” (Segal 2014, 7). LCS is an interdisciplinary, intercultural field. In terms of interdisciplinarity, it is open to learning and incorporating new knowledge and skills from disciplines other than itself, but it also applies its skills and concepts to other disciplines. The overall aim of this approach is to establish a dialogue that appreciates difference and understands difference as a potential source of richness in interdisciplinary collaborations. Thus, LCS “specializes in not being specialized, in the circulation or delocalization of knowledge and in ‘decentring the self’” (Segal 2014, 6). Without this approach, where skills and knowledge are purposefully translated and utilised beyond the boundaries of a single discipline, it is impossible to imagine addressing those aforementioned “grand challenges” that the world faces. Addressing these challenges must be a concerted, additive effort. Consequently, LCS is as willing to collaborate and learn from different disciplines as it is to do so across cultures. The appreciation of difference and the “decentring of self” are at the core of both interdisciplinarity and interculturality; in essence, the intention and modus operandi are the same. Thus, LCS promotes skills and knowledge that help us better negotiate disciplinary and cultural differences, hoping that this approach will result in more fruitful collaborations. As mentioned before, LCS looks at society and culture through “the lens of literary thinking”. This “lens of literary thinking” is paramount to understanding how LCS conceives of cultural literacy. Because of its background in literary studies, LCS sees a “text-like” quality in society and culture (Segal et al. 2013, 4). An approach that acknowledges the “text-­ like” nature of society and culture by definition also presupposes their readability. Consequently, LCS sees society, culture and their countless components as “texts” that can be analysed and interpreted in a myriad ways. In this sense, “fields of knowledge, historical and political events, social interactions, and any other manifestation of culture, can be considered readable” (Segal et al. 2013, 4). An educated, well-informed, critically engaged reading and interpretation of a culture different to one’s own is concomitant with a high level of cultural literacy.

10 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

1.3   Cultural Literacy as Literary Practice Our approach to teaching cultural literacy has been deeply influenced by Segal’s ideas. The contrast between Hirsch’s understanding of cultural literacy and that of the Cultural Literacy in Europe Forum is strong. Rather than promoting a dominant idea of Western culture, we support the “decentring of self”, in the understanding that skills and knowledge exist in a spectrum of relativity rather than a hierarchy (as we will discuss later, this is a core aspect of our teaching approach, through the notion of destabilisation). We see differences, whether disciplinary or cultural, as potential sources of richness in collaboration. This varies considerably from Hirsch’s ideas of standardisation of knowledge. Our goal is to teach students how to transfer the skills and knowledge that they learn as part of a course on literary and cultural studies from the classroom to the real world; to show how these finely honed skills of critique, analysis, argumentation and interpretation can be used to decipher difference in our everyday lives; to teach them how to move beyond the boundaries of our own disciplines and cultures, to build epistemological bridges through the “lens of literary thinking”; and to teach them how to “read” the world we live in, and make sense of what we don’t know. We refer to this application of literary theory beyond the “confines” of the classroom or the written page as “literary practice”, an essential component of our approach to cultural literacy. Traditionally, literary practice refers to reading and/or writing literature, or reading and/or writing about literature. But here we define literary practice as the application of the skills and knowledge learned as part of a course on literary and cultural studies to real-life scenarios, which is to say, events that take place outside the study of literature itself. The comparative literature scholar Gayatri Spivak argues that “the bottom line of teaching literature as such is to teach how to read, in the most robust sense … it is to teach an activism of the imagination and intellect” (2011, 457). This is precisely our intention when we teach cultural literacy. To show students how to read and interpret the world; to instil in them a pragmatic, organic application of semiotics, to the point that it becomes a modus operandi. In this sense, our pedagogical approach has also been influenced by the work of Tony Schirato and Susan Yell and by Intercultural Communication theory. Schirato and Yell explore cultural literacy in relation to communication practices. In Communication and Cultural Literacy they define cultural

1  WHAT IS CULTURAL LITERACY? 

11

literacy as “a knowledge of meaning systems, and the ability to negotiate those systems within different cultural contexts” (2000, xi). Following basic notions of polysemy, they argue that different communication practices are interpreted differently by people from different cultures and disciplines. Similar to the Cultural Literacy in Europe Forum, their approach is both intercultural and interdisciplinary. They incorporate a range of theories into their teaching that include semiotics, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, postcolonial studies and political and cultural theory. Schirato and Yell use these different influences to create a theoretical framework that allows tertiary students to reflect on their own communication practices. Far from exhaustive, the framework they propose is additive and open to new ideas dependent upon different communication contexts. We have been influenced by Schirato and Yell’s additive approach to teaching cultural literacy, which has helped us incorporate into our own teaching practice techniques such as Open-Space Learning, and a wealth of scholarly approaches to experiential learning and, most importantly, reflective practice. But prior to such reflection there must be a context of “difference” for the students to reflect on; this is where the other key influence in our work, intercultural competence theory, comes into play.

1.4   Cultural Literacy and Intercultural Competence Early in our research, we noticed that there were considerable overlaps between our understanding of cultural literacy, and important tenets of intercultural competence (ICC), which more recently has also been referred to as cultural intelligence (CQ). Because this has now become a broad field of study, what precisely constitutes ICC has been interpreted in a number of different ways. There is also considerable variation regarding how this competence is fostered and what it may look like. In Conceptualising Intercultural Competence, Spitzberg and Chagnon broadly define ICC as “the appropriate and effective management of interaction between people who, to some degree or another, represent different or divergent affective, cognitive, and behavioural orientations to the world” (2009, 379). At a basic level this definition encompasses the key points that many definitions of ICC ascribe to. However, it is important to note that the field of ICC studies lacks an overarching methodology, agreed set of approaches or set of practices. This is partly because

12 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

ICC, much like literary and cultural studies, is intrinsically interdisciplinary. As a research field, it sits across multiple disciplines—from communication studies to sociology and linguistics—and is used as the basis for developing competence across a number of different areas, each of these with a particular, different aim in relation to the others. This breadth of focus has allowed for the development of a rich interplay of practices in competence training; however, to its detriment, it has been limiting in the sense that it has not propitiated the development of a robust theoretical and analytical framework. Despite this great variance, Spitzberg and Chagnon have categorised the approaches to conceptualising ICC into five model types: compositional, co-orientational, developmental, adaptational and causal process (2009, 453–467). Co-orientational models focus on interaction while developmental models focus on stages through which an individual transitions as their competence grows. Adaptational models emphasise a process of “mutual adjustment” that the multiple actors in an interaction go through to achieve enhanced levels of competence. In this model “competence is manifest in mutual alteration of actions, attitudes, and understandings based on interaction with members of another culture” (466). Causal process models examine specific relationships between the variables involved in intercultural interactions. These broad conceptual models in themselves offer little to our conceptualisation of cultural literacy. They focus primarily on descriptive accounts of intercultural interactions and the ways in which individuals may achieve greater levels of effectiveness in these interactions. A common focus across them is the ability to overcome difference in order to achieve enhanced communication and a greater understanding through a process of cultural adaptation. Although not to the extent that it happens with Hirsch, this is still an approach that views difference as problematic, as something that must be overcome, which is drastically different to what we propose. In this sense, as Kaibin Xu (2013) points out, “the difference-as-problem” approach dominates the theorisation of ICC, and we can deduce, the practice it informs. Xu asserts that this perspective reduces linguistic and cultural differences to a “communication problem” and essentialises culture (380). He points out that this approach and the functionalist research that stem from this approach have been critiqued in the following four ways: (1) for neglecting the historical contexts and power relations between different cultural groups; (2) for setting up unnecessary

1  WHAT IS CULTURAL LITERACY? 

13

dichotomies and rigid expectations; (3) for taking a unitary and essentializing view of the self; and (4) for an epistemological foundation that is problematic and limiting.

It is important to note that much criticism has been laid at the foot of ICC for its primarily Western, Anglo-focused view and the ethnocentricity inherent in that position (Spitzberg and Chagnon 2009, 976) The development of ICC as a field closely aligns to the post-World War II period, in which nations sought to interact in meaningful ways at a socio-political level in order to strengthen growing global economic ties. This preoccupation resulted in attempts to define what characteristics make for an interculturally competent individual, or what traits can be identified that show the best potential for someone to become interculturally competent. In the first instance, this desire to develop and identify competency stemmed from studies of participants in the US Peace Corps programme established in 1961 by President Kennedy. The Peace Corps had as its broad mission the aim of enabling others to have a greater understanding of US culture while simultaneously promoting greater knowledge of other cultures. In many ways, the Peace Corps was seen to take up the reins of a flagging religious missionary presence. In examining the success of participants, academics were able to identify key characteristics or traits that made individuals more or less successful in their work (Spitzberg and Chagnon 422), and some of these key traits, including adaptability, cultural sensitivity and tolerance were later identified with ICC. The history of the Peace Corps itself, together with an aim that had decidedly neo-­ colonial undertakings, leave ICC with a genealogy that constructs it from a particular set of values that privilege Western viewpoints. As an area dominated by Anglo-American academics, many of the models listed above have at their centre an aim to increase competency to leverage business and socio-economic advantages through successful intercultural interactions. This can be seen by the development of the field in the 1970s and the 1980s in relation to understanding and evaluating increasingly global business endeavours (Spitzberg and Chagnon 423) Of course, this does not mean that the field has been frozen in time nor does it discount that among the plethora of approaches in ICC there are more nuanced understandings of what traits mark an interculturally competent individual. For example, Bennett’s (1986) well-known Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity establishes a framework that attempts to explain how people experience cultural difference moving

14 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

through stages from denial and defence to minimisation, acceptance and, finally, adaptation and integration, a shift that is now more commonly described as the movement from ethnocentrism to ethnorelativism (Bennett 1986). The underlying premise of Bennett’s model is that our understanding of cultural difference becomes increasingly complex and the methods we use to engage with intercultural situations become increasingly sophisticated over time. Importantly, this developmental model is conceptualised relative to context, shifting the individual from a centre/periphery relational position to one of a more balanced relationality that acknowledges the relative position of participants in the intercultural interaction. This approach aligns well with Segal’s idea discussed above, which sees the “decentring of self” as a constitutive aspect of cultural literacy (2014, 6). This increased focus on positionality is also evident in the work of Byram, who argues that ICC encompasses attitudes of “curiosity and openness, of readiness to suspend disbelief and judgement with respect to others’ meanings, beliefs and behaviours. There also needs to be a willingness to suspend belief in one’s own meanings and behaviours, and to analyse them from the viewpoint of the others with whom one is engaging” (1997, 34). This approach places much more focus on the positionality of the parties involved, which has an impact on both the relational nature of the interaction and allows a space to consider the relevant power differentials at play in instances of intercultural interaction. As we will discuss later in this section, and in more depth in Chap. 3, Bennett and Byram have influenced our way of looking at cultural literacy, particularly in the ways we define and approach destabilisation in our teaching practice. Their definitions of ICC overlap considerably with our own definition of what constitutes a culturally literate person. What exact attributes would a culturally literate individual possess? To be able to produce an accurate definition that draws on experts’ conceptualisation of the construct we contacted the members of the Cultural Literacy in Europe Forum—currently considered the world experts on the subject and asked them this very question. After collating and analysing their answers, we identified several common themes. Based on these themes we agreed on a working definition of what it means to be a culturally literate individual. A person who is culturally literate will be understanding and respectful of diversity, reflective but also self-reflective. Consequently, they will be adaptable, tolerant, curious and creative, aware, observant and communicative vis-à-vis cultural artefacts (e.g. texts). The

1  WHAT IS CULTURAL LITERACY? 

15

person in question will be open to new/different cultural artefacts and ways of being, an attribute that denotes either an organic or informed understanding of ethnorelativism and culture as a readable construct, and developed sense of empathy (as we will discuss in Chap. 2, this last attribute, empathy, is crucial to our teaching practice in helping students develop their cultural literacy). Having established an understanding of what attributes are key in a culturally literate individual we began to conceptualise how these attributes could be developed. In doing so we have built on the foundations of a range of existing practices, including intercultural competence training, Open-Space learning, embodied practice and experiential learning theory. All these fields have in their own way sought to create an applied practice that responds to their particular theoretical frameworks. In particular, intercultural training has sought to develop a set of traits in individuals that allows them to build the skills necessary to be able to interact in effective ways with culturally and linguistically different “others”. These strategies and techniques were developed with a dual aim in mind: to identify traits of ICC and to develop skill sets that allow individuals to overcome the challenges inherent in intercultural environments. Much of the focus of ICC training has been on the development of curated experiences or “critical incidents” (Morell et al. 2002; Toporek et al. 2004; Cushner and Brislin 1996; Dant 1995; Wight 1995; Holliday 2004; Bhawuk 2001). Critical incidents allow individuals to observe a particular intercultural interaction and to draw conclusions and learn from that observation. There is an emphasis on the authenticity of these “incidents” in order for them to be effective training tools. However, it should be noted that whether or not the incidents are real for the person describing the scenario, for the students trying to learn from these scenarios, they are fictitious, in the sense that these intercultural interactions did not happen to the student, nor do they specifically represent the student’s past experiences, or experiences they may have in the future. Critical incidents may trigger recognition, evoke a response, either intellectual, emotional or even physical, but this is not necessarily different from the reactions one may have reading a book or watching films, which we know to be fictional. When critical incidents are used in ICC training, the focus is on the analysis of a curated situation, with a structured reflection on the observable. On the other hand, the focus of cultural literacy is the “reading” of an environment, or an artefact, or a real interaction between people from different cultural backgrounds. This reading is followed by analysis and interpretation and integration into a broader

16 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

framework of knowledge, much like Schirato and Yell suggest. The focus is on an individual’s literacy in relation to them and this is what allows real, transformative learning to take place.

1.5   Cultural Literacy, Experiential Learning and Reflection Whether through critical incidents or other exercises, learning through experience or experiential learning is a core part of cultural literacy in practice. Over the last four decades, educational theorists have extensively engaged with and developed the notion of experiential learning (Cantor, J. A. 1995; Ewert, A., and Sibthorp, J. 2009; Lewis, L. H. and Williams, C. J. 1994; Moon, J. A. 2004; Wurdinger, S. D. 2005). The concept was first proposed by David Kolb in the 1980s. As its name indicates, his theory of experiential learning places experience at the heart of transformational learning. The term “experiential” is employed to “differentiate ELT [experiential learning theory] both from cognitive learning theories, which tend to emphasize cognition over affect, and behavioral learning theories that deny any role for subjective experience in the learning process” (Kolb et al., 2000, 67). Kolb’s theory sets out a four-stage cyclical process that moves from experience, through reflection on that experience, development of abstract conceptualisations of that experience and then the application of those conceptualisations on to new experiences. Of course, there is a broad range of activities that can fall within the framework of experiential learning, from controlled simulations to personal, lived experiences, any of which has the potential to be harnessed to support learning moments. In this regard, the focus of cultural literacy returns to developing the capacity to successfully navigate and learn from the experience itself; its focus is not the “veracity” of the experience per se. Critical for the development of cultural literacy is the moment of destabilisation that occurs in the learning experience that opens the space for individuals to recalibrate their perception of difference through reflection. Destabilisation for us can occur across a spectrum, from mild discomfort arising from being unsure in the learning environment, to a deeper, visceral unsettling that can occur when students are confronted with aspects of their own identity, world view or core values. Destabilisation, which we delve into in greater detail in Chap. 3, in and of itself is not sufficient for a meaningful learning experience; it must be paired with a process of

1  WHAT IS CULTURAL LITERACY? 

17

reflection. Reflection is a crucial component in the process of developing cultural readability. It is by means of reflection that students challenge their preconceived ideas and prior learning. It is also through reflection that they question themselves in relation to their discipline, which in the long run is a vital skill for any professional, the ability to ask oneself, “How is this experience relevant to me, as a person and practitioner?” “What can I learn from it?” And if the initial answers are “It isn’t relevant”, or “I can’t learn anything from this”, why is that the case? What does that say about me, and my ability to perform within, and learn from certain situations? Reflection as a tool for learning has been extensively researched. As Meizrow argues, “[c]ritical reflection addresses the question of the justification for the very premises on which problems are posed or defined in the first place”. It is a process in which one “becom[es] critically aware of our own presuppositions [and] involves challenging our established and habitual patterns of expectation” (1990, 12). It is through the processes of critical reflection that individuals can develop the cognitive tools to consciously “read” cultures, to create coherency, to enact their literacy, when faced with situations that challenge their prior knowledge. It allows students to reposition themselves in relation to their new readings of an encounter with difference, which makes it a crucial component in our approach to cultural literacy. Alongside destabilisation, reflection will be discussed fully in Chap. 3. Our aim in this book has been to balance theory and practice, to present the theoretical framework that underpins our research, alongside our teaching practice. To that effect, we begin by outlining the theoretical basis of our approach to cultural literacy and then discuss its application in a number of case studies. In Chap. 2 we discuss literature’s potential for developing empathy in readers and the role of empathy in teaching cultural literacy, highlighting the difference between developing empathy and developing an awareness of one’s empathy, which is a focus of our teaching practice. We begin with an explanation of our approach to empathy—a contentious construct—and focus on the notion of narrative empathy, as a starting point for the development of other forms of empathy. The chapter also discusses the ideas of identification, perspective-taking, Martha Nussbaum’s notions of “the circle of concern” and “complex compassion”, and how these inform our own teaching practice. Chapter 3 focuses on destabilisation and reflection as the pylons of our teaching practice. The chapter explains our approach to destabilisation and its

18 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

inextricable relationship to reflection. It outlines reflection and destabilisation as multidimensional frameworks, composed of both cognitive and emotional dimensions that need to be addressed and understood when teaching cultural literacy. We explore the importance of reflection as a modus operandi for meaning-making and its role as a shared, collaborative classroom experience. In this chapter, we also propose the decentring of the role of the educator through destabilisation. Chapter 4 moves on to our first case study, which takes place in the context of secondary education. The chapter looks at the case of teaching staff at Cranbourne Secondary College, and their use of the memoir by Najaf Mazari, The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-­Sharif, to address challenges of understanding and communication amongst its student cohort, which included students from refugee backgrounds. In this chapter, we argue that the teaching approach adopted by these teachers at Cranbourne Secondary College was an “organic” form of cultural literacy and that it had an important role to play in a positive change of culture at the school. The chapter includes interviews with former students and staff members at Cranbourne Secondary College. The case study in Chap. 5 moves from secondary to tertiary education, and looks at the introduction of cultural literacy in the Higher Education curriculum. The chapter provides a suite of versatile techniques for teaching cultural literacy that have been used in the Higher Education classroom, and which can adapted to different contexts and subject matters. The case study we examine here looks at a unit taught at Monash University, Leadership for Social Change 3 and the ways in which cultural literacy was embedded into its curriculum, by means of particular techniques and texts. The chapter includes interviews with two former students who were enrolled in the unit. Chapter 6 introduces our final case study, Reading Across Cultures. The primary focus of Reading Across Cultures is to teach cultural literacy. The entire unit is designed with this express purpose in mind. The chapter presents a detailed discussion of the unit, including its syllabus and assignments, and how these were conceived to help students develop their cultural literacy skills.

References Bennett, M. (1986). A Developmental Approach to Training for Intercultural Sensitivity. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 10(2), 179–195. Bhawuk, D.  P. S. (2001). Evolution of Culture Assimilators: Toward Theory-­ Based Assimilators. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 25, 141–163.

1  WHAT IS CULTURAL LITERACY? 

19

Byram, M. (1997). Teaching and Assessing Intercultural Communicative Competence. Clevedon, Philadelphia: Multilingual Matters. Cantor, J.  A. (1995). Experiential Learning in Higher Education: Linking Classroom and Community. ASHE-ERIC, Higher Education Reports, 7, 1–102. Cook, P. (2009). The Rhetoricity of Cultural Literacy. Pedagogy, 9(3), 487–500. Cushner, K., & Brislin, R. W. (1996). Intercultural Interactions: A Practical Guide (2nd ed.). London: Sage. Dant, W. (1995). Using Critical Incidents as a Tool for Reflection. In M. Fowler & M. G. Mumford (Eds.), Intercultural Sourcebook: Cross-Cultural Training Methods (Vol. 1, pp. 141–146). Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural Press. Ellwanger, A., & Cook, P. (2009). Disciplinarity, Pedagogy, and the Future of Education: Introduction. Pedagogy, 9(3), 471–474. Ewert, A., & Sibthorp, J. (2009). Creating Outcomes through Experiential Education: The Challenge of Confounding Variables. Journal of Experiential Education, 31(3), 376–389. Hirsch, E. D. (2015). I’ve Been Misinterpreted from Day 1. The Times Educational Supplement (5172). Retrieved from https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.lib. monash.edu.au/docview/1733220177?accountid=12528. Hirsch, E. D., Jr. (1983). Cultural Literacy. American Scholar, 52, 159. Hirsch, E.  D., Jr. (1985). Cultural Literacy’ Doesn’t Mean ‘Core Curriculum. English Journal, 74, 47. Hirsch, E. D., Jr. (1989a). Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (Australian ed.). Melbourne: Schwartz Publishing. Hirsch, E.D., Jr. (1989b). “From model to policy” (response to Gregory Colomb’s article on ‘Cultural Literacy,’ this issue). New Literary History, 20(2), 451–456. Hirsch, E.  D., Jr. (1990). Reflections on Cultural Literacy and Arts Education. Journal of Aesthetic Education, 24(1), 1–6. Hirsch, E. D. (2015). I’ve Been Misinterpreted from Day 1. The Times Educational Supplement (5172). Retrieved from https://search-proquestcom.ezproxy.lib. monash.edu.au/docview/1733220177?accountid=12528. Holliday, A.  R. (2004). The Value of Reconstruction in Revealing Hidden or Counter Cultures. Journal of Applied Linguistics, 1(3), 275–294. Hunter, J. D. (1991). Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. New York: BasicBooks. Kaibin, X. (2013). Theorizing Difference in Intercultural Communication: A Critical Dialogic Perspective. Communication Monographs, 80(3), 379–397. Kolb, D. A., Boyatzis, R., & Mainemelis, C. (2000). Experiential Learning Theory: Previous Research and New Directions. In R.  J. Sternberg & L.  F. Zhang (Eds.), Perspectives on Cognitive, Learning, and Thinking Styles (pp. 228–247). NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Lewis, L. H., & Williams, C. J. (1994). Experiential Learning: Past and Present. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, June(62), 5–16.

20 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

Meizrow, J. (1990). How Critical Reflection Triggers Transformative Learning. In J.  Meizrow and Associates (Ed.), Fostering Critical Reflection in Adulthood (pp. 1–20). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Publishers. Moon, J. A. (2004). A Handbook of Reflective and Experiential Learning: Theory and Practice. New York: Routledge Falmer. Morell, V. W., Sharp, P., & Crandall, S. (2002). Creating Student Awareness to Improve Cultural Competence: Creating the Critical Incident. Medical Teacher, 24(5), 532–534. Schirato, T., & Yell, S. (2000). Communication and Culture: An Introduction. London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Scholes, R. (1988). Review—Three Views of Education: Nostalgia, History, and Voodoo. College English, 50(3), 323. Segal, N. (2014). Introduction. In N. Segal & D. Koleva (Eds.), From Literature to Cultural Literacy (pp. 1–12). Palgrave Macmillan. Segal, N., et  al. (2013). Cultural Literacy in Europe Today. In N.  Segal, N.  Kancewicz-Hoffman, & U.  Landfester (Eds.), Science Policy Briefing (pp. 1–16). Brussels: European Science Foundation/COST. 48. Spitzberg, B.  H., & Chagnon, G. (2009). Conceptualizing Intercultural Competence. In: D. K. Deardorff (Ed.), The SAGE Handbook of Intercultural Competence [Kindle iOS Version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com. Spivak, G., & Damrosch, D. (2011). Comparative Literature/World Literature: A Discussion with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and David Damrosch. Comparative Literature Studies, 48(4), 455–485. Toporek, R.  L., Ortega-Villalobos, L., & Pope-Davis, D.  B. (2004). Critical Incidents in Multicultural Supervision: Exploring Supervisees’ and Supervisors’ Experiences. Journal of Multicultural Counselling and Development, 32, 66–83. Wight, A. (1995). The Critical Incident as a Training Tool. In S. M. Fowler & M.  G. Mumford (Eds.), Intercultural Sourcebook: Cross-Cultural Training Methods (Vol. 1, pp. 127–139). Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural Press. Wurdinger, S. D. (2005). Using Experiential Learning in the Classroom: Practical Ideas For all Educators. Lanham: Scarecrow Education.

CHAPTER 2

Cultural Literacy and the Case for Empathy

2.1   Reading and the Development of Empathy: An Uncertain Relationship The idea that literature can be a vehicle for the betterment of society is far from new. Its foundations are cemented, predominantly, in the belief that stories can nurture the imagination by showing us ways of being and operating in a world other than our own. The age-old question, What if?, appears to open the door to an avalanche of understanding. In the Poetics, Aristotle argues that literature is closer to philosophy than history, precisely for this quality, “one says what has happened, the other the kind of thing that would happen” (1996, 16). Thus, fiction allows us to explore not only what has been, but what life might have been or may be like if we were to walk in someone else’s shoes. In Emile, or On Education (224), Rousseau tells us that the value of good education rests in its ability to help us understand those who are less fortunate than us, and consequently, show some kindness, for if circumstances outside our control were to change, it could be we who would be there, but for the grace of God, homeless or mourning or half-broken by a moral dilemma. And so, at the heart of the idea that literature can help the well-being of society seems to be another idea, that literature can lead to empathy, which in turn will translate into sympathy or compassion in the form of positive social actions. To

© The Author(s) 2020 G. García Ochoa, S. McDonald, Cultural Literacy and Empathy in Education Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59904-1_2

21

22 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

what extent this is possible and under what circumstances are still points of much contention. In this chapter, we discuss the most prominent literature on the relationship between empathy and reading and its relevance to our own teaching practice. We problematise this relationship and the controversy associated with it and outline its strengths and limitations. We adopt a definition of empathy largely based on Susan Keen’s understanding of the term and argue that in a classroom setting it is important to approach empathy as a multidimensional framework, composed of affective and cognitive dimensions. We also discuss Keen’s notion of narrative empathy, suggesting that it is an important tool that can be used as a starting point for the development of a wider, more comprehensive form of empathy. It is important to remember that our focus is pedagogy, not psychonarratology (Bortolussi 2003), and while we discuss the empirical study of literary response to the extent that it is relevant, our aim is to help students understand such responses to literature. In light of this, we discuss how our teaching practice in cultural literacy, rather than focusing on developing empathy in students, aims to develop an awareness in students of their own empathy, through a process of structured reflection. As Kahn argues, “unlike the social sciences, the humanities invite us to take up an attitude of self-reflection. What does the act of interpreting tell us about ourselves?” (2014, 120) Thus, it is easy for empathy to go unnoticed and important to help students become aware of it. The chapter also touches on identification and perspective-taking as important elements of the relationship between literature and empathy and discusses Martha Nussbaum’s ideas of “complex compassion” and the “circle of concern”. We return to these ideas in Chaps. 4 and 5, where they are applied to our case studies. For decades, universities have been hailing the importance of preparing students for a globalised world (Sharifian 2013, 3; Darian-Smith and McCarty 2016, 14–15; Lindgren et  al. 2015, 74). Here we are, in the midst of that world, facing its challenges. At the heart of many of these challenges is cultural difference or, rather, how we understand, approach and negotiate difference. At present, there is no indication that the world will become less global, less interconnected, less dependent upon relations and interaction with people who are different from us. If we follow this logic, there will be an increasing need to learn how to relate to those differences in an ethical, productive and efficient way, conducive to mutual cooperation and understanding.

2  CULTURAL LITERACY AND THE CASE FOR EMPATHY 

23

Numerous arguments have surfaced championing empathy as the solution to cultural differences (Newstreet et al. 2019; Herrera 2012; Dewilde and Skrefsrud 2016; Nussbaum 1997). These ideas must be questioned and problematised. As research shows, empathy may be an important piece of the puzzle, but it is not the entire solution. This takes us to the crossroads where empathy and literature meet. If studying literature can help in developing empathy, and empathy in turn can help to negotiate and better understand differences across cultures, then it is reasonable to conclude that studying literature would be conducive to better cultural understanding. Whilst not always supporting the idea that literature may act as a vehicle for the development of empathy, over the last 30 years, scholarship on the relationship between the two has bloomed exponentially. Numerous studies have shown how reading stories about members of a marginalised social group may lead to improved attitudes towards that group in general (Batson et al. 1997, 2002; Johnson 2013; Newstreet et al. 2019; Johnson et al. 2013; Kaufman and Libby 2012; Vezzali et al. 2012, 2015). There has been considerable research on literature as a method for developing empathy in children (Cress and Holm 2000; Newstreet et  al. 2019; Conrad 2017; Harste et al. 2008; Heilman 2008; Nikolajeva 2012, 2014; Colvin 2017; Slaby et al. 1995), teenagers (Fjällström and Kokkola 2015; Morton and Lounsbury 2015) and college students (Junker and Jacquemin 2017). More specifically, at a tertiary and professional education level, similar studies have focused on medical students (Shapiro et  al. 2005; Tansey 2016; Winefield and Chur-Hansen 2000; Shapiro 2002; Freeman and Bays 2007; Shapiro et al. 2005); social workers (Ganzer 1994; Turner 2013), students of Law (Chen 2018; Nussbaum 1996; Schotland 2009), in organisational studies (Lawrence and Phillips 2004; Cornelissen et al. 2008) and with mental health professionals (Tussing and Valentine 2001; Schwitzer et al. 2005). There has even been considerable research on the effect that reading has on our capacity to feel empathy towards animals (Małecki et al. 2016, 2018, 2019; Buell 2001; Elick 2015; Hogan 2009; Regan and Linzey 2010; Lima 2015; Vizzini 2011). For a number of years academics have argued specifically in favour of literature as a vehicle for the development of empathy (Scarry 2012, 2014; Lear 2014; Kahn 2014; Solnit 2013; Colvin 2017; Cress and Holm 2000; Newstreet et  al. 2019; Conrad 2017). Some of these arguments have found a widespread platform through public intellectuals such as Wayne Booth (1988), Peter Brooks (2014) and Martha Nussbaum (1996, 1997,

24 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

2010, 2013) who advocate for the crucial, positive role that literature plays in the betterment of society. Many of their claims have been disputed (Keen 2007), or criticised for being romantic, conjectural or too speculative in nature (Małecki et al. 2018), but there has also been a considerable number of studies aimed at proving the validity of these ideas. The results of such studies have been mixed. Junker and Jacquemin (2017) explored whether literature could be used as a vehicle for learning empathy in the context of a college classroom. The results of their study showed that students’ levels of empathy did not change over the short period (a 15-week semester). However, rather than concluding that literature itself is not conducive to developing empathy, Junker and Jacquemin’s study raised questions of textual accessibility, style of writing, students’ writing skills and the effect that all of these factors had on the students’ empathetic responses. It also problematised how the key objectives of a literary course “may conflict with the objective of building empathy” and proposes that while literature may support the development of empathy, it is not sufficient on its own (Junker and Jacquemin 2017, 84). Conversely, in a study that took place with first year medical students studying an elective subject on literature and medicine over six months, Shapiro et al. concluded that “a brief literature-based course can contribute to greater student empathy and appreciation for the value of humanities in medical education” (2005). Tansey found similar results with a study involving nursing students (2016), as did Turner with undergraduate social work students who were enrolled in an interpersonal communication subject (2013). In “Can fiction make us kinder to other species? The impact of fiction on pro-animal attitudes and behaviour” Małecki et al. conducted experimental studies to understand the effects that fiction can have on our attitudes towards animals. In their paper, they discuss data that suggests that fiction may be more effective than advocacy messages in changing attitudes on animal welfare, arguing that unlike direct advocacy, which often faces greater critical scrutiny, fiction persuades “implicitly, through the perspective it encourages the readers to adopt and the characters and events it portrays” (2018, 55). In a later study, Małecki et al. set out to further determine whether empathy experienced for animals in literature could improve attitudes towards animals and their welfare in real life (“Feeling for Textual Animals” 2019). The results of their study indicated that “narrative empathic concern for animal characters in stories” led to “pro-animal attitudes” (2019, 5); however, they problematised this, acknowledging a limitation of their study, which was an “external

2  CULTURAL LITERACY AND THE CASE FOR EMPATHY 

25

manipulation” of the subjects, who were specifically asked to draw a relationship between the texts they had read and real-world action. Małecki et al. question whether this relationship would have been drawn by the subjects without interference from the research team. Aiming to understand whether literature has a role to play in the legal profession as suggested by Nussbaum, Chen conducted a study to see if moral judgements were affected after reading a randomised short piece of literature (2019). Using the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET) to test their subjects for sympathy and emotional theory of mind, his results concluded that literature can “increase or decrease pro-social behaviour” through empathy (25). In the last two decades, four important, independent studies have had a particular impact in the scholarly understanding of the relationship between empathy and literature: Batson et al. (2002), Bal and Veltkamp (2013), Kidd and Castano (2013) and Djikic et al. (2013). In 2002 Batson et al. used a fictional interview to induce empathy for a member of a stigmatised group, aiming to understand whether this would “improve attitudes toward the group as a whole” (1656). Their research was not conclusive, but encouraging, in that it found that “inducing empathy for a fictional character can be used to improve attitudes and stimulate concern for a stigmatized group may well be valid” (1666), thus opening the door to the possibility that fiction may indeed have an important role to play in social action. Bal and Veltkamp’s (2013) research on transportation theory and empathy concluded that reading does develop higher levels of empathy, but only when there is emotional transportation involved. Based on Gerrig’s ideas on transportation theory they define emotional transportation as the condition of becoming “fully immersed in a story” of being “transported into a narrative world” (2009, 3). Their study, which took place over a week, concluded that empathy levels in participants were positively influenced when they read fiction that transported them emotionally. Interestingly, “these effects were not found for people in the control condition where people read non-fiction” (2013, 1). Similar to Bal and Veltkamp, Djikic et  al. conducted a study testing for variations in affective and cognitive empathy, personality and exposure to literature over the course of their lives. Their results showed that participants who read a short story as part of the study reported significant increases in cognitive empathy, but this was only for participants who had scored low in “Openness” as a personality trait; furthermore, such participants reported no increase in affective empathy (44). Their results, however,

26 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

suggest that under certain conditions fiction may be used as a tool to develop certain types of empathy (44). Kidd and Castano’s paper “Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind” (2013) has been perhaps the most influential study in the field and one of the most contested. The project set out to determine whether literature could have an effect in fostering the ability to understand other people’s mental states, an ability known as Theory of Mind (ToM). The affective component of ToM is related to empathy (2013, 377). The study performed the Theory of Mind Test, the RMET and the Yoni tests on participants. Participants read non-fiction texts, popular fiction and literary fiction. The conclusions of the study showed that reading literary fiction, which Kidd and Castano refer to as both “writerly and polyphonic” following the definitions of these terms by Roland Barthes and Mikhail Bakhtin, led to higher results in the RMET and ToM tests. Kidd and Castano’s study was strongly disputed by Panero et al. (2016), who were unable to replicate their results. Panero et al. conclude that there is a “chicken or egg” dilemma when it comes to the relationship between literature and empathy. According to them, “the most plausible link between reading fiction and theory of mind is either that individuals with strong theory of mind are drawn to fiction and/or that a lifetime of reading gradually strengthens theory of mind, but other variables, such as verbal ability, may also be at play” (1), but also open the door to further research possibilities by suggesting that “given the universality of storytelling, we believe that narrative serves a deep human need and affects our lives in powerful and lasting ways. Rigorous future work should continue to investigate just how narrative exerts its power” (9). This “chicken or egg” dilemma is one that we will discuss again in Chap. 5 for it was an issue that we too encountered in our research and teaching practice. As with Panero et al.’s study, other studies have come to promising, yet inconclusive results, problematising the relationship between literature and empathy. Fjällström and Kokkola’s study (2015) sought to determine whether adolescents reading a short text would be able to empathise with its main character. The study focused on 35 Swedish students who read an Irish short story. The findings indicated that the students were mostly able to understand the emotions of the character in question and articulate well-argued reasons for why the character felt the way they did (408). However, students struggled to understand irony, and many had difficulties empathising with adult characters (405). Fjällström and Kokkola argue that the students were only able to empathise with characters when

2  CULTURAL LITERACY AND THE CASE FOR EMPATHY 

27

drawing on their personal experience and suggest that “a more nuanced understanding of how readers draw on personal experience would be desirable” (408). In “Can fiction make us kinder to other species? The impact of fiction on pro-animal attitudes and behaviour”, Małecki et al. looked into the effects that reading had on pro-animal attitudes over different periods of time (2018). Their study was divided into three phases: the first looked at the impact of narrative after one week of exposure, the second after two months and the third looked at the impact of narrative on behaviour towards animals. In their case, the first phase of the study resulted in increased empathy, only over a short period of time, thus problematising the lasting effect that reading may have on empathy. In short, what these studies show is that we still cannot determine with certainty whether reading affects empathy over the long term or the short term (or both), and what other factors may come into play (Junker and Jacquemin 2017).

2.2   Defining Empathy As the above literature review shows, a number of studies argue that reading can indeed help develop empathy; others deny this proposition; but a significant majority are inconclusive, problematising some of the challenges surrounding this charged question, in turn posing more questions that may help us gain clarity. Part of the problem is definitional. Empathy is a challenging term to define. Mainstream discourse often blurs the lines between empathy, sympathy and compassion, using the terms alternatively and with little clarity as to what each refers. To add to this ambiguity, experts in different fields approach the notion of empathy with particular nuances, highlighting different elements. Psychologist Martin Hoffman, for example, suggests that empathy is “an affective response that is more appropriate for another’s situation than one’s own” (2000, 4). Law and Philosophy scholar Martha Nussbaum defines empathy as “the ability to imagine the situation of the other, taking the other’s perspective” adding that it involves the “recognition of the other as a center of experience” (1996, 145–146). Given the challenges that such ambiguity presents, clarity and consistency are of the utmost importance. Thus, the definition of empathy that we adopt here is largely based on that used by Suzanne Keen in her monograph Empathy and the Novel, which provides an in-depth analysis and discussion on empathy, elucidating many of the ambiguities, assumptions and limitations surrounding the term. To Keen’s ideas we

28 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

add those of Cress and Holm (2000) and Junker and Jacquemin (2017). According to Keen, experiencing empathy implies that “we feel what we believe to be the emotions of others” as opposed to sympathy, where we feel “for another” (Keen 2007, 5). Thus, through empathy, “I feel what you feel. I feel your pain” whilst in sympathy “I feel a supportive emotion about your feeling. I feel pity for your pain” (5). Keen subscribes to Strayer’s and Eisenberg’s ideas on the “multidimensional affective-­ cognitive understanding” of empathy. We too follow these views, taking into consideration the research of Cress and Holm (2000), and Junker and Jacquemin (2017), who argue that empathy “combines affective (for instance, the emotional reaction one may have toward or with a person or character) and cognitive dimensions (for example, the mental processes of considering another’s perspective or imagining oneself in the situation of the person and/or character)” (79). To an extent, Johnson subscribes to this idea, but she adds compassion to the cognitive and affective dimensions of empathy, “The components of empathy include affective empathy, meaning feeling concern or compassion for another; emotional contagion, or experiencing identical emotions as another; and perspective-­ taking, or a basic understanding of another’s thoughts and emotions” (Johnson 2012, 150). Unlike Johnson, we take compassion into account in our discussion, but not as a constitutive component of empathy. As our study will later argue, this multidimensional framework is important in pedagogical settings; the processes of destabilisation and reflection that we will discuss in Chap. 3 address these affective/cognitive dimensions of empathy. Thus, one of the main questions we are concerned with here is whether the affective/cognitive dimensions of empathy can be learned, how we can teach students to become more aware of these dimensions of empathy and whether reading, or more broadly narratives, can have a role to play in this learning process. In order to better understand this, more precision is required in regard to our understanding of empathy and literature and so we must address the idea of “literary empathy” or “narrative empathy”. “Literary empathy” or “narrative empathy” are subcategories that fall under the broader, more generalist definition of empathy. Hammond and Kim argue that “literary empathy” is different from the broader, more generalist understanding of empathy we have discussed before. According to them, studies on literary empathy research “how thinking with or feeling with another happens within literary texts or because of literary texts. In other words, literary empathy studies consider both how writers

2  CULTURAL LITERACY AND THE CASE FOR EMPATHY 

29

represent empathic experience and how they provoke, promote, or prevent it in readers” (2014, 1). Thus, according to this definition literary empathy is related to instances of empathy that are limited to the realm of literature. This is not unreasonable, given that, as Fjällström and Kokkola argue, “critical responses to literature also require readers to ‘sample the feelings of another’, to imagine what the world might look like to another person and to engage with their beliefs, even when these beliefs differ significantly from their own” (2015, 397). Like Hammond and Kim, Keen makes a similar differentiation when she discusses “narrative empathy”. According to her, narrative empathy “is a prominent feature of the novel-reading experience” (2014, 21) that involves, specifically, “the sharing of feeling and perspective-taking induced by reading, viewing, hearing, or imagining narratives of another’s situations and condition” (2014, 21). It is located in a liminal space “between aesthetics, psychology, and philosophy” (2007, 34) because it is a mediated experience once removed, so to speak, as it does not take place with another, but through the narrative of another. Keen argues that narrative empathy can take place even with unrealistic characters such as animals, as in the case of Bambi, or the anthropomorphised house appliances of The Brave Little Toaster; an idea supported by Nussbaum, who argues the same of the nursery rhyme Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, which essentially involves “looking at a shape and endowing that shape with an inner world” (2010, 99). Keen suggests that there appears to be a certain quality, intrinsic to fiction, that allows identification on the part of the reader regardless of fact (2007, 69). Małecki et  al. (2019) make a similar differentiation between narrative empathy or narrative empathetic concern, both aligned with Keen’s ideas, and empathy itself, whose definitions they take from Batson’s as an “other-­ oriented emotion elicited by and congruent with the perceived welfare of someone in need” and “coming to feel as another … feels” (Batson 2011, 11, 15). However, narrative empathy, according to Keen, belongs to a secondary order of empathy, for it is ultimately our experiences with people that influence our moral development, even when mediated through literature: In narrative empathy as in other aspects of moral development, people have more influence on other people than narrative fiction by itself. Scratch any story about a novel that changed someone’s life, or her attitudes, or his actions, and you will find another person somewhere in there, taking a kid to a library, putting a treasured book in someone’s hands, leading a

30 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

­ iscussion, modelling the notion that our fiction reading shapes who we can d become. So, while novel-reading can affect our vocabulary, our knowledge of the world, and our vocations, including the rare but wonderful effect of recruiting the next generation of novelists, as humanists we should recall the impact of other human beings on our moral development. Novels can’t be left to do that work on their own. (2014, 24)

This notion of narrative empathy is also important in our study. As Nussbaum argues, “perspective-taking comes in degrees. It may be relatively rudimentary, not anchored, to a firm grasp of the distinction between self and other” (2013, 148). As our discussion will show, narrative empathy can be used as a starting point for the development of a wider, more comprehensive form of empathy. Particularly in the case of minorities or othered characters that students may not always engage with in real life, narrative empathy can be used as an introductory framework that will later enable students to transfer their affective and cognitive understanding of what characters feel, to people. In Nussbaum’s words, to expand their “circle of concern” (2013, 262). But beyond ascertaining the extent to which literature is capable of developing students’ empathy, narrative or otherwise, our interest lies in its capacity to raise awareness of their capacity for empathy. In her discussions on literature, empathy and compassion, Nussbaum argues that differently from compassion (which involves acting), empathy need not necessarily lead to good actions. Nussbaum suggests that compassion and empathy are related, but not exactly the same. She argues that compassion “is often an outgrowth of empathy” that requires the capacity to vividly imagine what someone else’s circumstances are like (2013, 146). It involves “the recognition that another person, in some ways similar to oneself, has suffered some significant pain or misfortune” (1997, 90–91). This is not mere empathy or perspective-taking, for in instances of compassion, Nussbaum argues, what the other person is experiencing is a serious, significant and grave emotion. An important element of compassion is that it is typically reserved for people whose suffering is not self-inflicted. Thus, Nussbaum argues that “in feeling compassion, we express the view that at least a good portion of the predicament was caused in a way for which the person is not to blame” (2013, 143). Whilst empathy need not necessarily lead to good actions, according to Nussbaum, it does in what she refers to as “complex compassion”, defined as “helping behaviour that responds to the specific features of the other

2  CULTURAL LITERACY AND THE CASE FOR EMPATHY 

31

creature’s plight as seen from that creature’s viewpoint” (2013, 149). Nussbaum further problematises the notion of empathy, arguing that it is neither indispensable nor sufficient to attain compassion. Sadists aiming to inflict the maximum degree of pain on their victims may use empathy to understand the best way to do this, and lawyers trying to confuse a witness may use empathy for similar, nefarious aims. Nussbaum also provides the example of an actor who may make use of empathy to understand and embody their character without feeling any compassion for the said character (2013, 146). Chen supports Nussbaum’s ideas, giving as an example a bargaining scenario, where “empathy may be antecedent to guile—when someone knows what the other person wants and intentionally deceives him or her (e.g. exploit take-it-or-leave-it offers to their advantage)” (2018, 5). Nussbaum comes to the conclusion that “empathy is not necessary for compassion. Often, however, it is extremely helpful” (2013, 146). Thus, according to Nussbaum’s definition, there appears to be a moral dimension intrinsic to compassion, which may not be the case with empathy, and there are ways in which compassion may be reached without empathy. Notwithstanding Nussbaum’s positive claims on compassion, we have made a deliberate decision to focus our research on the development of students’ awareness of their own empathy as an element of cultural literacy. Compassion does constitute part of our classroom discussions, we touch on it and problematise it, but it is not the focus of our approach. Nussbaum’s idea of compassion, as discussed above, encompasses situations where there is “significant pain or misfortune” of another (1997, 90–91). While we certainly would hope that our students would act compassionately towards those less fortunate than themselves, the aim of our pedagogical approach is much broader than this. We wish to help students develop empathy as an element of cultural literacy, so that they may operate in a myriad different situations where cultural differences could otherwise pose a challenge. These situations need not necessarily involve the pain or suffering of others. Interestingly, as we will discuss in Chaps. 4 and 5, there were instances of compassion in our case studies, particularly Nussbaum’s idea of complex compassion. Thus, compassion involves part of our discussions, but our aim is the development of empathy as an element of cultural literacy.

32 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

2.3   The Controversial Relationship Between Reading and Empathy It is important to discuss with careful consideration a number of problems related to empathy, otherwise we risk falling into platitudes. As Keen points out, the question of whether or not we should trust our emotional responsiveness to narrative as a catalyst for moral actions is one that has been debated across centuries, from Plato to Pinker (2014, 22–27). At present, there are three main areas of controversy regarding the relationship between narrative and empathy: does feeling empathy for a fictional character translate into positive actions? Can narratives have the opposite effect that we seek here and stir hatred, intolerance and discrimination? And, is empathy an innate attribute that allows some readers to identify more with characters, or are people who read more, prone to developing empathy? Challenging Nussbaum’s assertion that novels foster empathy in readers, and this in turn results in social good, Keen argues against the underlying assumption that experiencing empathy will inevitably translate into positive social actions (2007, 22–35). Furthermore, Keen argues, even if readers were to feel empathy for characters in a book, there is no evidence that such empathy will be translated to real-world scenarios (2007, 35). Comparing reading habits in Germany during World War II with the fact that less than 1% of the people helped the Jews during the Holocaust, Keen points out that while this “does not preclude influence through fiction reading, to be sure, it does warrant caution when making claims about the formation of these particular good world citizens” (2007, 23). It could be argued that if feeling empathy cannot be directly linked to positive social actions, as is the case with compassion, empathy itself can be detrimental to society, resulting in moral complacency, for it could give us the illusion that we are doing something “good” by virtue of putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes, just by feeling, without enacting any real change. In this regard, Junker and Jacquemin argue, The idea that empathy, which tends to focus on individuals, often at the expense of fully accounting for the systemic social, political, cultural, and economic forces, will transform into real-world behavior or social change, may be wishful thinking […] After all, one of theories that explains why readers of fiction show stronger increases in empathy than readers of nonfiction is that fiction provides readers with a sense of safety because they can feel freely for negative situations without any accompanying sense of obligation to act in a concrete manner. (2017, 86)

2  CULTURAL LITERACY AND THE CASE FOR EMPATHY 

33

Keen concludes that while empathy may indeed precede sympathy and compassion, it is not indispensable for either. She argues that both can “be brought about by cognitive states other than empathy” (22). As we will discuss in Chap. 5 in relation to our teaching practice, this is why approaching empathy as a multidimensional framework with a cognitive dimension and why reflection both play a pivotal role in the student experience. Another important issue is the choice of texts themselves. According to intellectuals like Pinker and Nussbaum, stories have made humans better and nicer over time. This is a romantic view of literature that does not address the dark, immoral side of storytelling, and how narrative can be used to convince people to perpetrate the most nefarious acts. This brings us back to the question of canon addressed in Chap. 1 in relation to Hirsch’s work and the choice of the texts used in the classroom. If reading literature can be, indeed, a vehicle for empathy or compassion, “if the wrong texts are chosen, reading about difference could actually have the opposite of the intended affect—students could become less empathetic and more, instead of less, resistant to diversity and difference” (Junker and Jacquemin 2017, 85). As Chen argues, “literature which perpetuates essentialist, colonial, racist, sexist and otherwise de-humanising depiction” (2018, 2) will achieve the opposite of what we aim for in this study. Keen elaborates in this regard, Many more people read fiction sixty years ago than today. A vast majority of them must have been bystanders to the Holocaust, and undoubtedly some participated in carrying out genocide. This might leave novel reading in a neutral position, neither distinguishing bystanders nor inspiring altruists. A more disturbing option must be confronted. Could fiction have participated in stirring up race hatred? Does anything guarantee that the technology of fictional world-making will always be used to good ends? (2007, 26)

In this regard, Newstreet et al. also warn against the problems of choosing texts with the aim of representing entire cultural groups (2019, 560). Whenever a text aims to be culturally representative, this representation itself needs to be problematised and understood as a generalisation, with all the benefits that a generalisation can provide at an introductory level, but fully aware of its limitations.

34 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

Another controversial, still unresolved question on the relationship between narrative and empathy is whether innate empathy in readers informs their ability to identify with fictional characters, or whether reading itself has the capacity to develop narrative empathy, which can later be transferred to the real world. As Keen argues, If, on the one hand, empathy precedes (and invites) character identification, then empathy may be better understood as a faculty that readers bring to their imaginative engagement with texts—a human default setting—rather than as a quality gained from or cultivated by encounters with fiction … If, on the other hand, character identification opens the opportunity for empathy (this is the more common and more widely disseminated assumption), then representation of characters with strong differences might be used didactically, to develop a readers’ moral sense. (2007, 71)

The problem that Keen raises is known as the “chicken-and-egg” dilemma of empathy and reading that we had alluded to before. It has been addressed by numerous other scholars, both theoretically (Morton and Lounsbury 2015; Pinker 2011, 589) and empirically (Shapiro et al. 2005, 81). Until now, no consensus has been reached, and this is an important area of ambiguity that must be acknowledged as an existing limitation of our understanding of the moral, emotional effect that reading has on us.

2.4   Identification and Perspective-Taking: Mirrors and Windows “Mirrors” and “windows” are two metaphors commonly used to talk about the social function of narratives (Damrosch 2003; Colvin 2017; Tschida et  al. 2014). As defined by Colvin, “mirrors are narratives that reflect the reader’s experience or identity back to them, while windows are narratives that give readers a glimpse into an unfamiliar experience or story” (2017, 1). Some readers are naturally inclined towards “mirror narratives” that reflect their own world experience. For example, in a study by Turner to help social work students develop empathy through literature, participants showed a strong interest in narratives with characters of their same gender (2013). On the opposite end of the spectrum, what would be considered “window readers”, readers with a more developed sense of empathy are able to relate to characters who may be different from

2  CULTURAL LITERACY AND THE CASE FOR EMPATHY 

35

themselves, even at a fundamental level, and put themselves in those characters’ shoes. There are also readers in-between these opposite poles, who “draw heavily on real-life experiences but are able to use their understanding of themselves to engage with the lives of fictional characters in a more nuanced fashion” (Fjällström and Kokkola 2015, 402). Mirror narratives can be positive in a myriad ways. They can help readers reflect on who they are and why. They can, for example, foster the representation of minority groups and help readers of marginalised groups to understand the reasons and complexities of their circumstances. Window narratives tend to be more favoured when teaching intercultural communication. In his essay on literature and the global, García Ochoa argues, When books become windows, they open our eyes to other worlds, other ways of being. In the latter metaphor literature can help us embody positions different to our own. It can provide access to points of view that are otherwise inaccessible, with the added value of a critical process that allows us to understand such points of view. This subjectivity can kindle curiosity, and a need for inquiry. It fosters connection without barring disagreement, and helps expand our critical, epistemic horizons beyond the boundaries of what we know. Most importantly, subjectivity can develop our imaginations in a way that allows us to inhabit different possibilities, hypothesize about the nature and differences of what it means to be human outside the limits of our own identities … It is very hard not to question one’s positioning when one is constantly in touch with the subjective universe of literature. The possible ways of being that are offered by stories inevitably place our identities within a complex spectrum, culturally, historically, morally; they show us that even though we are at the center of our universe, we are not at the center of the universe. (García Ochoa 2018)

Like García Ochoa, Colvin argues that literature can work as a safe simulator for understanding different aspects of the human experience. According to her, “Stories are the perfect way to prepare for the world. Indirect interaction with new people and new situations provides a safe haven to perfect social skills and to alleviate anxiety about that new group or situation. Not only are diverse stories a simple way for young people to interact with new types of people, the indirect experience might be less stressful than a direct social situation” (2017, 3). Colvin goes on to suggest that social interactions with people whose lives may be fundamentally different from our own, need not necessarily take place between “physical

36 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

people” (an all-too-common phenomenon in this post-internet age) as they can also happen through stories and the characters in those stories (2017, 2), which is precisely the argument posed by Keen in relation to narrative empathy. In the words of Judith Butler, “by awakening a sense of what it might be like to be someone else or to live in another time or culture”, these window narratives “tell us about ourselves, stretch our imagination, and enrich our experience” (2014, 15). However, despite optimistic claims by those who champion literature as a vehicle for social justice such as Nussbaum, most evidence suggests that reading alone is not enough to increase a person’s empathy. Junker and Jacquemin’s study found that often, far from being conducive to the development of empathy, the objectives of courses on literary analysis are at odds with this (2017, 86). If a course aims to develop empathy in students, it has to be specifically designed to do so; even though literature can be a very efficient method for the development of empathy, empathy is not a guaranteed by-product of reading. Two approaches commonly used to develop empathy through literature are “identification” with characters and “perspective-taking”. Identification involves asking students to find common ground with a character in the story in order to “enhance their awareness of the ability to ‘relate to’ others, despite significant differences” (Turner 2013, 861). As such, it can be associated with “mirror” narratives and readers. Perspective-­ taking asks students to actively, consciously, put themselves in someone else’s shoes. Nussbaum refers to this as “imaginative displacement”, which according to her, is a cornerstone of empathy (2013, 146). According to Nikolajeva, it is “the most complicated and demanding characterisation device”, as it involves our mental representation of “a character’s interiority: thoughts, feelings, perceptions, beliefs, opinions, assumptions and intentions” (2014, 80). What might life be like if I were this person? How would my understanding of x, y or z be different from how I perceive these concepts as myself? This is closer to the idea of a window reader and a window narrative. Numerous studies have noted how a reader’s ability to identify with characters, in particular characters different from oneself (as in the case of window narratives), strongly influences empathy levels (Keen 2007, 68; Oatley 1999, 445; Johnson 2012, 150–155; Djikic et al. 2013). Nussbaum argues that part of the aim of classical comedies (such as the works of Aristophanes) was to show our common, shared vulnerability and limitations as humans, in spite of human differences. No matter who we are or

2  CULTURAL LITERACY AND THE CASE FOR EMPATHY 

37

where we come from, “Excretion, sex, and sweat are shown as signs of great vulnerability … embraced as common to all, as just a part of being alive, connected to life’s joy” (2013, 272). We find a commonality with perspective-taking. In his discussion of what he calls the “perspective-sympathy hypothesis”, Pinker refers to fiction as one of the many “technologies of vicarious experience” that have helped expand our sense of sympathy for others (Better Angels 2011, 583). In this regard, a number of studies have shown that exercises on perspective-­ taking that are part of a literary studies curriculum help facilitate the development of empathy (Colvin 2017; Turner 2013; 867; Junker and Jacquemin 2017; Newstreet et al. 2019), particularly those that prompt students to be creative about how they approach understanding the point of view of a character different from themselves, for example, by writing a journal entry from the point of view of a character in a text (Junker and Jacquemin 2017, 56). Oatley even suggests that reading that does not involve these kinds of exercises may have adverse effects on students’ empathy (1999, 445). The common denominator here appears to be reflection. As Koopman and Hakemulder argue, it is through reflection in relation to one’s reading that empathy may be developed to “the fullest extent” (2015, 101). Perspective-taking may help in the development of empathy, but it is only through reflection that any robust form of perspective-taking can come about, by gauging the differences and similarities between the reader and the character in question, and trying to imagine what the world would be like from that particular point of view. The same goes for identification with a character, which involves a process of introspection, where the common ground between reader and character is revealed. This is precisely why reading alone is often not enough as a tool to develop empathy. There are numerous instances in which reflection happens “naturally” in the reader, without it being prompted by an educator. Authors such as Nussbaum (1996, 2010, 2013) assume that this is a given element of the reading experience. However, this is not always the case. Therefore, in order to develop empathy in the student, the reading experience must be accompanied by a carefully curated process of reflection. If we revisit the metaphor of windows as books or mirrors, perhaps through well-tempered reflection there can be a liminal, dual approach to narrative, which can be more conducive to empathy. The text can become at once a mirror and a window as we see ourselves in the other and the other in ourselves.

38 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

2.5   Circle of Concern Furthermore, Nussbaum argues that societies have a moral responsibility to find effective, appropriate ways to extend compassion to their members (2013, 262). Basing her ideas on the work of Batson, she uses ancient Athenian festivals, stagings of Sophocles’ Antigone in particular, as a good example of how a society can engage with and negotiate difference within itself, how it can learn to “overcome a bodily disgust” towards some of its members who are markedly different from the majority, the kind of disgust that can “easily turn aggressive” (2013, 262). As Spiegel and Charon argue, literature and psychology “often entail attention to unpleasant, even horrible aspects of experience in the hope that suffering, when properly contained and considered, may widen one’s vision” (2004, viii). This is the very purpose of tragedy. The main reason why tragedies such as Antigone are able to achieve this effectively is that they widen our vision by exposing viewers to the possibility of suffering, implicitly suggesting that were circumstances outside of their control any different, they themselves could experience the hardship of tragic heroes. In this way, tragic spectatorship presents us with the possibility of our vulnerability, framing this as a common denominator for all humans, regardless of social segmentation. However, extending beyond the reach of classical tragedies, Nussbaum argues that much of the power of reading novels relies in their ability to help us understand not only the vulnerability of heroes, but of everyday humans, and in so doing, reading expands our “circle of concern”: The tragic form asks its spectators to cross cultural and national boundaries. On the other hand, in its universality and abstractness it omits much of the fabric of daily civic life, with its concrete distinctions of rank and power and wealth and the associated ways of thinking and speaking. For such reasons, later democratic thinkers interested in literature as a vehicle of citizenship came to take a particular interest in the novel—a genre whose rise coincided with, and supported, the rise of modern democracy. In reading a realist novel with active participation, readers do all that tragic spectators do, and something more. They embrace the ordinary. They care not only about kinds and children of kinds, but about David Copperfield, painfully working in a factory, or walking the twenty-six miles from London to Canterbury without food. Such concrete realities of a life of poverty are brought home to them with a textured vividness unavailable in tragic poetry. (1997, 94–95)

2  CULTURAL LITERACY AND THE CASE FOR EMPATHY 

39

Thus, Nussbaum argues, by experiencing compassion for these characters who are different from us, we expand our “circle of concern” (2013, 262). The consequences of a society not being able to expand its circle of concern are considerable. If those members of society who are markedly different are expelled from, or not ever part of the circle of concern, they may be stigmatised as a base underclass, and approached as sub-human, or not human at all (incidentally, dehumanisation is the fourth step in Gregory Stanton’s “Ten Stages of Genocide”, and it takes place when “one group denies the humanity of the other group. Members of it are equated with animals, vermin, insects, or diseases” (1996)). Dehumanisation, Nussbaum argues, “is a constant possibility in societies divided by class, race, gender, and other identities, particularly when disgust and stigma are involved” (262). But the literary imagination gives us another option. The literary imagination allows us to see ourselves in others, and that projection, that extension of care from the personal to the public, is what extends our circle of concern. In this manner, reading helps us “to see each person’s fate in every other’s, to picture it vividly as an aspect of our fate, and to conceive of the whole history of the human kind and its possible future as part of our own sphere of concern, through intense focusing on ideal images of human achievement” (2013, 62). As our case studies will show, Nussbaum’s idea of the circle of concern is particularly important in the case of refugees in Australia, who are often approached as non-human others. Unless we are able to expand our circle of concern to those different from us, such as refugees in this case, and enact compassion on their behalf, tangible actions spurred by empathy, little will be achieved.

References Aristotle. (1996). Poetics (M. Heath, Trans.). London: Penguin. Bal, P. M., & Veltkamp, M. (2013). How does Fiction Reading Influence Empathy? An Experimental Investigation on the Role of Emotional Transportation. Public Library of Science, 8(1), e55341. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal. pone.0055341. Batson, C.  D. (2011). Altruism in Humans. Oxford; New  York: Oxford University Press. Batson, C. D., Chang, J., Orr, R., & Rowland, J. (2002). Empathy, Attitudes, and Action: Can Feeling for a Member of a Stigmatized Group Motivate One to Help the Group? Personality and Social Psychological Bulletin, 28(12), 1656–1666.

40 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

Batson, C. D., Harmon-Jones, E., Imhoff, H. J., Mitchener, E. C., Bednar, L. L., Klein, T. R., et al. (1997). Empathy and Attitudes: Can Feeling for a Member of a Stigmatized Group Improve Feelings Toward the Group? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72(1), 105–118. https://doi. org/10.1037/0022-3514.72.1.105. Booth, W.  C. (1988). The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bortolussi, M. (2003). Psychonarratology: Foundations for the Empirical Study of Literary Response. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press. Brooks, P. (2014). Introduction. In P. Brooks, & H. Jewett (Eds.), The Humanities and Public Life. Retrieved from https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.ezproxy. lib.monash.edu.au Buell, L. (2001). Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Butler, J. (2014). Ordinary, Incredulous. In P. Brooks, & H. Jewett (Eds.), The Humanities and Public Life. Retrieved from https://ebookcentral-proquestcom.ezproxy.lib.monash.edu.au Chen, D. L. (2018). Law and Literature: Theory and Evidence on Empathy and Guile. Review of Law & Economics, 15, 1–33. Colvin, S. (2017). Literature as More Than a Window: Building Readers’ Empathy and Social Capacity through Exposure to Diverse Literature. Voice of Youth Advocates, 39(6), 24–29. Conrad, H. (2017). Rewiring Empathy: The Value of Multicultural Literature in the Classroom. In International Association of School Librarianship. Selected Papers from the … Annual Conference, 64–70. Retrieved from http://search. proquest.com/docview/2034243148/ Cornelissen, J., Oswick, C., Christensen, L., & Phillips, N. (2008). Metaphors in Organizational Research: Context, Modalities, and Implications for Research. Organization Studies, 28, 7–22. Cress, S. W., & Holm, D. T. (2000). Developing Empathy Through Children’s Literature. Education, 120(3), 9. Damrosch, D. (2003). What is World Literature? World Literature Today, 77(1), 9–14. https://doi.org/10.2307/40157771. Darian-Smith, E., & McCarty, P. (2016). Beyond Interdisciplinarity: Developing a Global Transdisciplinary Framework. Transcience, 7(2), 1–26. Dewilde, J., & Skrefsrud, T. (2016). Including Alternative Stories in the Mainstream: How Transcultural Young People in Norway Perform Creative Cultural Resistance in and Outside of School. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 20(10), 1032–1042. https://doi.org/10.1080/1360311 6.2016.1145263.

2  CULTURAL LITERACY AND THE CASE FOR EMPATHY 

41

Djikic, M., Oatley, K., & Moldoveanu, M.  C. (2013). Reading Other minds: Effects of Literature on Empathy. Scientific Study of Literature, 3, 28–47. Elick, C.  L. (2015). Talking Animals in Children’s Fiction: A Critical Study. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers. Fjällström, E., & Kokkola, L. (2015). Resisting Focalisation, Gaining Empathy: Swedish Teenagers Read Irish Fiction. Children’s Literature in Education, 46(4), 394–409. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-014-9238-7. Freeman, L.  H., & Bays, C. (2007). Using Literature and the Arts to Teach Nursing. International Journal of Nursing Education Scholarship, 4(1), 15. Retrieved from www.bepress.com/ijnes/vol4/iss1/art15. Ganzer, C. (1994). Using Literature as an Aid to Practice. Journal of Contemporary Human Services, 75(10), 616–623. Garcia Ochoa, G. C. (2018). The Positive Aspects of Bewilderment: Literature in the Global Context. global-e, 11(38). Retrieved from http://www.21global. ucsb.edu/global-e/july-2018/positive-aspects-bewilderment-literatureglobal-context Gerrig, R. J., Love, J., & McKoon, G. (2009). Waiting for Brandon: How Readers Respond to Small Mysteries. J Mem Lang, 60, 144–153. Hammond, M.  M., & Sue, J.  K. (Eds.). (2014). Rethinking Empathy through Literature. Taylor & Francis. Harste, J., Leland, C., & Lewison, M. (2008). Creating Critical Classrooms: K–8 reading and Writing with an Edge. New York, NY: Erlbaum. Heilman, E. (2008). Including Voices from the World through Global Citizenship Education. Social Studies and the Young Learner, 20(4), 30–32. Herrera, S. (2012). Globalization: Current Constraints and Promising Perspectives. Journal of Curriculum and Instruction, 6(1), 1–10. https://doi.org/10.3776/ joci.2010.v6n1p1-10. Hoffman, M. L. (2000). Empathy and Moral Development: Implications for Caring and Justice. Cambridge, UK, New York: Cambridge University Press. Hogan, W. (2009). Animals in Young Adult Fiction. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Johnson, D. R. (2012). Transportation into a Story Increases Empathy, Prosocial Behavior, and Perceptual Bias Toward Fearful Expressions. Personality and Individual Differences, 52, 150–155. Johnson, D.  R. (2013). Transportation into Literary Fiction Reduces Prejudice Against and Increases Empathy for Arab-Muslims. Scientific Study of Literature, 3(1), 77–92. https://doi.org/10.1075/ssol.3.1.08joh. Johnson, D.  R., Jasper, D.  M., Griffin, S., & Huffman, B.  L. (2013). Reading Narrative Fiction Reduces Arab-Muslim Prejudice and Offers a Safe haven from Intergroup Anxiety. Social Cognition, 31(5), 578–598. https://doi. org/10.1521/soco.2013.31.5.578.

42 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

Junker, C. R., & Jacquemin, S. J. (2017). How Does Literature Affect Empathy in Students? College Teaching, 65(2), 79–87. https://doi.org/10.108 0/87567555.2016.1255583. Kahn, P. (2014). On Humanities and Human Rights. In P. Brooks, & H. Jewett (Ed.), The Humanities and Public Life. Retrieved from https://ebookcentralproquest-com.ezproxy.lib.monash.edu.au Kaufman, G. F., & Libby, L. K. (2012). Changing Beliefs and Behavior Through Experience-taking. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103(1), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0027525. Keen, S. (2007). Empathy and the Novel. New  York; Oxford: Oxford University Press. Keen, S. (2014). Novel Readers and the Empathetic Angel of Our Nature. In M. M. Hammond & J. K. Sue (Eds.), Rethinking Empathy through Literature (pp. 21–33). Taylor & Francis. Kidd, D. C., & Castano, E. (2013). Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind. Science Express, 3, 1–6. Koopman, E.  M., & Hakemulder, F. (2015). Effects of Literature on Empathy and Self-Reflection: A Theoretical-Empirical Framework. Journal of Literary Theory, 9(1), 79–111. Lawrence, T. B. and Phillips, N. (2004) ‘From Moby Dick to Free Willy: Macrocultural discourse and institutional entrepreneurship in emerging institutional fields’, Organization, 11, pp. 689–711. Lear, J. (2014). The Call of Another’s Words. In P. Brooks, & H. Jewett (Ed.), The Humanities and Public Life. Retrieved from https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.ezproxy.lib.monash.edu.au Lima, N. (2015, October 15). 10 Fiction Novels with an Animal Rights Message. Retrieved July 10, 2017, from http://www.care2.com/causes/10-fiction-novels-with-an-animal-rights-message.html Lindgren, M., McDonald, S., Monk, N., & Pasfield-Neofitu, S. (2015). Portal Pedagogy: From Interdisciplinarity and Internationalization to Transdisciplinarity and Transnationalization. London Review of Education., 13(3), 62–78. Małecki, W., Pawłowski, B., Cieński, M., & Sorokowski, P. (2018). Can Fiction Make us Kinder to other Species? The Impact of Fiction on Pro-animal Attitudes and Behavior. Poetics, 66, 54–63. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. poetic.2018.02.004. Małecki, W., Pawłowski, B., & Sorokowski, P. (2016). Literary Fiction Influences Attitudes toward Animal Welfare. PLoS One, 11(12), e0168695. https://doi. org/10.1371/journal.pone.0168695.

2  CULTURAL LITERACY AND THE CASE FOR EMPATHY 

43

Małecki, W., Pawłowski, B., Sorokowski, P., & Oleszkiewicz, A. (2019). Feeling for Textual Animals: Narrative Empathy Across Species Lines. Poetics, 74, 101334. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2018.11.003. Morton, L., & Lounsbury, L. (2015). Inertia to Action: From Narrative Empathy to Political Agency in Young Adult Fiction. Papers: Explorations into Children’s Literature, 23(2), 53–70. Newstreet, C., Sarker, A., & Shearer, R. (2019). Teaching Empathy: Exploring Multiple Perspectives to Address Islamophobia Through Children’s Literature. Reading Teacher, 72(5), 559–568. https://doi.org/10.1002/trtr.1764. Nikolajeva, M. (2012). Guilt, Empathy and the Ethical Potential of Children’s Literature. Barnboken—Tidskrift För barnlitteraturforskning/Journal of Children’s Literature Research, 35(0). https://doi.org/10.3402/clr. v35i0.18081 Nikolajeva, M. (2014). Reading for Learning: Cognitive Approaches to Children’s Literature. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Press. Nussbaum, M. C. (1996). Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Nussbaum, M. C. (1997). Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nussbaum, M. C. (2010). Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Nussbaum, M.  C. (2013). Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Oatley, K. (1999). Meeting of Minds: Dialogue, Sympathy, and Identification in Reading Fiction. Poetics, 26, 439–454. Panero, M. E., Weisberg, D. S., Black, J., Goldstein, T. R., Barnes, J. L., Brownell, H., & Winner, E. (2016). Does Reading a Single Passage of Literary Fiction Really Improve Theory of Mind? An Attempt at Replication. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 111, e46. Pinker, S. (2011). The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. New York: Viking. Regan, T., & Linzey, A. (Eds.). (2010). Other Nations: Animals in Modern Literature. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press. Rousseau, J.-J. (1979). Emile: or, On Education. New York: Basic Books. Scarry, E. (2012). The Literacy Revolution: Poetry, Injury, and the Ethics of Reading. Boston Review, 37(4), 66–70. Retrieved from http://search.proquest. com/docview/1024831026/. Scarry, E. (2014). Poetry, Injury, and the Ethics of Reading. In P.  Brooks, & H.  Jewett (Eds.), The Humanities and Public Life. Retrieved from https:// ebookcentral-proquest-com.ezproxy.lib.monash.edu.au

44 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

Schotland, S. D. (2009). Justice for Undergraduates: Teaching Law and Literature in the Liberal Arts Curriculum. Currents in Teaching and Learning, 2(1), 41–48. Schwitzer, A. M., Boyce, D., Cody, P., Holman, A., & Stein, J. (2005). Clinical Supervision and Professional Development Using Clients From Literature, Popular Fiction, and Entertainment Media. Journal of Creativity in Mental Health, 1(1), 57–80. Shapiro, J. (2002). How Do Physicians Teach Empathy in the Primary Care Setting? Academic Medicine, 77(4), 323–328. https://doi. org/10.1097/00001888-200204000-00012. Shapiro, J., Duke, A., Boker, J., & Ahearn, C.  S. (2005). Just a Spoonful of Humanities Makes the Medicine Go Down: Introducing Literature into a Family Medicine Clerkship. Medical Education, 39(6), 605–612. Sharifian, F. (2013). Globalisation and Developing Metacultural Competence in Learning English as an International Language. Multilingual Education, 3(1), 1–11. Slaby, R., Roedell, W., Arezzo, D., & Hendrix, K. (1995). Early Violence Prevention. Washington, DC: NAEYC. Solnit, R. (2013). The Faraway Nearby. New York: Penguin Books. Spiegel, M., & Charon, R. (2004). Editors’ Preface: Narrative, Empathy, Proximity. Literature and Medicine, 23(2), vii–x. https://doi.org/10.1353/ lm.2005.0015. Stanton, G. (1996). The Ten Stages of Genocide. Online Resource: Retrieved from https://www.genocidewatch.com/ten-stages-of-genocide Tansey, S. (2016). Exploring Empathy Through the Patient Experience in Literature. The Journal of Nursing Education, 55(7), 420. https://doi. org/10.3928/01484834-20160615-13. Tschida, C. M., Ryan, C. L., & Ticknor, A. S. (2014). Building on Windows and Mirrors: Encouraging the Disruption of “Single Stories” through Children’s Literature. Journal of Children’s Literature, 40(1), 28–39. Turner, L.  M. (2013). Encouraging Professional Growth among Social Work Students Through Literature Assignments: Narrative Literature’s Capacity to Inspire Professional Growth and Empathy. British Journal of Social Work, 43(5), 853–871. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/bcs011. Tussing, H. L., & Valentine, D. P. (2001). Helping Adolescents Cope with the Mental Illness of a Parent through Bibliotherapy. Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal, 18(6), 455–469. Vezzali, L., Stathi, S., & Giovannini, D. (2012). Indirect contact Through Book Reading: Improving Adolescents’ Attitudes and Behavioral Intentions Toward Immigrants. Psychology in the Schools, 49(2), 148–162. https://doi. org/10.1002/pits.20621.

2  CULTURAL LITERACY AND THE CASE FOR EMPATHY 

45

Vezzali, L., Stathi, S., Giovannini, D., Capozza, D., & Trifiletti, E. (2015). The Greatest Magic of Harry Potter: Reducing prejudice. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 45(2), 105–121. https://doi.org/10.1111/jasp.12279. Vizzini, N. (2011). Animal Rights Books for the Compassionate Bookworm. Retrieved July 10, 2017, from https://www.peta.org/living/entertainment/ animal-rightsbooks/. Winefield, H.  R., & Chur-Hansen, A. (2000). Evaluating the Outcome of Communication Skill Teaching for Entry-level Medical Students: Does Knowledge of Empathy Increase? Medical Education, 34, 90–94.

CHAPTER 3

Destabilisation and Reflection

In this chapter, we build on the notion of cultural literacy, examining it as an applied practice and analysing different ways in which it can be implemented in the learning journey. Specifically, we explore destabilisation and reflection as the core learning practices that we use to develop cultural literacy in students and argue how, when carefully framed and unpacked, destabilisation and reflection can lead to building new ways of understanding both the world and the self. The chapter begins by explaining our idea of destabilisation as a multidimensional framework with emotional and cognitive dimensions and why it is conducive to learning and teaching cultural literacy. We locate destabilisation within a spectrum of experiential learning and explain why Open-Space Learning (OSL) techniques serve as ideal tools for destabilisation. Our arguments on destabilisation are followed by a detailed discussion on reflection as a critical skill in helping students develop their “cultural readability”, which we explain within the context of cultural literacy. We highlight the importance of reflection as a modus operandi, a transferable skill for meaning-making and understanding, that can be used in any professional context following instances of destabilisation, uncertainty or confusion. By “understanding” we do not allude to a “flattening” of knowledge, or a “harmonisation” of the unknown, or even reaching a state of comfort in the presence of something new and unsettling (although, the latter may be a by-product of reflection). Rather, we refer to the ability to draw meaning from

© The Author(s) 2020 G. García Ochoa, S. McDonald, Cultural Literacy and Empathy in Education Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59904-1_3

47

48 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

experiences and be at ease with the possibility of discomfort that such meaning can bring. We move on to a discussion of the difference between Schön’s distinction of the immediacy of reflection: reflection-in-action (reflecting while engaged in an experience), and reflection-on-action, which refers to reflection after an experience has taken place. We argue why, in the context of teaching cultural literacy, we favour the latter as a more transformative, long-lasting learning experience. Following this, we discuss reflection as a multidimensional framework, also comprised of both cognitive and emotional (visceral) dimensions, and its relationship to destabilisation as a multidimensional framework. Here, we draw a link with Keen’s, Cress and Holm’s and Junker and Jacquemin’s multidimensional framework of empathy and explore the relationship between the two. We explore the idea of reflection not taking place alone (although it can) but as a collaborative, shared experience which can work effectively in a group setting. To conclude, we discuss the role of the educator in facilitating moments of destabilisation in the classroom and explain how that role can be destabilised within certain contexts, to allow for a more transformative educational experience.

3.1   Destabilisation in Developing Cultural Literacy In previous publications we have defined destabilisation as a key step in the process of developing cultural literacy, a technique that culminates in “both a conceptual shift in students, and a more instinctive ‘visceral’ form of unrest that is aimed at unsettling their views on culture, identity, and the world at large” (García Ochoa et  al. 2016, 550). An experience of destabilisation, whether in the classroom or through a student’s personal experience is a “liminal stage in the learning process … when students have already encountered the unknown without fully assimilating the implications of the learning experience, and as a consequence, find themselves in an ambiguous state, with certain unresolved tensions regarding their views of the discipline and what these imply” (García Ochoa et al. 2016, 550). Beyond the disciplinary uncertainty that occurs in a defined classroom or educative setting, these “unresolved tensions” can also make themselves present in a sense of place or identity or in relation to the experience of learning itself.

3  DESTABILISATION AND REFLECTION 

49

The aim of destabilisation in the context of cultural literacy is to become aware of what is assumed or taken for granted and pull this into sharp relief, questioning and probing experiences of uncertainty. The facilitated experience of destabilisation is used to prompt students to consider “how they approach that which they do not know, how they engage both conceptually and empirically with the unknown” (García Ochoa et al. 550). Navigating the uncertain in a safe, class-based setting allows students to critically interrogate their personal, professional and disciplinary identities, in order to gain the self-recognition necessary for the meta-cognitive shift to achieve a transformative learning experience. While destabilisation is undoubtedly a form of experiential learning, not every experience will necessarily be destabilising. In fact, many individual experiences may conform to, or are experienced through, a frame of pre-existing ideas, knowledge and experiences and serve to support existing frames of reference for understanding. While this is not necessarily problematic, it is not the type of experience to which we refer here or that we seek to elicit or deploy as a tool in the classroom. Rather, destabilisation in relation to cultural literacy refers to a form of experience that to a greater or lesser extent has the potential to disrupt pre-existing or fixed knowledge or frameworks. The destabilisation “experience” can be instigated by applying a range of tools or approaches in the learning context. The development of structured or constructed experiences to elicit cultural learning can be seen in techniques often associated with experiential learning, which exists within a spectrum (García Ochoa et  al. 2019). On one end of this spectrum, there is full immersion, iso-immersion, the real-life experiences used in military training and less intense learning models like study abroad experiences (Woodcook and Russell 2011). Iso-immersion places students in real-life situations and pushes them to fend for themselves and learn from the experience. On the opposite end of the spectrum are mediated experiences known as critical incidents, where students are presented with real-­ life scenarios studied theoretically in the classroom without immersion. Critical incidents are often used in intercultural competence (ICC) training; they represent the least experiential examples of experiential learning. Standing between iso-immersion and critical incidents is “destabilisation”, a more embodied approach than in critical incidents, using role-play or simulations, but still within a controlled, curated learning environment. In the case of cultural literacy in the tertiary environment, our approach to destabilisation is neither purely theoretical nor constructed, as may be

50 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

experienced in intercultural competence training, nor does it presuppose a fully immersive, othering, experience. Instead, we use destabilisation to help students build strategies that allow them to understand and learn from the visceral and intellectual discomfort inherent in new, unfamiliar experiences. One of the central theoretical methodologies that have helped us frame class-based destabilisation is Open-Space Learning. Open-Space Learning (OSL) has a 15-year history. It can be traced back to 2005, when it emerged as part of a transdisciplinary collaboration spearheaded by Professor Nicholas Monk at the University of Warwick’s CAPITAL Centre. The first aim of the CAPITAL Centre was to develop new, innovative and best practice strategies for learning and teaching. These strategies sought to do two things at once: train “students in theatre performance skills and creative thinking and, at the same time, teach them how to transfer these skills to their learning in other subjects” (García Ochoa et al. 2018, 513). In this manner, students would be able to engage with the new knowledge pertaining to their academic discipline with an embodied “organic understanding” of this knowledge that would prepare them to “integrate this into their world outside academia” (García Ochoa et al. 2018, 513). This approach is known as “active performance”, which entails the understanding of embodied knowledge, “space and performance, and their effects upon teaching and learning” (Monk et  al. 1). Furthermore, active performance offers “a shared space—both physical and conceptual—for teachers, students and practitioners … to come together and inform each other’s work, linking theory with practice” (Bate and Brock 2007, 343). Following the principles of active performance, OSL aims to create a safe learning space that, whilst controlled and secure, is far from being a comfort zone, and is designed to challenge participants’ expectations. Therefore, our central conceptualisation of destabilisation finds a counterpart in OSL. Without explicitly referring to it as such, the notion of destabilisation as we define it is at the core of OSL. In an academic context, where learning is traditionally “intellectual”, often intentionally dissociated from the body, most students find the embodied nature of OSL challenging and destabilising. However, when the process is facilitated with due care, and with the correct preparation and scaffolding (which are crucial to its success), it “allows students to experiment and take risks, explore their creativity and the limits of their learning potential” (García Ochoa et al. 2018, 513) and as a consequence, it can generate profound, transformative learning experiences, real “threshold moments” of learning. In this regard, Monk et al. argue that

3  DESTABILISATION AND REFLECTION 

51

the open spaces draw participants into an acknowledgement of their embodied nature, which can lead to complete engagement with it, and that has the effect first of radically unsettling them (reactions of discomfort to the sheer vulnerability they feel through intense self-exposure), but then of liberating them. Working collaboratively, sharing ideas, moving around and through open space (doing their thinking not just intellectually but physically), they see themselves trying things out, rehearsing possibilities, freed to be provisional, to take risks, to offer and own ideas, but also to make mistakes and to change their minds. (“Introduction” 2011, 3)

OSL is transdisciplinary in nature. It brings together theories in pedagogy, performance, neuroscience and social theory. As Monk et al. explain, OSL is informed by […] methods such as “enactive” learning, “kinaesthetic” learning, and the various methods of teaching developed by practitioners such as Augusto Boal and Paulo Freire, and related to the work of thinkers like Lev Vygotsky, Howard Gardner, and David A. Kolb. It also has affinities with “applied drama,” “applied theatre,” or “applied performance.” In addition, theories around OSL are influenced by the work in neuroscience of academics like Andy Clark and Antonio Damasio, who seek to reconnect mind, body and work. Beyond this, we have incorporated social theory and the ideas connected to a “third space,” in which teaching and learning are conducted in ways, and in spaces, that bring together knowledges and skills from students, subject experts and practitioners in the creation of understanding. (2011, 2)

Specific examples of OSL activities and their deployment in the classroom are detailed in Chap. 5. As with OSL, we recognise that destabilisation in the classroom context comes with certain risks, and while we certainly aim to encourage students to move beyond the comfortable parameters of their existing knowledge and understanding, we take great care to support the learner. It is imperative that the facilitator be aware of how different moments of destabilisation can affect different people in varied ways and we need to be cognisant of, and value, the diversity of classroom experiences. While destabilisation is central to the development of the culturally literate individual, as many scholars have recognised, destabilisation alone is not sufficient to prompt the cognitive shift requisite for a transformative

52 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

learning experience. Instead, a conscious process of critical reflection prompted in students and developed as a modus operandi for life-long learning creates the space for meaningful development of cultural literacy.

3.2   Experiential Learning and Reflection We acknowledge that we are by no means the first researchers to link experience and subsequent reflection with potential learning. The concept of reflective education has been used by many educational theorists as an avenue to develop practice knowledge, autonomy, critical thinking and open-mindedness (Horton-Deutsch and Cara, 140). While reflective practice has become part of educational approaches across many fields, much of the research around reflection as a learning practice has been concentrated in the areas of teacher education, adult education and professional learning and in the health fields of nursing and social work (Dewey, J. 1933, 1938; Schön 1983, 1987; Kolb, D. A. 1984; Meizrow, J. 1981; Johns, C. 2006, 2016). Much of the theorisation around reflection in practice has focused on defined professional practices in these areas. In the case of cultural literacy, our use of reflection as a learning practice focuses on the development of a skill set that can be deployed in a range of professional and personal settings; it is the cultivation of a modus operandi for meaning-making in any situation. To better understand how we converge with, and bifurcate from, broader understandings of reflection and reflective practice, it is worth pausing to look at existing understandings of, and methods for, reflection. Most analyses of the use of reflection in learning contexts refer to the work of both John Dewey and Donald Schön. In 1933, the publication of John Dewey’s How We Think set out an understanding of experience as part of a cycle of continuous learning. For Dewey, “experience is an interaction between the individual and the environment” and experience in an educational setting was wide-ranging “includ[ing] reading, taking notes, discussion and participating in activities. An experience also contains continuity, a continuous flow of knowledge from previous experiences” (in Horton-Deutsch and Cara, 139). The continuity of multiple experiences, that is, how past experiences inform present and future thought and actions in the face of new experiences, is a form of learning that develops knowledge and skills (Dewey 1938, 44). The possibilities offered through experience in one’s own learning needed in Dewey’s understanding to be

3  DESTABILISATION AND REFLECTION 

53

followed by reflection in order for the learning to occur. For Dewey reflection is “… an active, persistent and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it and the further conclusions to which it tends” (Dewey 1933, 9). One of the key elements of Dewey’s understanding of reflection is that it is focused on the resolution of a problem, “a solution for a perplexity” (Horton-­ Deutsch and Cara, 140). In his theorisation of learning through reflection is the role of reflection “to transform a situation in which doubt, conflict, or disturbance is experienced into one that is clear, coherent and harmonious” (Dewey 1933 in Horton-Deutsch and Cara P140). Horton-Deutsch and Cara note that “Dewey suggests that reflection leads to increased control by directing the learner to deeper insight and freeing the learner from merely impulsive and routine activity. Reflective thinking takes time and requires engaging in several phases of thought” (Dewey 1933, 106–115). These are: • Perplexity: responding to suggestions and ideas that appear when confronted with a problem • Elaboration: referring to past experiences that are similar • Hypothesis: developing several potential hypotheses • Comparing hypotheses: finding some coherence within these hypotheses • Taking action: experiencing “mastery, satisfaction, enjoyment when selecting and then acting on these hypotheses” In Dewey’s view of the reflexive process, what he identifies as “perplexity” resonates with what we call destabilisation, although in the case of Dewey’s definition it is presented as a “problem” that needs to be resolved. For us destabilisation can be an ongoing or temporary experience that the individual does not necessarily seek to resolve or harmonise, as Dewey suggests as an ideal outcome. Rather, destabilisation can be a moment or a series of moments that the culturally literate individual can navigate and use to build understanding. The capacity to draw meaning from these experiences results in an ability to work through sensations of intellectual discomfort rather than erase or harmonise the multiplicity of experiences that can lead to that discomfort. To be clear: understanding something, at either an intellectual or an emotional level, does not necessarily equate to feeling comfortable. The development of cultural literacy allows an individual to be at ease in the absence of harmony, and the drive to

54 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

immediately rationalise experience shifts to a focus on understanding, and being at ease with temporary discomfort as part of the learning process, which is discussed in more detail below. Horton-Deutsch and Cara also detail the work of Schön (1983, 1987) in regard to the role and process of reflection. In particular, they highlight Schön’s interest in adaptive knowledge attained through experience in clinical settings, in particular his distinction between reflection-in-action— reflecting while engaged in an experience—and reflection-on-action— reflecting after the experience is completed (141). In many ways Schön’s work is seen as a counterpoint to Dewey’s in that, where Dewey privileges the intellectual processes of reflection that examine the experience, attempt to resolve the problem triggered by the experience and then incorporate that experience into knowing, Schön brings to the fore the contribution of intuitive practice or knowledge cultivated through experience. Where Dewey’s work is “criticised for its overreliance on rationalism and technical rationality” and its development as an “ends-based” model (Hébert 2015, 363), Schön “reconstructs the epistemology of practice, removing it from its inferior status in relation to theory” (Munby and Russell 1989, 71). In her examination of the models for reflective practice offered by Dewey and Schön, Cristyne Hérbert explains that in Schön’s model “[e]xperiential knowledge … cannot be dismissed as merely anecdotal (Bleakley 1999), but rather is viewed as a superior form of knowing” (2015, 365). Like Dewey, Schön has been critiqued by fellow theorists and educators. In particular, he has been accused of being “atheoretical” and “apolitical” (Thompson and Pascal, 316). Of greater interest to our understanding of reflection and its role in the development of the culturally literate individual is the concern that Schön’s approach to reflection “neglect[s] … the significance of language, meaning and narrative” (Thompson and Pascal 2012, 317) and thus does not fully engage with “meaning-making” in the process of reflection. Building on his theoretical predecessors, in particular John Dewey, David Kolb developed a widely cited theory of experiential learning (1984). For Kolb “learning is the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience” (1984, 38). Kolb et al. further clarified this transformative potential by explicitly building on the cognitive processes that underpin learning via experience. In this sense “the term ‘experiential’ is used … to differentiate experiential learning theory both from cognitive learning theories, which tend to emphasise cognition

3  DESTABILISATION AND REFLECTION 

55

over affect, and behavioural learning theories that deny any role for subjective experience in the learning process” (Kolb et al. 2000, 67). Kolb (1984) sets out a series of phases that document the cycle of experience and reflection. Individuals’ practical experiences offer an opportunity to build knowledge. They then consider a particular experience or set of experiences in the context of their existing knowledge; that is, they enter a process of reflection. The next stage is to locate these reflections in the framework of what they already know; the final stage is the application of this new learning attained via the experience and the reflection on that experience (Horton-Deutsch and Cara 2017, 140–141). In Kolb’s model, experience and reflection are not single points that result in a fixed shift in thought and learning with a defined end point; rather, both experience and reflection are part of a continuous learning cycle that presupposes future learning and reflection that will again be applied to build new knowledge. In this foreground of the continuous and cyclical nature of learning through experience and reflection, Kolb intersects directly with Dewey’s assertion that for the purpose of learning, experience must contain an element of continuity so that each experience is part of a web of ongoing experiences that build foundations for new learning. Dewey, Schön and Kolb’s work have been central to understanding the role of experience and subsequent reflection on the learning process. One of the key elements, which has been the focus of many other theorists and scholars, is the need to develop parameters and processes that can underpin reflection, acknowledging Horton-Deutsch and Cara’s point that as a learning tool reflection “grew out of the limitations of knowledge derived from technical rationality and research-based knowledge alone” (2017, 142). There are numerous suggested frameworks for reflection. Many of the existing models are rooted in the assessment of clinical medical practice, particularly that in nursing. In their overview of reflective practices in nursing, Horton-Deutsch and Cara (2017, 142–143) detail in particular The Gibbs Reflective Cycle (1988): . Describe what happened 1 2. If it happened again, what would you do? 3. What were you thinking/feeling? 4. What else could you have done? 5. What was good/bad about the experience? 6. What sense can you make of the situation?

56 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

And the Boyd and Fales Model (1983) for reflective practice: • A sense of inner discomfort • Identification or clarification of concerns • Openness to new information for external and internal sources • Establishing continuity of self with past, present and future • Deciding whether to act on the outcome of the reflective process While the Gibbs model provokes a set of responses to specific, if broad, questions, the Boyd and Fales model focuses on inner cognitive processes. Boyd and Fales’ model reflects their understanding of reflective learning as “a process of internally examining and exploring an issue of concern, triggered by an experience, which creates and clarifies meaning in terms of self, and which results in a changed conceptual perspective” (1983, 99). There is an attempt via both structures for reflection to move to a final phase of decisive action. This focus on action links these models with those proposed by both Dewey and Schön who diverge at the point of the temporal specificity of the action but not at the notion of “action” as the key point of the reflective process. In the development of cultural literacy, the question of temporality is not important in the way it is for Schön, or even in the delay that occurs in a reflection-on-action model. For Schön the question of temporality can be critical because he is concerned with practitioners and reflection/ action at the moment of practice, while for us the action can occur at any time from the moment or the ongoing process of reflection; the immediacy of the action does not make it richer. It is the act beyond the moment of reflection, beyond the classroom that shows a greater cognitive and affective shift and also evidences an authenticity in the shift of perspective as it is not constrained by the requirements of a particular educational setting but rather shows a deeper transformation of understanding and perspective. This approach to temporality is also conducive to the development of what Nussbaum terms “complex compassion” which was elaborated on in Chap. 2. An example of this is developed later in Chaps. 4 and 5, when one of the students participating in a class focused on the experience of Syrian refugees in Melbourne, Australia, and then chooses, after completing her course, to identify ways to engage with, better understand and support this community. In all the aforementioned models there is a focus on, and some would argue a privileging of, the intellectual cognitive process involved in

3  DESTABILISATION AND REFLECTION 

57

reflection. The role of emotion is not eliminated from the reflective process; indeed as Kolb mentions above the recognition of subjective experience allows for affect in ways that do not insist that it is subsumed by cognitive processes. As Alterio and McDrury (2003) have asserted, “[t]he place of feelings and emotions, irrespective of whether they are negative or positive, is important in any reflective process” (Boud et al. 1985). They assert that through “acknowledging and integrating affective reactions, within and around stories, it is possible for students to move to processing practice events reflectively in constructive ways” (107). Richard Jordí (2011) advocates “mind-body” integration both in experiential learning and in its associated reflective practice. He states that “[f]or reflection to be a purely cognitive exercise excludes much of the richness and complexity of human experience and consciousness from knowledge creation” (193). Unlike Alterio and McDrury, Jordi views the importance of being aware of one’s feelings in reflective practice as central, not as an element to be incorporated and asserts that this has been skewed by a desire to “resolve” emotion “in the service of promoting clarity of learning” (185). He cites Michelson (1996) when noting that “[c]learing feelings out of the way of rational interpretation of experience is very different to embracing emotion and feeling as important sources of knowledge” (185). This mind-body duality or the tendency to privilege the mind and the processes of rationalisation over the visceral experience afforded through the manifestation of emotion in learning has been an ongoing tension within the practice of reflection. Since the work of Dewey and Schön, the raison d’être of the reflective process has been to resolve discomfort, to solve the “problem” that has arisen. While Schön’s work as discussed above does bring to the fore a more instinctive and immediate reflection-in-action, both have left an inheritance in reflective practice that seeks to resolve uncertainty and make the unknown known. In the practices of applied cultural literacy we seek to better navigate uncertainty and the unknown, to more effectively draw meaning from such scenarios rather than to remove the uncertainty altogether. As mentioned above, Dewey’s quest for harmonisation may be a by-product of cultural literacy in practice but it is not its aim. Harmonisation requires and risks a flattening of experience, its uncomfortable insertion into a known, understood and accepted framework or the adjustment of that framework in order for it to fit. In cultural literacy, learners may need to accept the discomfort of a given experience and the desire to “resolve” that discomfort may be

58 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

where the reflective practice is deployed, but the assumed outcome is not the elimination of a difficult emotive or cognitive state. The notion that the cognitive outplays the affective in a “hierarchy” of learning is addressed by Jordi in his argument for a re-embodiment of experiential learning in which he draws on the work of Tara Fenwick and Elana Michelson. Jordi notes that while “supporting the progressive challenge that experiential learning discourse and practice have posed to traditional hierarchies of knowledge expertise, [scholars] … have developed quite fundamental critiques of its pedagogical assumptions (Fenwick 2001, 2006; Michelson 1996)” (186). Jordi notes that “[t]he constructivist experiential learning perspective posits that an individual learner can extract learning from distinct concrete experience through a process of cognitive reflection that is best undertaken separate from experience, ideally through facilitation by an educator” (186–187). In detailing the fundamental critiques posited by Fenwick, Jordi states that her analyses are “consistent in their criticism of experiential learning’s rationalist detachment from the subjective, social, contextual, cultural and co-emergent richness of human experience” (187). Jordi suggests that the “remedy” for this is “the need for experiential learning to be ‘re-embodied’” (187). Among the arguments for this re-­ embodiment, Coulter (2001) suggests that reflection has no place in the re-conceptualisation of experiential learning towards an embodied practice, while Michelson (1996) strongly critiques both the concept and practice of reflection as an inherently gendered practice that doesn’t value the body itself as a site of learning. Our practice and theorisation of developing cultural literacy acknowledges the limitations of an unchecked or unquestioning adherence to a particular model of reflective practice; however, we do not advocate its abandonment but rather its careful adoption through models that encourage and recognise embodied experience and learning and like Stelter (2005) we would “[argue] that reflection is still an important concept insofar as it facilitates the making of meaning by integrating the ‘experiential and pre-reflective dimension’ with the ‘discursive, narrative and community-based dimensions’ of human experience” (7). For us the process of reflection does not negate the possibilities for embodied experiential learning rather we would advocate for making use of such experiences as sources of knowledge and cogitation. In fact, as discussed in Chap. 2, developing awareness of empathy as a learning outcome of building cultural literacy engages both emotional/affective and cognitive processes that need to be recognised and engaged by the learner.

3  DESTABILISATION AND REFLECTION 

59

The “multidimensional framework of empathy” explored in Chap. 2 insists on the coexistence of affective and cognitive dimensions. This creates the necessity to develop an awareness of both facets of experience that contribute to meaning-making and ensure that students have the tools to recognise the impact and the role of each when navigating both the known and the unknown. Thus, destabilisation “opens the door” to empathy. It provides the cognitive and emotional jolt for a shift in perspective, which takes place through reflection and creates the understanding of someone else’s point of view. We argue that the way to develop this multifaceted approach to reflection, that sits across the affective and cognitive dimensions, would be to develop a critical reflexivity supported through structured, scaffolded reflective practice. Thompson and Pascal (2012) make the case for the explicit and intentional insertion of an active criticality into the heart of reflective practice. For them the development of a critical perspective manifests itself in the adoption of a critical approach, that is not just about “critical thinking in the sense of any underlying rationale at a narrow, individualistic level, … but also takes account of cultural and structural factors …” (322). Our implementation of reflection as a key step in the practice of developing cultural literacy focuses on developing awareness not only of the individual and the individual’s experience, it is also a process that can be collaborative and shared. It is a pathway to the creation of new knowledge not just in relation to the topic/experience at hand but also about the process of reflection itself, what we term meta-reflection. This insight into reflection as a process necessarily imbues reflection with the type of criticality advocated by Thompson and Pascal without losing the ability to value and engage with emotive and physical responses to a given experience. Thompson and Pascal (2012, 314–315) note that reflective learning is characterised by • Blending theory and practice: reflective learning attempts to integrate theory and practice and moves “away from the traditional idea of classroom-based learning, being applied to practice as if there is a one-way relationship between theory and practice, between knowing and doing”. • Active learning: recognising and valuing the knowledge, skills and experience deployed in and gained from practice. Practitioners are active participants in learning.

60 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

• Participative learning: “curriculum” is determined jointly between students and educator. • Challenging dogma: learning provides a foundation for challenging dogma and prejudice. While Thompson and Pascal are examining reflective practice as a domain of learning for practitioners or those engaged in professional activities, for us the learner is a practitioner in the sense that learning is their core practice and can be applied in personal and professional domains. Classroom-based learning is not a lesser form of experience, but part of the individual and collective shared experience of the participants and is therefore to be valued. However, for us, the classroom is not the sole domain of theory acquisition but a space in which personal, professional and intercultural relationships and social hierarchies can be played out. Despite variations among the key theorists that consider how and when reflection is enacted, the degree of criticality involved in reflection and the cognitive and emotional elements of the reflective process, there is general agreement that “as the mechanism for transformational learning, reflectiveness is required for productively navigating the interval of confusion that follows an encounter with the existentially unfamiliar” (Schwartzman 2010, 40). As such one’s “critical consciousness” (Meizrow 1981) needs to be engaged via the reflection process, “[c]ritical reflection addresses the question of the Justification for the very premises on which problems are posed or defined in the first place” (1990, 12) and it is via this process that our own limitations, pre-existing knowledge and assumptions become visible and we can begin to approach how an awareness of these limitations can impact our understanding of new and hitherto unknown or unexperienced situations and information.

3.3   Developing Cultural Literacy: Cultural Readability in Action As discussed above within the Higher Education sector there is no single agreed-upon definition of reflection or how reflective practice should be developed and implemented. Nonetheless, “the definitions that do exist share a number of similarities, including the exploration of experience and analysis of thoughts and feelings (of self) to inform learning …. [and the suggestion] that reflection will involve a change in perspective or

3  DESTABILISATION AND REFLECTION 

61

transformation in thinking that leads to action” (Horton-Deutsch and Cara 2017, 141). To this we would add the critical engagement of skills fundamental to literary and cultural studies. It is through periods of reflective practice that students deploy these skills to “create structures that facilitate the readability of cultural artefacts, enabling them to draw meaning out of such artefacts” (García Ochoa et al., 550). This is what we have termed cultural readability and it is through the enactment of these skills in reflective practice that learners are able to build their cultural literacy (see García Ochoa et al. 2016). To explain further, cultural readability is the process by which the learner brings to bear the skills inherent in critical reading, the analytical and interpretive approaches found in the disciplines of literary and cultural studies, to their understanding of difference in the myriad of ways in which it can occur. It is the deployment of these skills that allows the student to “read” a particular interaction, artefact or scenario and build their understanding. For us the transformative potential of reflection after an experience of destabilisation, mediated through the specific skill sets of cultural literacy, enables meaning-making to occur through our reading of cultural artefacts. This is where transformative learning takes place. One of the continuing critiques of implementing reflective practice is the limitation in appropriate tools to undertake reflection. As with many pedagogic techniques, reflection can be used in a superficial, arbitrary way and we acknowledge that such approaches do not support the process of transformational learning. As Walsh and Mann (2015) identify, there are multiple “pitfalls” in the use of tools and approaches that are not contextually fit for purpose, and they identify a series of key issues that need to be overcome in the establishment of reflective practice as part of a learning framework. They warn against tasks that are: • Too complicated, they stifle budding reflection. The focus of attention is on completing the task rather than reflecting on practice; • “An increasing chore” and have a lack of variety, the reflective task becomes an institutionalised requirement that only encourages superficial engagement or inauthentic reflection; • Have a lack of progression (a design problem), they do not promote growth; are too problem-oriented (continually asking the individual to identify a “problem” in their teaching), the outcomes will be both limiting and depressing (353–354).

62 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

These are indeed potential “pitfalls” that we have sought to address in the development of cultural literacy in Higher Education contexts. The applied practice of cultural literacy brings together the critical skills germane to literary and cultural studies with the design of activities that engage students in authentic tasks relevant to and valuable for their lived experience. Reflection in this context is an intentional and structured practice that merges a critical cognitive skill set with a valuing of the emotive experiences implicit in destabilisation. In addition to the above critiques, reflective practice itself is often critiqued for being an individualised process of learning that “perpetuates the suspicion that RP suffers unduly from individual narcissism and introspection. Many models and accounts of reflection (see, for example, Brockbank and McGill 2007) concentrate on reflection as an individual rather than a collaborative process, which may underestimate the value of learning from ‘others’ experiences’ as well as from our own” (Walsh and Mann 2015, 353). In the practices we have developed and applied in the fostering of cultural literacy skills in the classroom we have attempted to bridge the space between the individual and the collective by allowing individual reflections and narratives to be brought into the broader class environment and also to utilise reflection as part of a collaborative and shared cognitive journey. The critique of the personalised element of reflection presupposes that the individual process is necessarily inward looking, but beyond that process of reflection is the movement to action or change, whether that is a change in mental process or that manifests itself in action, these changes become part of a collective or a collaboration the moment they are enacted in a community setting, where there is the opportunity to learn from each other and share each other’s experiences. As we will argue in the case of Cranbourne Secondary School, which is detailed in Chap. 4, the students’ learning from their experience of reading was undoubtedly personal and individual but this did not inhibit, indeed we could argue that it facilitated, the transformational learning in a community, in this case the community of students and educators. The wider impact was then felt beyond the classroom peer interaction, across the school community more broadly. For us the following key characteristics are those that make reflection a critical tool in developing culturally literate individuals:

3  DESTABILISATION AND REFLECTION 

63

• Must contain the possibility of a dual focus. It is important to build skills that allow for both individual and collective practice and foster reflections that are both inward and outward looking. • Critically informed practice. The application of foundational literary and cultural studies methodologies to a “reading” of cultural artefacts. • Structured approach to practice. Provision of elements of scaffolding to support the contextualisation or framing of reflection beyond the purely instinctive or insular. • Meta-cognitive. Supports the learner to recognise existing knowledge and seeks to fill gaps. As Li Tran (2015) defines this, the learner moves towards “creative/agentive ignorance”. • Attentive to both feelings and thought process. Valuing the contribution of each to shifts in understanding of self, other and context. • A “modus-operandi”, that is, an ongoing part of lived experience that becomes second nature. In the context of our deployment of reflection in the tertiary sector, and in the activities detailed in Chap. 5, reflection for us almost always takes place, at least in part, in a written, textual or oral form.

3.4   Destabilising the Educator Both destabilisation and reflection as critical techniques in the development of cultural literacy require a specific commitment on the part of the educator. Whether destabilisation and reflection occur organically or are planned a priori, how the educators position themselves is critical. By shifting their centrality and position in relation both to their specific discipline area and in terms of knowledge and broader ways of knowing, they enable the learner to fully participate in the experience of learning. As “experts” they need to cede their central space to students and give value to the knowledge that they bring to the classroom. This is in part what separates our definition of cultural literacy from other uses of the term such as that of Hirsch which was elaborated in Chap. 1. For us, cultural literacy is not about the promulgation of an idea of Western cultural dominance, rather it is predicated on an ability to decentre the self and to recognise and question hierarchies of knowledge.

64 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

In the context of the Higher Education sector, we have previously discussed that the embedding practices in destabilisation and reflection in the classroom and providing opportunities for reflection to impact both knowledge and practice at the site of learning can also prove fundamentally destabilising for the educator (García Ochoa et al. 2016). This is an important element when considering the practices of destabilisation and reflection in the learning environment, while most studies focus on the impact or lack thereof on the learner the disposition and openness of the educator can fundamentally impact the effectiveness of both, not through inherent flaws in the practice or approach but through unwillingness to cede ground in the experience of learning. In the Higher Education context, disciplines are dominated by sets of approaches and knowledge to their subject matter but as Aiden Ricketts points out, they do not often turn this critical eye on their own practices and approaches to knowledge (2010, 45). That is not to in any way denigrate the role and importance of the educator’s expert knowledge; rather it is simply to acknowledge that the sometimes unchallenged nature of the Discipline and the Academic can act as inhibitors to the learner’s participation in navigating understanding and building new knowledge. As Ricketts establishes: There is much to be gained for students, educators, the disciplines and the professions in producing graduates who are sceptically aware of the assumptions and values upon which their discipline is built. The first necessary step of course is for the educators themselves to become self-critical. The process of uncovering assumptions … fundamental to critical practice requires not only an understanding of the assumptions inherent in the discipline (as a phenomenon external to ourselves) but also of the way that we, as scholars have probably already consciously or unconsciously internalised those assumptions as part of our own education. The challenge for educators is to remain critically reflexive, whilst also ensuring that the threshold experiences that students traverse are presented in a way that expands rather than inhibits the capacity for ongoing critical practice. (2010, 59)

In building cultural literacy in learners, the techniques of destabilisation and reflection play central roles as catalysts for transformation and transformative meaning-making from experience. In practice, these can occur in multiple ways for the learner and these are expanded upon in Chap. 5, in which we examine both the applied practice of cultural literacy from a student’s perspective and the development of these same skills in educators with the aim of addressing the challenges posited above.

3  DESTABILISATION AND REFLECTION 

65

Through our research and practice in the context of higher education it has become clear to us that destabilisation and reflection are the pivotal activities that allow learners to activate and build their cultural literacy and in doing so develop the ability to navigate uncertainty and to “read” their environment and its cultural artefacts. Through this capacity to “read”, individuals are able to draw meaning from the experience of not knowing and construct new epistemologies, opening the door to a fundamentally transformative learning process. In 2018, we learnt about an organic instance of cultural literacy that occurred in an educational setting different to our own. In Chap. 4 we expand on our opportunity to meet a remarkable young person, Shabnam Safa, who was generous enough to share her experience of coming to Australia, and in particular her experience of becoming part of the Cranbourne Secondary College community. Learning of Safa’s story coincided with developing our understanding at both theoretical and applied levels, of models of cultural literacy and its application as a pedagogical tool to teach students to navigate the unknown. As we reflected on Safa’s experience, her friends and the educators at Cranbourne Secondary College, it became increasingly clear that in many ways her story was a naturally occurring instance of what we had been trying to achieve through an intentional, directed and deliberate educative process. Through Safa’s story and our interactions with the teachers who formed part of the School’s initiatives, we observed both short- and long-term impacts of the explicit development of greater understanding and meaning drawn from a specific set of circumstances as developed via a specific literary intervention. Of course, as we have mentioned before, this is not simply a shift that occurs via a literary intervention, the outcomes and impact are not given, rather here we saw the tools of “reading” inherent in literary studies coupled with both an experience and an engagement with experience. This is precisely how we had been approaching the notion of cultural literacy as a set of skills that could be learnt. In thinking through the markers of the transformative shift in the community at Cranbourne Secondary School, we identified the same key facets for transformative learning that we had theorised in our previous work on the development of cultural literacy in Higher Education contexts.

66 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

References Alterio, M., & McDrury, J. (2003). Learning Through Storytelling in Higher Education: Using Reflection and Experience to Improve Learning. Routledge. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com (2019-08-16 22:34:45). Bate, J., & Brock, S. (2007). The CAPITAL Centre: Teaching Shakespeare (and More) Through a Collaboration between a University and an Arts Organization. Pedagogy, 7(3), 341–358. Bleakley, A. (1999). From Reflexive Practice to Holistic Reflexivity. Studies in Higher Education, 24, 315–330. Boud, D., Keogh, R., & Walker, D. (1985). Promoting Reflection in Learning: A Model. In D.  Boud, R.  Keogh, & D.  Walker (Eds.), Reflection: Turning Experience into Learning (pp. 18–40). London: Kogan Page. Boyd, E. M., & Fales, A. W. (1983). Reflective Learning Key to Learning from Experience. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 23(2), 99–117. Brockbank, A and McGill, I. (2007). Facilitating Reflective Learning in Higher Education. Buckingham: Society ror Research into Higher education and Open University Press. Coulter, X. (2001). The Role of Conscious Reflection in Experiential Learning. Paper presented at Adult Higher Education Alliance Conference on the Changing Face of Adult Learning, Austin, Texas. Retrieved from http://www.ahea. org/01proceedings.htm. Dewey, J. (1933). How We Think: A Restatement of the Relation of Reflective Thinking to the Educative Process. Boston, MA: D.C. Heath and Co.. Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and Education. New York: Collier Books, Macmillan. Fenwick, T. (2001). Experiential Learning: A Theoretical Critique from Five Perspectives. Columbus: Ohio State University. Fenwick, T. (2006). Inside Out of Experiential Learning: Fluid Bodies, Co-emergent Minds. In R.  Edwards, J.  Gallacher, & S.  Whittaker (Eds.), Learning Outside the Academy. International Research Perspectives on Lifelong Learning (pp. 42–55). New York: Routledge. García Ochoa, G., McDonald, S., & Monk, N. (2016). Embedding Cultural Literacy in Higher Education: A New Approach. Intercultural Education, 27(6), 546–559. García Ochoa, G., McDonald, S., & Monk, N. (2019). Destabilisation and Cultural Literacy. Intercultural Education, 30(4), 351–367. García Ochoa, G., et al. (2018). Adapting Open-Space Learning Techniques to Teach Cultural Literacy. Open Cultural Studies, 2, 510–519. Gibbs, G. (1988). Learning by Doing: A Guide to Teaching and Learning Methods. Oxford, UK: Oxford Brookes University. Retrieved from https://thoughtsmostlyaboutlearning.files.wordpress.com/2015/12/learning-by-doing-graham-gibbs.pdf.

3  DESTABILISATION AND REFLECTION 

67

Hébert, C. (2015). Knowing and/or Experiencing: A Critical Examination of the Reflective Models of John Dewey and Donald Schön. Reflective Practice, 16(3), 361–371. Horton-Deutsch, S., & Cara, C. (2017). Learning Through Reflection and Reflection on Learning: Pedagogies in Action. In S.  Horton-Deutsch & G. D. Sherwood (Ed.), Reflective Practice (2nd ed.). Retrieved August 6, 2019, from http//ebookcentral.proquest.com. Johns, C. (2006). Engaging Reflection in Practice: A Narrative Approach. Oxford, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Johns, C. (2016). Mindful Leadership. A Guide for Healthcare Professionals. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Jordí, Richard. (2011) REframing the concept of reflection: Consciousness, Experiential learning, and reflective learning practices. Adult Education Quarterly 61(2) 181–197. Kolb, D. A. (1984). Experiential Learning: Experience as a Source of Learning and Development. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Kolb, D. A., Boyatzis, R., & Mainemelis, C. (2000). Experiential Learning Theory: Previous Research and New Directions. In R.  J. Sternberg & L.  F. Zhang (Eds.), Perspectives on Cognitive, Learning, and Thinking Styles (pp. 228–247). NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Meizrow, J. (1981). Critical Theory of Adult Learning and Education. Adult Education, 3(1), 3–24. Meizrow, J. (1990). How Critical Reflection Triggers Transformative Learning. In J.  Meizrow and Associates (Ed.), Fostering Critical Reflection in Adulthood (pp. 1–20). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Publishers. Michelson, E. (1996). Usual Suspects: Experience, Reflection and the (En)gendering of Knowledge. International Journal of Lifelong Education, 15, 438–454. Monk, N., et  al. (2011). Introduction. In N.  Monk, C.  Chillington Rutter, J.  Neelands, & J.  Heron (Eds.), OpenSpace Learning: A Study in Transdisciplinary Pedagogy (pp. 1–9) Bloomsbury. Munby, H., & Russell, T. (1989). Educating the Reflective Teacher: An Essay Review of Two Books by Donald Schön. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 21, 71–10. Ricketts, A. (2010). Threshold Concepts: Loaded Knowledge or Critical Education. In R. Land et al. (Eds.), Threshold Concepts and Transformational Learning (pp. 45–60). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Schön, D.  A. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner: How Practitioner Professionals Think in Action. New York: Basic Books. Schön, D.  A. (1987). Educating the Reflective Practitioner. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

68 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

Schwartzman, L. 2010. “Transcending Disciplinary Boundaries.” In Threshold Concepts and Transformational Learning, edited by R. Land, J. Meyer, and C. Baillie, 21–44. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Stelter, R. (2005). Embodiment and Learning. Copenhagen: AGORA 6. Thompson, N., & Pascal, J. (2012). Developing Critically Reflective Practice. Reflective Practice, 13(2), 311–325. Tran, L. (2015). Internationalising the Student Experience and Cosmopolitan Learning: Theoretical Concepts and Examples of Practice from the VET Sector. Paper presented at the Learning and Teaching for a Globalised World: Internationalisation of the Curriculum SIC Forum 2015, Melbourne. Walsh, S., & Mann, S. (2015). Doing Reflective Practice: A Data-Led Way Forward. ELT Journal, 69(4), 351–362. Woodcook, T., and B. Russell. (2011). “Language Training.” Marine Corps Gazette 95(5): 75–79.

CHAPTER 4

“Organic” Cultural Literacy—A Case Study

This chapter focuses on the case study of teachers at Cranbourne Secondary College, and their introduction of the memoir by Najaf Mazari, The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif, in the curriculum at a time when the school was going through a transition period, aiming to understand how to best address the new challenges brought about by the diversity of its student population, which included a considerable number of students from a refugee background. The memoir was introduced into the curriculum in 2012. It tells the story of Mazari, a Hazara Afghan rugmaker, who had to flee his home in Afghanistan due to the war and travel to Melbourne via Pakistan and Indonesia searching for safety. The text reflects many of the experiences of refugees, also shared by some students at Cranbourne Secondary College. It was chosen as part of a strategy to address communication issues between students from refugee Afghan backgrounds and non-refugee students, hoping to develop empathy and understanding of each other’s differences. The aim was to create a common narrative, a shared knowledge between peers that would allow students from non-­ refugee backgrounds to have a better understanding of their fellow students’ background and present situation. In our view, the text was taught in a way that helped develop the cultural literacy of students at the school, incorporating cultural readability, and through the use of destabilisation and reflection. Through interviews with two staff members who taught at Cranbourne Secondary College at the

© The Author(s) 2020 G. García Ochoa, S. McDonald, Cultural Literacy and Empathy in Education Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59904-1_4

69

70 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

time—Ross Huggard and Danielle Radivo—the chapter provides a background and context for the situation at the institution and explores these teachers’ rationale for introducing the text.1 We also discuss some of the techniques that Radivo and Huggard used in the classroom—namely, contexualisation, collaborative reflection and perspective-taking—and explain how these relate to our own ideas of cultural literacy. Here, we introduce the concept of “organic cultural literacy”, as we see the case study of Cranbourne Secondary College as a very positive example of how pedagogy in cultural literacy can take place “organically”, in the sense that, notwithstanding that the teaching staff at the school deliberately introduced the text into their curriculum with specific aims in mind, those aims were not informed by the scholarship and philosophy of cultural literacy that we outline in this book (in great part, because such scholarship and philosophy were in their infancy at the time), but rather, by a robust, experiential understanding of the student experience, and student needs, in particular the needs of students with refugee backgrounds, which are so often overlooked (Correa-Velez et al. 2010; Correa-Velez et al. 2017; Dumenden and English 2013; Sidhu Taylor and Christie 2011; Uptin et al. 2013) The case study also incorporates the story of Shabnam Safa, a young Afghan woman of refugee Hazara background who resettled in Melbourne in 2009 and studied at Cranbourne Secondary College before and after the text was introduced into the curriculum. Through interviews with Safa, we aimed to have a student’s perspective of the effects that studying The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif had for her as a student from a refugee background. There are also interviews with one of Safa’s fellow students, Ema Stefanovic, who has no refugee background. Stefanovic shares her views on what it was like as a student from a different background to Safa’s, to study at Cranbourne Secondary College and the effect that Mazari’s text had on her. To provide a background and context to this case study, the chapter begins by briefly summarising the situation Australia found itself in, in the years prior to and immediately after Safa’s resettlement in the country. This summary is by no means exhaustive, but we have provided a broad overview of the socio-political context, and the image and understanding of refugee groups propagated by mainstream media in Australia. It includes some of the events prior to 2008 that led to the situation Safa encountered in 2009, such as the introduction of mandatory detention policies in the early 1990s, “the Tampa Affair”, the Pacific Solution, the Malaysian 1  Mr Huggard and Ms Radivo were not interviewed as representatives of Cranbourne Secondary College. The recollections and views expressed in this chapter are their own.

4  “ORGANIC” CULTURAL LITERACY—A CASE STUDY 

71

Solution, the debate on “stopping the boats” and Australia’s own excision of its migration area from its mainland. This summary is followed by a literature review on the challenges surrounding schooling and social cohesion that students of refugee background face when they resettle in Australia, particularly around the time of Safa’s arrival.

4.1   The Australian Context Refugee settlement in Australia has been a politically contentious topic for a number of decades. Australia works with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to determine who will be resettled within its borders. The “orderly processing” of refugees has been a point of great contention in Australian mainstream discourse for a number of decades. The governments of Prime Ministers Malcolm Fraser (1975–1983) and Bob Hawke (1983–1991) were very flexible in regard to refugee intake. However, based on this notion of orderly, systematic processing, since 1991 asylum seekers who come to Australia without documentation are subject to mandatory detention (Phillips 2017a). This was a policy introduced by the Keating government that received bi-partisan support (Phillips 2017a). Since the government of John Howard (1996–2007), however, Australia’s stance towards refugees has become increasingly intransigent. In 1991 the first mandatory detention centre was opened in Port Hedland, for refugees, predominantly boat arrivals, who were undocumented upon arrival in Australia (York 2003). Under mandatory detention, those who arrive in Australia without a visa (except for New Zealanders) are detained and subsequently deported, unless there is an asylum claim, in which case they are detained until the government can ascertain the validity of their claim as asylum seekers (Jupp 2007). In 1997 the number of boat arrivals to Australia rose exponentially as refugees escaped different parts of the Middle East fleeing Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship and the Taliban (York 2003, 12). This increased the pressure on processing centres and began to raise concerns amongst the public. There was also an increase in Islamophobia, as the general Australian public appeared to associate Islam with terrorism (189). The result of these different pressure points led to the opening of a new detention centre in South Australia in 1999, Woomera. Overpopulation of Woomera led to slower processing (Jupp 2007). In addition to this, in 2001, when the Taliban were overthrown, the processing of Afghans stopped, leaving hundreds of people awaiting processing around Australia

72 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

“in limbo” (Jupp 2007, 189). This resulted in protests, hunger strikes, self-mutilation and violent unrest in other remote facilities in addition to Woomera, such as Port Hedland and Curtin detention centres. The overpopulation at Woomera contributed towards one of the most decisive moments in Australia’s approach towards asylum seekers, what became known as “the Tampa Affair” and its aftermath, the creation of “the Pacific Solution”. On 26 August, the Norwegian freighter, the MV Tampa, rescued 433 asylum seekers, most of them Afghan Hazara refugees, from a sinking boat 140 km north of Christmas Island. The Australian government refused to allow the Tampa to disembark at Christmas Island and “military force was used to remove the stranded passengers and to send them out of Australian waters altogether” (Phillips 2017a, 17). At the time, Christmas Island was part of Australia’s migration zone. Thus, there was a general assumption that the refugees rescued by the MV Tampa had the right to claim asylum in Australia. However, the Australian government sought to pass  retrospective legislation in September 2001 that excised Christmas Island from Australia’s migration zone, granting itself a legal standing to argue the refugees had not technically landed in Australia, as well as the exempting the government of any responsibility towards them (York 2003). This laid the precedent for Australia’s infamous decision in 2013 to excise itself from its own migration zone, effectively making Australia disappear from the map for the purpose of asylum seeker claims (Phillips 2017a, 5). Australia’s actions in the Tampa Affair led to the creation of the “Pacific Solution”, a grossly unethical, inefficient plan created by the government in the hope that it may unburden itself from the responsibility of settling in Australia those asylum seekers rescued by the MV Tampa. The Australian government reached an agreement with Nauru and Papua New Guinea to hold asylum seekers in offshore detention while their claims were being processed collaboratively between the Australian Immigration Department and the UNHCR (Phillips 2017a). Australia would bear the financial cost of the operation, but there were no guarantees that any of the asylum seekers in Nauru or Papua New Guinea (PNG) would ever be settled in Australia. Since 2001, the Australian government’s approach to refugees has progressively degenerated into an inhumane, arbitrary system, with policies that have been severely criticised both within and outside Australia (see Goddard et al. 2008; Manne 2010; Kwek 2009; Mogelson 2013; Toohey 2013). In order to win the 2001 election that took place in November, John Howard stoked a combination in the Australian electorate of

4  “ORGANIC” CULTURAL LITERACY—A CASE STUDY 

73

xenophobia and deeply ingrained fears of immigration. Howard’s battle cry for his campaign, the sentence that effectively won him the election, was as follows: “We will decide who comes to Australia and under what circumstances” (Howard 2001). Howard’s campaign promise asserted Australian sovereignty in the face of an imaginary threat of Australia being flooded by asylum seekers. To this was added a new fear after the 11 September attacks in New York, the fear of Muslim terrorists entering the country posing as asylum seekers. In reality, other than the creation and progressive degeneration of an inhumane, draconian system of punishment against asylum seekers, Howard’s promise of control would deliver little more than what had already been achieved through the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901. For 100 years, Australia had effectively decided who entered its borders and under what circumstances; any suggestion to the contrary came from Howard alone and not from any tangible challenge to Australia’s border sovereignty. Robert Manne refers to this obsession with migratory control as Australia’s “immigration absolutism”: “that we should strive for a situation where not even one asylum seeker boat reaches our shores” (2016). Manne argues that this absolutism is a remnant of the White Australia Policy that existed between 1901 and 1973, during which period the focus of this absolutism was on not allowing “a single person of non-­ European stock” from ever settling in Australia (2016). In Manne’s view, this bureaucratic obsession with absolute control rather than racism itself has had a greater influence in the current architecture of Australia’s asylum seeker policies. Australia’s immigration policy after World War II was predominantly assimilationist (Mann 2012). Viewed as a British-White policy (Castles et  al. 2013; Mann 2012), it required new migrants and refugees from non-British backgrounds to fully integrate into Australia’s mainstream, White culture (Koirala 2016, 122). This assimilationist approach was replaced in 1973 by a policy of multiculturalism that allowed and encouraged non-British migrants and refugees to embody their cultural background and identity. From the start of this multicultural approach in 1973–2001, Australia’s immigration policies had focused on “the need to build the nation through selective immigration without regard to race, colour or creed; to select migrants on the basis of economic viability or family connections; and to adhere to the United Nations Convention and Protocol on Refugees” (Jupp 2007, 191). The change that began in 2001 played on the aforementioned obsession with border control and the

74 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

consequent fear that if such control was not absolute the “floodgates” would open, overriding the country. It also aimed to address the very real problem of people smuggling as a growing criminal enterprise. This was also a period when the Australian government began to promulgate a perception of asylum seekers as “illegals, queue jumpers and unauthorized arrivals” (McAdam 2013, 436). This perception was not entirely new. In 1982 the Commonwealth government had adopted an individual assessment of claims by refugees with the express purpose of “stopping queue jumping” (York 2003, 4). However, after the Tampa Affair it can be argued that it had a much greater influence on the mainstream perception of asylum seekers and refugees. In the coming years, the refugee and asylum seeker debate became one of the most contentious issues in Australian politics. As Robert Manne explains, One of the most intriguing and puzzling questions of Australian politics is how so apparently minor an issue has had such an impact on our national life for such a protracted period of time. No political question has more clearly separated Australia’s ‘battlers’ from the inner-city ‘elites’. No ideological issue has more sharply divided the Left from the Right. (Manne 2010)

After the Pacific Solution was created, the number of unauthorised arrivals in Australia remained low, and relatively steady, until 2008. There were practically no boat arrivals at the end of 2007. In early 2008 the government of Kevin Rudd disbanded the Pacific Solution and abolished temporary protection visas. The government’s policy changed, to allow future unauthorised boat arrivals to be processed, not in Manus Island or Nauru, but on Australian territory (Phillips 2017a, 4). In 2009, 2726 asylum seekers reached Australia by boat (Phillips 2017b). In 2010, the number rose to 6555 and went down to 4565 in 2011, only to spike again in 2012 and 2013 with 17,204 and 20,587 cases, respectively (Phillips 2017b). The opposition leader, Tony Abbott famously vowed to “stop the boats”. He framed Rudd’s policy changes as a failure and proposed the implementation of considerably more draconian measures, such as the use of the military to return boats by force, the reopening of Nauru and re-establishing temporary protection visas. Rudd’s government was challenged by Julia Gillard, who became Prime Minister in June 2010, largely due to the asylum seeker debate.

4  “ORGANIC” CULTURAL LITERACY—A CASE STUDY 

75

Gillard proposed creating a new “regional processing centre for the purpose of receiving and processing irregular entrants to the region” (2010). In mid-2011, the Gillard government signed an agreement with the Malaysian government for the transfer of asylum seekers (Spinks 2011). This was known as “The Malaysian Solution”, which later that year the High Court of Australia declared to be invalid (Spinks 2011). Gillard’s policies were very close to Abbott’s. The main difference between them was that she was willing to stop people smuggling by reopening Nauru and to reinstate temporary protection visas. It was during Gillard’s government, in May 2013, that Australia extended its excision policy to include the entirety of its mainland. Later in 2013, Kevin Rudd was reinstated as Prime Minister, and he adopted considerably harsher policies towards asylum seekers. These included the following: –– all asylum seekers (not a selected few) who travelled to Australia by boat with no valid visa would be sent offshore for processing and resettlement –– those found to be refugees would not be resettled in Australia –– people found not to be refugees would be returned to their home country (or a country where they had a right of residence) or held in a transit facility indefinitely and –– Australian Federal Police would pay rewards of up to $200,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of people organising people smuggling ventures to Australia. (Phillips 2017a, 5) It is interesting to note the changes in name undergone by the various Departments in charge of refugee and asylum seeker policies, which appear to signal a progressive degeneration of such policies, where a humanitarian approach towards refugees is slowly replaced by a punitive one. In 2006 the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs was dissolved and replaced in 2007 by the Department of Immigration and Citizenship. After the “multicultural component” was dropped in 2007, in 2013 the Department was again dissolved to become the Department of Immigration and Border Protection. In 2017, this became the Department of Home Affairs, its present name as of 2020.

76 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

4.2   Students from a Refugee Background in Australia Over the last decade there has been a surge in research on the experiences of students from a refugee background resettling in Australia. The transitions that these students undergo when resettling in Australia are diverse, varied and unique to each individual—as Hiorth and Molyneux argue, “highly complex and multifaceted” (2018, 125). However, research has also identified a number of positive and negative characteristics to these transitions that appear to be shared by a considerable number of students. There is a tendency among students from a refugee background to be keen to start their new lives in their new host country (Correa-Velez et al. 2017; McMichael et al. 2017). They also show great resilience and a very positive outlook on their circumstances (Hiorth and Molyneux 2018; McMichael et  al. 2017). Pre-migration education before coming to Australia and strong post-settlement support through robust social networks in their new host country have a strong impact on students’ happiness and well-being (McMichael et  al. 2017, 68). However, refugee students also face a host of challenges when settling in Australia. To some degree, many of them have had their education interrupted in one way or another (Correa-Velez et al. 2017; McMichael et al. 2017); they struggle to adjust to new educational scenarios in Australia (Naidoo 2012; McMichael et  al. 2017), often because they do not receive appropriate explanation on the workings of the Australian education system (Naidoo 2015). Many refugee students have to juggle the responsibility of looking after other family members (McMichael et al. 2017) and may require special support with English language learning (Correa-Velez et  al. 2017; Naidoo 2015), as well as cultural differences in general (Naidoo 2015). Iqbal et  al. identified that gender can also be an important challenging factor for a number of refugees resettling in Australia, particularly Afghan Hazara female refugees (2012). According to Iqbal et al.’s research, teenage girls from this group can be at a disadvantage, kept at home by their families and not allowed to attend school or university, in spite of their eagerness to embrace educational opportunities and build a career (2012). A considerable number of refugee students have experienced trauma prior to coming to Australia (Iqbal et al. 2012; Correa-Velez et al. 2010), the aftermath of which hinders their resettlement experience. However, ongoing discrimination, racism and bullying can be just as crippling as past trauma, if not more so, and the source of new, future trauma. A number

4  “ORGANIC” CULTURAL LITERACY—A CASE STUDY 

77

of researchers have identified discrimination as the most pressing challenge refugee students face when settling in Australia (Correa-Velez et al. 2010; Uptin et  al. 2013; Correa-Velez et  al. 2017; Sidhu et  al. 2011; McMichael et al. 2017; Garvey 2001; Sutton 2009). Research shows the effect that public discourse on refugees and asylum seekers can have on the way refugee students are treated by their peers at school. Riggs and Due, for example, argue that the ongoing public debate over refugees and asylum seekers in Australia in 2009–2010 affected how Australian-born students behaved towards their peers from a refugee background, often inhibiting them from including refugee students in their social circles (2010). Uptin et al. (2013) explore the importance of understanding this politicised, racialised discourse and the role that it plays as it filters into schools (2013). Correa-Velez et al. look at the predictors of secondary school completion amongst refugee students, addressing discrimination as a major issue, and point out the negative effect of the political rhetoric that dehumanises refugees and asylum seekers in Australia (2017, 802). Sidhu et  al. point out Australia’s “ambivalent” attitude towards refugees and how Australian election campaigns have negatively targeted refugees and asylum seekers, stoking fears about “illegal immigration and global terrorism” which naturally has an effect on the way the community receives refugees, including in schools (2011, 93). According to McMichael et al., discrimination is the factor with the greatest negative impact on refugee youth (2017). Correa-Velez et al. conducted a longitudinal study on this, where they concluded that older refugee youth who are subject to discrimination in the first eight to nine years of resettlement in Australia are less likely to complete high school, which can have a very negative impact on their future lives in their host country (2017). Part of the problem, according to Uptin et al., is not just the climate of political vituperation against refugees that trickles down to student dynamics, but that fact that schools themselves either ignore or do not notice discrimination (2013). The reverse of discrimination is, of course, belonging. A number of studies have identified that a strong sense of belonging is linked to young refugees’ well-being and social status (Correa-Velez et  al. 2010; Iqbal et al. 2012; Sidhu et al. 2011; Tozer et al. 2018; Uptin et al. 2013; Marsh 2012). This sense of belonging is tied not only to the young refugees’ new host country, but simultaneously, to their ethnic community (Correa-­ Velez et al. 2010).

78 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

Dumenden and English note, following Bourdieu’s concept of “hysteresis”, that there are a number of refugee students in Australia who undergo experiences where they feel like “fish out of water”. This is partly because the Australian education system is markedly different from their previous experiences at school and teachers tend to have certain expectations around students’ work that they were unable to meet (2013, 1079). Uptin et al. have also identified this experience of embodied difference undergone by many refugee students, pointing out how crucial it is that schools handle inclusion effectively (2013, 129). Similarly, Naidoo acknowledges that refugee students find it difficult to acculturate to their new environment, especially their educational one (2012). However, when schools create programmes, particularly partnership programmes of inclusion involving the community and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that allow students to be valued as individuals and develop a sense of belonging, the benefits are substantial (Naidoo 2012). In this regard, schools play a crucial role in connecting them with their host country and helping them develop a sense of belonging (Correa-Velez et  al. 2017). Schools tend to be the first point of contact for refugee students, which is one of the many reasons why school programmes that are inclusive are so significant for refugee students’ settlement within Australian society (Uptin et  al. 2013). In a study involving 93 students in Brisbane from refugee backgrounds, Tozer, Khawaja and Schweitzer found that a strong sense of connection and belonging at school were significant factors for the well-being of the students (2018). Extracurricular programmes that focus on inclusion and cross-cultural communication, such as a music and dance programme at “Freemont” Intensive English Centre in south-­ western Sydney, help refugee students develop a sense of belonging within both the school community and the community at large (Marsh 2012). In this regard, Naidoo highlights the need for schools to create a “culture of warmth, concern and understanding”, as this is an important contributor to students’ “academic engagement and school performance” (2015, 215)—a sentiment echoed by Hiorth and Molyneux, as they argue for the importance of schools to culturally educate refugee students about the workings of the Australian school system whilst also taking account of and incorporating the cultural backgrounds of the refugees themselves in order to help ease their transition (2018). Naidoo points out the effectiveness of programmes like Refugee Action Support (RAS), a partnership between the University of Western Sydney (UWS), the Australian Literacy and Numeracy Foundation, and the New

4  “ORGANIC” CULTURAL LITERACY—A CASE STUDY 

79

South Wales Department of Education and training. The programme aimed to provide “tutoring … to recently arrived African students from refugee backgrounds in Western and South Western Sydney schools” (2012, 269). The aim of the programme was to cater its tutoring to individual students, moving away from “blanket solutions” to “a more specialized, individualized approach for refugee background learners, recognizing and celebrating the diversity of refugees and the specific barriers that refugees face in education access” whilst also building “links with refugee community members” (2012, 266). The programme proved to be very effective, resulting in the creation of a context within schools that allowed refugee students to demonstrate their many and varied skills, improving their academic results, and giving them better chances of professional success after school (Naidoo 2012, 2013). Unfortunately, programmes like RAS and the music and dance programme at “Freemont” Intensive English Centre (Marsh 2012) appear to be the exception. There is an absence in Australia of policies dealing specifically with resettling refugee youth (Correa-Velez et  al. 2010; Correa-Velez et  al. 2017; Dumenden and English 2013). In their study on the resettlement experiences of Afghan Hazara students in Melbourne, Iqbal et al. (2012) also conclude that there is a great need for further research in assisting refugee youth to resettle in their host country. Taylor and Christie argue that far from helping refugee students, there are State schools that have acquired a neo-liberalist bent, which has resulted in the needs of refugee students left behind, and that while the Australian government purports to encourage educating students to become global citizens, in practical terms they rely on individual teachers to carry this out, with minimal support (2011).

4.3   Cranbourne and Cranbourne Secondary College The events pertaining to the case study of Cranbourne Secondary College began in the early 2000s (R. Huggard, personal communication, 1 March 2018). Cranbourne Secondary College was founded in 1975 “to serve the growing town of Cranbourne” (Cranbourne Secondary College 2019a, b, c, para. 1). The school “is recognised as a leader providing an inclusive curriculum that caters for the diverse and changing needs of the community” (Cranbourne Secondary College 2019a, b, c, para. 7). The school

80 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

currently has a population of over 1300 students (Cranbourne Secondary College 2019a, b, c, para. 2). Cranbourne itself is a suburb in the south-east of Melbourne, located roughly 40 km from the city’s centre. At the time of the 2001 Australian Census, Cranbourne had a total population of 13,612 people, with 74.9% of them being born in Australia (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2020a, b, c). Ross Huggard, Senior School Leader at Cranbourne Secondary College at the time of this interview, described the school and the surrounding Cranbourne area in the early 2000s as: a very Anglo, white, narrow kind of school. Because Cranbourne in those days […] had been a fairly country town, really […] You wouldn’t believe that now. But that is what it was. And […] that started 23 years ago, when I came here, that’s what it was like, there were no […] housing estates on the perimeters at all. Cranbourne South had these wealthier residents, who were just here for the weekend you know, there were million-dollar houses out there, there were people with serious money. This [the area surrounding the school] is not. And it was a struggling working class […]. (Personal communication, 1 March 2018)

Huggard taught at Cranbourne Secondary College for close to two decades. He has been a professional educator for almost 40 years, at both private and public schools. In addition, he has been involved in the design of state-wide exams and textbooks for the curriculum of the Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE), which is “the certificate that the majority of students in Victoria receive on satisfactory completion of their secondary education” (Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority 2020, para. 1). The demographic makeup of Cranbourne began to change in the early 2000s, with different waves of migrants settling around the area. As Huggard recalls it, the first wave was from the Pacific Islands, and it brought a new form of cultural diversity and changes in the community. This was followed by another wave of migration, mostly consisting of Afghan refugees (personal communication, 1 March 2018).2 The arrival and settlement of these new migrant communities in Cranbourne brought about tensions. According to Huggard, it was not uncommon for existing members of the community to question the right of migrants to settle in Cranbourne (personal communication, 1 March 2018). 2

 For further information, refer to Cranbourne census data 2001, 2006 and 2011.

4  “ORGANIC” CULTURAL LITERACY—A CASE STUDY 

81

To address this, staff members at Cranbourne Secondary College started taking measures to help students from refugee backgrounds better adapt to their new community, particularly at school. They wished to create safe spaces, and as much support as possible for these newly arrived students from refugee backgrounds. This started before Huggard considered introducing The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif into the VCE English curriculum, with allegations of bullying and racial violence against Afghan members of the community: We had a few Afghan students, and I said, all their friends, relatives, whatever were down the road, and they’re having a dreadful time, and we told them to come here, we would welcome them, we would support them. And Danielle [Radivo] was really important that time because she’d gone into the EAL area, and we made it clear we would support and set up the sort of refugee support programs. We linked up with a whole lot of programs. And we did all of the things in those early years […] And then that kind of just escalated, and […] precipitated what came next. (Personal communication, 1 March 2018)

One of the support mechanisms created by Cranbourne Secondary College was “Polyhood”. Polyhood is an ongoing co-curricular programme with a focus on cultural inclusion. It precedes the incorporation of The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif into the school curriculum. Its aim was to address the challenges brought about by a growing population of students, predominantly from the Pacific Islands (hence the Poly prefix to the name): The early 2000s saw an influx of students into the college from a range of countries including Afghanistan and The Sudan but the Pacific Islands students were the most numerous. While most of these students came to Australia via New Zealand many also came directly from their island homes of Samoa and The Cook Islands. Our curriculum did not have the time and space to enable any exploration or celebration of these cultures and so the students formed an alternative student council to try to meet specific needs: many students needed the time and space to play music, sing and dance, and maintain their very rich cultural traditions within the confines of this new environment. The formation of “Polyhood” was the result of a group of Pacific Island students, led by Angelina and Jonathan Eli, wanting to be able to showcase and celebrate the cultures of their home islands and to be seen and heard in the college as a united and strong student voice. Polyhood has

82 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

continued to grow: the annual highlight is the Polyhood performance that presents singing and dancing, contemporary and traditional. Past students return to be part of Polyhood and external members of the Pacific Island community also contribute to this exceptional performance/celebration. (Cranbourne Secondary College 2020)

What Huggard appears to be describing above is a period of significant change for the Cranbourne community. This process of transformation, of disruption, is what we would refer to as an instance of “organic destabilisation”. Notwithstanding the creation of Polyhood, and efforts by staff members at Cranbourne Secondary College in the early 2000s, there were still significant tensions in the school due to the arrival of students from refugee background (R.  Huggard, personal communication, 1 March 2018; D. Radivo, personal communication, 1 March). It is important to remember that this took place in the context outlined earlier in this chapter, when the plight of refugees and asylum seekers in Australia was being vilified by politicians. As research shows (Riggs and Due 2010; Uptin et al. 2013), it would not have been uncommon for some of these views to be replicated within the school community. Instead of using this “organic destabilisation” as an opportunity for growth and unity through diversity, it was employed  by politicians for precisely the opposite end, division and fear, in order to further political agendas. Much deeper and more pronounced than the type of destabilisation that we aim to curate in an educational environment, “organic destabilisation” prompts an emotional (visceral) and cognitive shift in those who experience it, but without the certainty of safety that must underpin classroom activities. Organic destabilisation is life, doing what life does best, which is to say, unsettle us. Here, it is of crucial importance to stress that instances of “organic destabilisation” cannot be taken as an excuse for any form of bigotry. Our notion of organic destabilisation does not condone racist behaviours; it does not aim to diminish their severity or shift the responsibility of those who engaged in such behaviours to the refugee communities who are settling in a new country with the hope of building new lives. We staunchly distance ourselves from any such interpretations of our work. Rather, our aim in articulating this idea of organic destabilisation is to describe a cognitive/emotive process that takes place when we encounter change. With all sense of proportion, we wish to draw a parallel here between this process of navigating change, and the one that we curate for students in the classroom. Of course, the scale and/or import of the

4  “ORGANIC” CULTURAL LITERACY—A CASE STUDY 

83

change may be different, but we argue that the process itself is not, which is what allows for the transferability of the skills and knowledge of cultural literacy that are taught in the classroom to real-life scenarios. Throughout the rest of this chapter, we will outline different instances of organic destabilisation that took place at Cranbourne Secondary College amongst members of staff and students from refugee and non-refugee backgrounds and the ways in which they were successfully addressed, bringing about greater cultural literacy.

4.4   The Story of Shabnam Safa: Destabilisation Through Difference Shabnam Safa grew up as an Afghan refugee in Pakistan due to ongoing civil war and unrest. In Pakistan, her family lived in the city of Quetta, in a small community known as Hazara Town. As its name indicates, Hazara Town has for a long time been home to a significant population of Hazara Afghan refugees. In 2009, through Australia’s Refugee and Humanitarian Program, Safa and her family were resettled in Melbourne. Close to 2800 refugees arrived by boat the same year as Safa and her family did (Phillips 2017a), a situation that, as previously discussed, was much politicised in Australian politics and mainstream media. If members of the Cranbourne community felt destabilised by the arrival of refugees and the effects that this had on the community, what was it like for those refugees who left their homes and lives behind to resettle in a new country? Many of the stories Safa shared with us can be understood as examples of deep, organic destabilisation. Fully immersive experiences often characterised by uncertainty and confusion that Safa had to learn to navigate, organically. Safa often refers to this destabilisation as “difference”, different instances of “difference”, that had to be negotiated on a daily basis at different levels. In Safa’s words, when describing her first impressions of Australia, “Different was the first thing that comes to mind, very different … all sorts of different” (personal communication, 30 May 2018). There was difference at a linguistic level in the use of localisms of Australian English, and the Australian accent itself. There was a physical, geographical difference that went beyond the obvious elements of weather and location one would first conjure, but more subtly, the different manifestations of these, such as how buildings are constructed, the

84 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

lack of population density, the urban sprawl of Melbourne. At a cultural level, that difference was most tangible for Safa in terms of new social mores and a new educational system.3 Prior to resettling in Australia, in Pakistan Safa attended Rabia Balkhi High School in Hazara Town, “the only girls’ school in town” (personal communication, 30 May 2018). Safa shares some of the differences between studying in Pakistan and studying in Melbourne. She recalls how prior to resettling in Melbourne, she was meant to start Year 12 in Pakistan: I found out, when I came here, I was going to be in Year 12 in Pakistan because there nobody cares about age. I was always the youngest because I kept skipping classes. […] Two or three times I just convinced my teachers that I was too smart for my year level. I knew it all. They’d be like “Yeah, right, okay, sit an exam.” If I passed they’d send me higher up. And I came here and teachers said, “No, you have to start here from Year 9.” It was very shocking, because you know, I was like, Oh, Year 12, you know, I’ll finish school and then go do other stuff and the school’s like, “No, you’re 14!” I was very sad that I had to repeat three whole years, but I’m so glad I did. Well, it’s not like I had any other option anyway, but I’m very glad I did it. I really got to know what going to school or high school is like here, obviously very different. In Pakistan, the schools that we went to as Afghan refugees, most of them weren’t actually registered and recognized by the Pakistani government. So that meant that when I finished my Year 12 and then went out of the little town that I lived in […] If I showed people my certificate and you know, tried to either do high education or get a job, they wouldn’t recognize it. They would say, “You went to this refugee school,” as though I didn’t have any qualification at all, like all those 12, 13 years were for nothing. Thank God, I didn’t get to that stage. But a lot of people knew that was the future they were going to face. So what would happen is that most of the girls […] would drop out by Year 8, nine because they’d say, “I learned to read and write and that’s enough, for me and my family.” The ones who would continue, once they’d finished Year 12, they would either become teachers at the same school, obviously not everybody, because that was the only way they could get their qualification recognized. […] Or they would have to go to Afghanistan and show the certificate and everything, and try to sit the university entrance exam over there. Some people would try three, four years, because Afghanistan itself, […] they wouldn’t 3  The destabilisation that Safa and her family experienced is a much more extreme, scaledup version of what we intend to curate for our students in the tertiary classroom; this will be discussed in the following chapter, alongside the skills necessary to create stability, order and meaning from such chaos.

4  “ORGANIC” CULTURAL LITERACY—A CASE STUDY 

85

recognize it […] So [it was] very hard for many of the graduates. (Personal communication, 30 May 2018)

When she arrived in Melbourne, Safa continually struggled with understanding Australian accents and localisms. Safa learned English in Pakistan, where her parents made a conscious effort to ensure that she learned it from a young age. My parents, they obviously made me take English classes and everything when we were back home. [They thought] it would be good if at least one person knew how to speak English, and those English classes were not free because we didn’t learn English in school. So it was an extra thing. They had to pay for all those classes. And I think I did go to [classes] for three years before we came here. And we came here and I couldn’t understand anything and they’re just like … “Have you been going to class?” (2018, pers. comm. 30 May)

In Pakistan her English teachers had diverse backgrounds, “with all sorts of accents”, many from Britain or the United States (personal communication, 30 May 2018). But as Safa explains, most of the time her teachers were “the students, of the students, of the students of people who actually could speak English properly” (personal communication, 30 May 2018). Safa is naturally inclined towards accents, and it didn’t take her long to get used to the idiosyncrasies of Australian English, but nevertheless, this form of linguistic destabilisation was challenging for her. It manifested itself in many ways, but most prominently at school. I knew that I knew English. But my English wasn’t comprehensible, or people couldn’t understand me and I couldn’t understand them. That was very overwhelming. That took me a very long time, […] to start understanding words here and there when people were talking. Most of the time I had to tell them to slow down because I couldn’t understand them […] Every day felt like an achievement. Come home. I did that, […] I talked to two people today and they didn’t ask me to repeat things five times. They actually understood what I said. (Personal communication, 30 May 2018)

As Correa-Velez et al. (2017) and Naidoo (2015) point out, the challenges that Safa faced are not uncommon. Safa’s linguistic destabilisation was coupled with the destabilisation that comes with learning how to navigate a new environment at school. In her case, what she encountered at

86 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

Cranbourne Secondary College was radically different from her prior experience of school, in all aspects: I don’t know if I can put it into words […] if that would do it justice. It was obviously very overwhelming but not overwhelming in a positive or negative way altogether. I definitely remember my first day at school. I was just standing there […] outside the locker room, that locker room, and going “How am I gonna find my way out of here when it’s time to go home? This place is massive!” I’d never been to a school so big in my life, never before. Our schools where these little square, box-shaped buildings with only four or five rooms getting, you know, reused throughout the day. (Personal communication, 30 May 2018)

Beyond the physical differences that a school like Cranbourne Secondary College presented for Shabnam, there were less tangible but equally unsettling differences, such as the culture of the institution, which was harder to unravel and make sense of: The interaction between teachers and students … I remember at the start, when I had just started going to school here, I would go inside the class and when the teacher walked in I would stand up and I wouldn’t sit down because that’s how we were back home. You know, the teacher walks in and as a show of respect, you stand up and you don’t sit down until the teacher tells you to sit down. And if they are being mean and they don’t want you to sit down, you can’t sit down, basically. And that was very … I think the first few times when teachers would walk in, I’d stand up, and look around, and no one even cared that the teacher was inside the class, you know? It was such a … I was horrified. Oh my god, that’s so rude. And I would just stand there until, like, you know 15 minutes into class the teacher would notice and ask, “Why are you standing?” Because you haven’t told us to sit down yet. Everyone else is, but I don’t want to be in trouble. Or […] when calling out your name on the roll you’d stand up, and say that you were present, all of that. Or looking at teachers in the eye. Calling them by their first name was […] it was a sin, right? And people here did it the whole time without any consequences. Those were the things it took me a while to get used to.

The curriculum at Cranbourne Secondary College was also markedly different from that at Rabia Balkhi High School. One of the examples Safa explained in regard to curricular differences had to do with how history was taught at the two schools:

4  “ORGANIC” CULTURAL LITERACY—A CASE STUDY 

87

We did history in Pakistan […] It’s just, the history was very, very focused. You just did Afghanistan’s history. They were more interested in teaching us what happened like 200 or 300 years ago, how this Afghan King went and conquered all these other lands. […] It was also a very glorified history of our own people. Nobody talked about all the other stuff that the Afghans did around the world. I mean, talk about the bad things too! Everything was good, everything was, you know, glamorous and everything was the same: the king did this, and then the king would die, and then the son would become the king. It was just, it was this repetitive thing.

Social life at Cranbourne Secondary College also posed a challenge for Safa. Once again, the main issue was difference. Safa felt too different from her Australian-born peers, “I actually didn’t even try to become friends with non-bicultural people, with my Aussie classmates at school. It was completely out of the question” (personal communication, 30 May 2018). There was a breakdown in communication, which from Safa’s perspective, seemed to be a two-way street: she did not feel she had the ability to explain what differentiated her from her fellow students, and she felt that even if she tried, they would not have had the resources to understand those differences. “My life before Australia was just completely, totally different. A different world” (personal communication, 30 May 2018). Safa elaborates, Oh, just you know, saying things like, “Oh, we all slept in the same room. And our entire house was one room. We didn’t have separate rooms, we didn’t have beds, you know, furniture. Everything was on the floor and we would use the same room for everything. The living room, you know, was our guest room, it was our study room. And at night it was our dining room, it was our bedroom. Yes, it’s very hard to explain that to people, unless you have […] photos to show, this is what it looked like. Very hard to explain. (Personal communication, 30 May 2018)

Further reflecting on the cultural divide that separated her and her Australian-born, non-migrant classmates upon arrival at Cranbourne Secondary College, Safa highlights the lack of understanding she found in her peers. The way she describes this, it was not necessarily unwillingness, but rather a profound inability to relate, due to an almost complete lack of reference points (what we would argue to be a dearth of cultural literacy). For example, important differences between Afghan students from different religious or ethnic backgrounds would go completely unnoticed

88 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

(personal communication, 30 May 2018). The result more often than not was homogenisation of the “other”, the notion that any and every migrant group was essentially the same. Unless it was America or places people had been to, or, you know, they’ve gone on holiday with their families to France or somewhere else. Those are the places they knew. And they knew […] how different they were to Australia, but everything else outside that was the same. Just putting everyone in one box. Or, you know, say, the Middle East, everyone’s the same […] there’s just this impression that everything outside of Australia looks the same. (Personal communication, 30 May 2018)

Safa comments on some of the characteristics that would set her and other Afghan students apart from their peers at school, particularly through clothing. For example, a number of Afghan female students were required to adhere to strict dress codes at home. In Safa’s words, these students weren’t allowed to wear pants, take the scarf off. That’s a huge difference, right?, to everyone else at school, and everyone’s just like, why would you do that? Pants are for winter, summer dress for summer. Right? Those are things that sets set us or them apart from everyone else at school. (Personal communication, 30 May 2018)

Safa herself was not subject to the pressures of a dress code by her parents: “See, I was, I don’t know if it’s been lucky or not, or unlucky, but I didn’t do any of that. I tried to dress as much as [possible] like everyone else. So I wouldn’t stand out. Yeah, but some of my friends weren’t allowed to do that” (personal communication, 30 May 2018). Conveying the workings of fasting during Ramadan posed another challenge for Muslim students, “It was really hard to explain to people. I don’t fast but, why these guys were not eating? Like, you know, questions like, ‘Not even fruits? Not even water? How does that work?’” (S. Safa, personal communication, 30 May 2018). During her first years at Cranbourne Secondary, Safa gravitated towards students with a background similar to hers. Once such students were identified, there was a tendency to isolate themselves from the rest of the school community, to remain insular. Safa explains, “We had quite a lot of students from Afghanistan. Students from/with Hazara ethnicity. Not all were from the

4  “ORGANIC” CULTURAL LITERACY—A CASE STUDY 

89

same town in Quetta, Pakistan. […]” These students tended to spend time together, in and out of school. [We were] this group of nerd students [who would] just stick to their own group, do their homework, be Teacher’s Pet and really smart at everything. […] And yeah, we sort of had our little group, “the Afghans”. […] When we were at school we had this little Afghan corner in the VCE block. Four or five chairs that we called the Afghan corner. So, you know, we all hung out there, we ate and we also did our snacks and everything in that little corner. (Personal communication, 30 May 2018)

In this regard, Ema Stefanovic, a fellow student at Cranbourne Secondary College at the time Safa studied there, explains, “Taking a step back now, the ‘Afghans,’ as they were often termed at my school, were quiet and often stuck to their group” (personal communication, 17 May 2019). Even after years of living in Australia, prior to commencing university, Safa struggled to fully understand the intricacies of the Australian tertiary education system. In regard to studying at university, Safa remarks, Part of the reason I wanted to take that whole year off [before entering university] was that I still wasn’t a citizen. This I’ve never said to anyone, but in my head I was like “I’m not a citizen, if I go to university, I have to pay for everything!” I didn’t do my research and I was totally you know, eligible for HECS because I was still a permanent resident, humanitarian permanent resident. So I was like, “I’m gonna take the year off and by next year, I’ll become a citizen, you know, have everything and I won’t have to pay, and I definitely don’t want my parents to pay”. So that was just such a stupid thing that I did back then. But I’m glad I took that year off because I worked for the first half of the year and went to volunteer in India for the second half. (Personal communication, 30 May 2018)

Safa’s deep, organic destabilisation placed her in a position where she had to identify and understand her limitations in order to address them. She quickly developed Tran’s notion of creative or agentive ignorance, engaging with ignorance “actively, in a creative manner, with not only awareness of it but with the intention of turning such ignorance ‘into co-­ constructive knowledge and capabilities and attributes’” (Tran 2015). This is precisely what a culturally literate person does. As discussed in Chap. 3, Tran’s idea of creative ignorance is an important foundation of

90 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

cultural readability. Becoming aware of the fact that there is something we don’t know, but that we ought to know in order to better navigate a situation of uncertainty, is a starting point for reflection. By identifying and reflecting upon her limitations (or lack of knowledge) in order to address them, Safa was able to develop her cultural literacy. She did so with tremendous success, learning how to navigate the workings of her new system. By Year 11, Safa felt she had the skills and the confidence to befriend her Australian-born peers. She excelled both academically and in her extracurricular activities. She was the Dux of the school in Year 11 and graduated with a 90+ Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (ATAR) result. In addition to this, Safa practised (and continues to practice) karate, with ambitions of becoming an Olympic athlete: “That’s still in the books, especially now that karate is included in the Olympics as a sport. It will be for the first time in 2020” (personal communication, 30 May 2018). After finishing her studies at Cranbourne Secondary College, Safa excelled as an activist, dedicating herself to helping her community and aiding refugees both in Australia and internationally. Before starting her university degree, Safa joined a volunteer programme run by Latitude Global Volunteer, teaching English in India. Coming back from India in 2014, Safa and a group of friends from Afghan refugee backgrounds started the Noor Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation. The aim of the Noor Foundation is to “help newly arrived migrants and refugees with their initial settlement”, assisting with those services “that are not provided by the bigger service providers”, and to help bridge generational differences between elder and younger members of her community (personal communication, 30 May 2018). Safa and her friends wanted to draw from their own knowledge and experience as refugees to help ease the transition of other refugees coming to Australia, in particular those of Afghan backgrounds with whom they could communicate with ease. The same year Safa and her friends created the Noor Foundation, she was selected as one of 75 young applicants amongst a pool of over 15,000 to represent Australia at the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations— Education First Summer School. Since then, her local community work has included involvement with the City of Casey’s Access and Inclusion Advisory Committee, the Multifaith Multicultural Youth Network, the Victorian Refugee Health Network and the Centre for Multicultural Youth (S. Safa, personal communication, 30 May 2018). Safa also received a fellowship from Qatar Foundation through which she had the opportunity to investigate the impact of conflict on education and went to research and work at refugee camps in Greece to get a better understanding of the

4  “ORGANIC” CULTURAL LITERACY—A CASE STUDY 

91

issue. She ran for office in her local council, the City of Casey, in 2016 and, although unsuccessful, received the fourth highest number of votes out of 18 candidates. The reasons behind Safa’s many successes and her extraordinary cultural literacy are complex and multi-factorial. They involve her commitment, resilience and intelligence and support from her family and community at large, to mention only a few. An event that Safa describes as instrumental in helping her to develop her cultural literacy was studying The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif at school, not only in the effect that the book had on her, but more importantly, on how she felt that others at Cranbourne Secondary College perceived her as a result of reading the book and developing their own cultural literacy.

4.5   Destabilising the Curriculum: The Introduction of The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif was an important step towards a change in culture at Cranbourne Secondary College. In our view, the approach taken in teaching this book at Cranbourne Secondary College was an “organic” example of embedding cultural literacy into a curriculum. Organic in the sense that it came about as a pragmatic, well-planned and well-considered answer to some of the challenges of diversity and inclusion perceived by the staff at the school, underpinned by their years of experience in teaching, but not by the theory and scholarly research that we present in this book. As we discuss in this section, the text’s study presented the opportunity for both destabilisation and deep, collaborative and multidimensional reflection, which appear to have fostered the students’ cultural literacy skills and, in particular, their empathy.4 Again, it is very important to emphasise that we are not suggesting the book was a panacea to every challenge of diversity and inclusion at the school; over a period of time, there were numerous institutional changes at different levels that led to Cranbourne Secondary College having 4  Here, it is important to note the difference between our approach to empathy in teaching cultural literacy and the approach to empathy that some of the teaching staff at Cranbourne Secondary College had when teaching the text. The focus in our teaching practice is to develop our students’ awareness of their own empathy, whilst the approach taken when teaching The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif was to develop empathy itself.

92 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

the commendable culture of diversity that it has at present (such as the aforementioned introduction of Polyhood), but The Rugmaker of Mazar-­ e-­Sharif seems to have been a crucial step in this process. In Huggard’s words, it “helped open people’s eyes” (personal communication, 1 March 2018). ESL Classes The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif was taught to two different cohorts. At first, the book was only incorporated into the English as Second Language (ESL) curriculum, but it later became a mainstream text for VCE English. These cohorts had different educational requirements. Consequently, the rationales behind teaching the book to each cohort, and the ways in which the text was taught, differed. Danielle Radivo was the coordinator of ESL at Cranbourne Secondary at the time. She taught The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif extensively over a period of four years (personal communication, 1 March 2018). There were two classes of roughly 12 students each, for a total of 24 students in the ESL cohort. The students were predominantly Afghan, almost 90% of the class with some of them from refugee backgrounds (personal communication, 1 March 2018). According to Radivo, there was a large group of students from a refugee Afghan background at the time, and only two or three students from the cohort came from a different background, but she was unable to recall whether those other members of her class were also from refugee backgrounds. Given the composition of Radivo’s classes, predominantly Afghan refugee students, the text was clearly not chosen with the intent of challenging students’ views on Afghanistan or refugees (although it did have this side effect for those students from non-Afghan backgrounds who were in the class). Rather, what Radivo aimed to do was build a cultural bridge with the students through the text, fostering an educational environment that showed them they were welcomed, honoured and appreciated. Mazari’s memoir seemed the ideal text to her, as it bridges the cultural divide between Afghanistan and Australia. According to Radivo, when choosing classroom materials for her ESL classes, she seeks for texts (whether film or books) that will “embrace” the culture of the majority of the students in her class and that will help, to the extent that it is possible, to bond with students, as well as for students to bond with each other: “I always try to look for something that they can relate to […] you want something they can connect with” (personal

4  “ORGANIC” CULTURAL LITERACY—A CASE STUDY 

93

communication, 1 March 2018). Radivo adds that choosing a text like The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif in an ESL environment is also important because it shows students that teachers respect where they come from and that they wish to connect and honour their cultural heritage: “You want to listen to the stories of their people […] to respect the kids that are in our school that are Afghans, and perhaps what their parents have been through” (personal communication, 1 March 2018). Showcasing Mazari as a role model was also important according to Radivo: “It was recognition of a writer that came from their background, a Hazara. And here we were, acknowledging and accepting this refugee. A success story, and listening to his story and say, well, he’s got a lot to offer” (personal communication, 1 March 2018). Throughout the years when Radivo taught The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif, she was able to organise a visit for students to meet Mazari himself, who is based in Melbourne. When The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif was adopted as a mainstream text for VCE, a number of the students who had studied it in previous years as part of the ESL curriculum had begun to transition into mainstream English. Radivo explains, I taught [The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif] in one year here, and then the following year, mainstream English came on board, and they adopted the book too as one of their texts. And I think that would have been an interesting lesson too, because then it would have shown native speakers what it’s like to come from a background like that, you know, to help to connect […] I think it’s important for the EAL learners, it’s like, we want to learn something about their culture, we value it, there’s something we can glean from that, and learn and understand them as people. And then, for native speakers, the same thing, they can develop the empathy that we would hope they would have with their other peers in this school. And I think that has come about. (Personal communication, 1 March 2018)

Huggard, who taught those VCE classes, expanded on this. By the time that [The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif] came onto the course […] the transition had happened with students from Afghan and other backgrounds becoming mainstream students because they’re out of the seven years. […] And of course that’s grown over the years. (Personal communication, 1 March 2018)

94 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

VCE English Huggard was responsible for making The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif part of the VCE English curriculum at Cranbourne Secondary College. There were very different objectives in teaching The Rugmaker of Mazar-­ e-­Sharif to VCE English students than to the ESL cohort. Although as mentioned above, throughout the years some of the students that had originally read The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif in an ESL class eventually transitioned to VCE English classes, when the text was first introduced Huggard’s class was predominantly composed of Australian-born students. In light of this, one of Huggard’s main aims in choosing the text was to challenge, at a fundamental level, students’ preconceptions of refugees and their stories, and to present them with a discourse different to the one they were exposed to by the mainstream media. This is precisely what we would refer to as destabilisation in our teaching practice. Huggard taught the text for three years over the course of a term, with approximately 125 students enrolled in class each year. He explains that in addition to challenging students’ preconceptions, there were other reasons behind the choice of The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif. Year 12 VCE English texts are usually chosen as paired texts with a common topic, in order to prompt comparative analysis between the texts. The topic of study for Year 12 VCE English at the time was “Conflict”. One of the other text options was Miller’s The Crucible. “There were four texts to choose from and I thought that was a really good pairing,” Huggard explains. In his opinion, pairing The Crucible and The Rugmaker of Mazar-­ e-­Sharif would present very different perspectives on the topic of conflict and “open up their understandings” on the topic (personal communication, 1 March 2018). Accessibility was also an important factor to take into consideration. In terms of the syntax and clarity of the language, the text is easy to read and set at the appropriate level for Year 12 students. Interestingly, this aligns with Junker and Jacquemin’s arguments regarding the required conditions for a course on literature to be conducive to the development of empathy. Junker and Jacquemin argue that the style of writing has to be accessible to students and that the key objectives of the literary course should not “conflict with the objective of building empathy” (2017, 84). This goes hand-in-hand with Huggard’s last aim, that the study of the text would lead to enhanced communication and empathy between students from non-refugee backgrounds and their classmates from refugee

4  “ORGANIC” CULTURAL LITERACY—A CASE STUDY 

95

backgrounds “because the number of Afghan students had grown a lot, and I will highlight that because they were so conspicuously different, they kind of stood out” (personal communication, 1 March 2018). A way of approaching and making sense of that “conspicuous difference” was through the text, which would serve a dual function: hone the students’ writing, reading and literary analysis as intended in their VCE curriculum, whilst enhancing their cultural literacy skills, “In terms of The Rugmaker, it would help kids to understand the experience that so many of our Afghan students have gone through or their families” (personal communication, 1 March 2018). Huggard elaborates on this: I thought it would open up a better understanding because it would help students to actually look at other students around them and think, “Wow, it’s their experience. It’s just like them.” So and that capacity was, you know, from a thinking point of view was going to help them understand more clearly the impact of conflicts, and that was going to help their writing. (Personal communication, 1 March 2018)

The “conspicuous difference” Huggard refers to echoes the “difference” Safa alluded to in her story. This is another example of the “organic destabilisation” that appeared to be taking place amongst some students at Cranbourne Secondary College. According to Huggard, it was very difficult for his Australian-born students to relate to both the experiences that many students with a refugee background faced prior to coming to Australia and the everyday challenges they faced once in Australia. For example, a number of students from Afghan refugee backgrounds were not aware of their age. For a variety of reasons, many did not have birth certificates or other documentation that attested to the exact date of their birth. The ongoing tensions between Pashtuns and Hazaras, which is second nature to Afghan children, was completely alien to Australian-born students who did not have an Afghan background. As Huggard explains, “Most of the kids don’t even know the difference [between Pashtuns and Hazaras]” (personal communication, 1 March 2018). There were also students from refugee backgrounds who had to face the challenge of being separated from members of their nuclear families, who would often be based out of Australia. This presented a weighty problem for many of them, finding themselves practically alone in Australia. Consequently, it was not uncommon amongst young Afghan men, for example, to have to travel back to Pakistan or even Afghanistan in some cases due to

96 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

extenuating circumstances affecting a relative. Huggard shared the case of a student enrolled in Year 12 at Cranbourne Secondary College who found himself in such a situation: This young man was Hazara, not all, but a significant number of Afghan, young men are. He had a person who brought him up who was basically like a stepparent. I think his own parents were dead. He [the stepparent] was very ill, but he was in Quetta. And at this point Quetta was being bombed out of existence. And then of course, the Hazara were a target. And he knew that it was really dangerous before he had to go back, and we had some discussions, and I got him to compress the time he was going […] But before he went, I said, “How are you going to stay safe?”, and he said “It’s alright. I’ve got completely different clothes I will travel in, and I’ll arrive in, and I won’t look like a Hazara. And I know what I need to do if there’s trouble.” And it was really interesting, it was an interesting comment. (Personal communication, 1 March 2018)

According to Huggard, the anxiety that this young man experienced knowing that a loved one overseas was unwell, and his inability to help them in the way he would if he were there, the pressures involved in having to travel back to Pakistan, into the midst of a situation that could potentially endanger him, were too alien for Australian students from non-­ refugee backgrounds to relate to. Huggard mentions that when he asked the Afghan young man to share his experience with his Australian classmates, many of them “were quite shocked that he would have to do that” (personal communication, 1 March 2018). The points of reference often required for empathy to take root—the commonality, the shared background and communal stories—are simply not there. The organic destabilisation that students from a non-refugee background experienced through the text, and through the narratives presented to them by many of their peers, was multidimensional. Cognitively, it challenged the ongoing political discourse that they had been exposed to, but it also challenged them at a more emotional, visceral level.

4.6   “Destabilising the Educator” in Practice Another important form of organic destabilisation that took place at Cranbourne Secondary College pertained to the teachers themselves. This speaks to another point we raised earlier, of the importance of destabilising the educator. In our view, in order for destabilisation to work effectively

4  “ORGANIC” CULTURAL LITERACY—A CASE STUDY 

97

and successfully, how educators position themselves in relation to knowledge and their students is critical and requires a very particular type of commitment. When educators are able to shift their centrality and to an extent, position of authority in relation to knowledge—and ways of knowing more broadly—they open the space for the students to fully engage in their own destabilisation. Incorporating The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif into the curriculum at Cranbourne Secondary College was destabilising in a number of ways. As Radivo and Huggard explain, there was considerable resistance at the time from some members of staff at the school. When it became part of the ESL reading list, Radivo had to face “huge battles” (personal communication, 1 March 2018). Later, when Huggard started using the text in his mainstream VCE classes, his decision was questioned by colleagues, “I had a few staff saying, ‘Are you really using it? Is this going to work?’” (personal communication, 1 March 2018). Huggard and Radivo themselves, who clearly were not sceptical about the use of the text, were nonetheless destabilised by it in their own teaching practice. Both teachers acknowledge that The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-­ Sharif challenged them as educators. In Radivo’s case, in particular, it led her to reflect on her role as a figure of authority and a source of knowledge in the classroom. Given that many of her ESL students came from a refugee Afghan background, they were “experts” in the context of the text in a way Radivo could never be: she had never been to Afghanistan, is not a refugee had not experienced instances of conflict and displacement such as those narrated by Mazari and, in many cases, lived by her students. Thus, Radivo’s preparation for teaching these texts involved informing herself as much as possible on the history and culture of Afghanistan, the Hazara and the conflict that constitutes the context of the book: “At that time it was alien territory for me. It was not, I didn’t know a lot about Afghan culture. So I had to sort of prepare myself do a little bit of research. Know what the customs are of these people and what it’s like before I present that to the students” (personal communication, 1 March 2018). However, part of Radivo’s preparation for teaching these texts involved not only informing herself and learning about Afghanistan, but having the openness to learn from her students. To surrender her position as the centre of knowledge and authority, and move from the role of expert to facilitator, allowing the expertise of the members of her class to inform both her and each other, “And the amazing thing was, I learnt a whole lot about their

98 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

culture through them, through the discussion. I kind of filled in the gaps, and they were real, tangible” (D. Radivo, personal communication, 1 March 2018).

4.7   Teaching Strategies: Contextualisation, Collaborative Reflection and Perspective-Taking In order to better understand the strategies that allowed students to develop their empathy and understanding, Huggard and Radivo shared their approach to teaching The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif, including the exercises they did with students in relation to the text, both in class and outside in the form of assignments. There were three practices that we found particularly relevant to cultural literacy, all closely associated with our approach to reflection: contextualisation, collaborative and shared reflection and perspective-taking These activities exercise many of the skills that we associate with cultural readability in that they approach issues from the lens of literary thinking, applying a “text-like” quality to society and culture, and they foster the creation of thinking “structures” that facilitate the readability of cultural artefacts, enabling students to draw meaning from such artefacts. Contextualisation Huggard explains the importance not only of properly contextualising subjects of study for students, which ultimately allows them to have structured and intentional reflections, but even more crucially, the importance of teaching students how to contextualise and understand contexts. In Huggard’s view, this is a crucial skill, because it provides the foundation for other skills like reflection, perspective-taking, imaginary displacement and ultimately empathy. It is very hard for any of the above to develop without a robust understanding of contextualisation. Huggard comments in regard to teaching students how to contextualise a text, provided they understand the values and the attitudes that prevail at that time. If they don’t, no. You’ve got to do a whole lot of work trying to set that up. I’m just finishing Gogol’s Diary of a Madman […] Now you got to kind of get their head in the 1830s Russia, you know, pre-revolution in a bureaucratic world and very stratified society. For Year 11s, it’s been a real battle, to try and get their head around it. I know, I recognize where it is.

4  “ORGANIC” CULTURAL LITERACY—A CASE STUDY 

99

Or the last text we’ll do this year will be Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. It’s hard to understand attitudes in the 1950s, particularly toward sexuality, marriage. A lot of other things, the Deep South and all those kinds of attitudes. You’ve got to kind of get your head around it. So I think there’s got to be a lot of explicit teaching of that, the place, the time, the situation, the attitudes, to be able to put yourself in. Then step back and say, “Hey, now I can see that.”

Contextualisation, of course, is a foundational skill of text analysis, but it is also a transferable skill for cultural literacy that allows for a better understanding of real-life scenarios. In relation to The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif, Huggard explains how students from non-refugee backgrounds were taught to contextualise the text and the effects this had in how they understood the stories of their peers from refugee backgrounds: I’ve always looked at the context, it’s critical to understand what’s going on. […] We were giving them articles, all sorts of things. Not just to analyse, but in terms of background and information. […] Give them a bit of a history of Afghanistan looking at it, [understanding] that it was really a very modern construct. And really it hadn’t been a nation on its own, virtually through history. It’s been pulled and pushed all over the place. And so it’s a melting pot and they are the victims of situations not of their own making. Which was also helpful to understand the Afghan students. [Non-refugee students were] thinking, “Oh, it’s not their fault. You know, there’s a reason why people go through this.” (Personal communication, 1 March 2018)

As mentioned before, “conflict” was the theme of analysis for VCE English at the time The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif was taught at Cranbourne Secondary College. Huggard used this theme not only as a scaffolding for structuring his teaching of the text, but also to help students develop their own contextualisation skills. He explains, I had a series of questions on both texts [The Crucible and The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif]. But the questions were framed in a way that they’re always looking at, obviously, encountering conflict, because this was the context under which we were doing this, but looking at […] particular experiences, so that there was a lot of analysis, close text analysis. (Personal communication, 1 March 2018)

Analysing the text through the theme of conflict allowed Huggard’s students to delve into other topics in the book, but with a firm “thinking structure”, that facilitated their understanding of different situations.

100 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

Huggard explains how the theme of conflict in the course “put a framework. Looking at, you know, the people, the universal experiences of conflict, and people who experienced it, how they don’t want to be [experiencing it], people don’t want to be in conflict. But what happens when you do? And how do you respond? […] And what are the consequences? So that framed a lot of that point of view from a kind of cultural sense” (personal communication, 1 March 2018). Some of those topics and situations the students analysed were relevant to the students’ personal experience in different ways. Students from non-refugee backgrounds, for example, as indirect recipients of conflict, delved into the long term, secondary consequences of conflict through the changes brought about in their community with the arrival of refugees. Huggard elaborates on how appropriate contextualisation is key to helping students achieve a truly immersive reading experience, particularly when the context of the text is significantly different from their own. This is what helps students develop an imaginative sense of displacement or literary empathy. A problem with a lot of adolescent fiction is that it is too current and written in the current way. And I think that can be a limiting factor, because kids see it is relevant to them at that moment. So then they come into more substantial fiction, or literature, other kinds, and of course, they’re not. It wasn’t written today, and they go, “This is irrelevant!” No, it’s not. (Personal communication, 1 March 2018)

In this regard, Huggard’s pedagogical approach to the text echoes Junker and Jacquemin’s argument on the need to align the development of empathy in students with the key objectives of a course (2017). The exercises on contextualisation the students undertook when studying The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif adhered at all times to the requirements of the VCE curriculum, but there was also a clear intention on both Huggard’s and Radivo’s part to go beyond this and help students from a non-refugee background develop their ability to contextualise a narrative, so that they could in turn show empathy and understanding for those students from refugee backgrounds. Thus, class activities and assignments were carefully designed to provide students with the necessary skills and knowledge that would allow them to have an informed understanding of the meaning of the text, but also to engage in deep, critical self-reflection,

4  “ORGANIC” CULTURAL LITERACY—A CASE STUDY 

101

which would often result in empathy for the character of Mazari in the book (narrative empathy) and their peers (more general empathy). Interestingly, when Radivo discusses her strategies for teaching The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif in her ESL class, she also emphasises the importance of context. This would appear counterintuitive given that the majority of her students at the time came from an Afghan refugee background. However, it is not unreasonable when considering first that there were still students from other backgrounds in the class who would not be able to understand the text without appropriate contextualisation and, second, it speaks to the crucial importance of providing students with a robust framework in order to prompt reflection and understanding, even when the subject of study may appear to be second nature to them from the educator’s point of view. Without such framework, as Junker and Jacquemin argue (2017) deciphering a text is much harder, issues of accessibility arise and the chances of developing subjectivity and empathy are much harder too. Radivo explains, [We] had to look at the outer world and how conflict occurs. And then so we talked about conflict in the world at large and then we came into the world of The Rugmaker. And we discussed the types of conflict that Najaf was experiencing. Familial conflict, with the different civil groups, the Taliban versus the Hazara, and any other conflicts that […] came from that novel. So that’s what we did with that, that was one of the main activities. And just sort of related the world, the larger world coming into the novel […] Contextualising. We did concept maps. Venn diagrams. Circles within circles. (Personal communication, 1 March 2018)

Collaborative and Shared Reflection Many of the activities at Cranbourne Secondary College involved shared, collaborative reflection. Huggard explains that reflecting on a text as a group is a basic step to tease out the themes that are of relevance to the students, whether in relation to the topic of study, or their own experience. Through class discussion students are able to better understand each other’s perspectives, to “see things differently” and to “counter some of the attitudes” and prejudices that some of them may have in relation to certain social narratives, such as the mainstream political discourse on refugees in this particular case (R.  Huggard, personal communication, 1 March 2018). There is, of course, a personalised aspect to the reflection

102 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

process; but in the development of cultural literacy, it is important that personalised reflection has a dual lens, both inward and outward looking, which helps to contextualise that personal reflection within a community. Collaborative, shared reflections in the form of class discussions such as the ones Huggard describes are an ideal conduit for this. Huggard recalled a particularly helpful class discussion, when Mazari was visiting the school and held a Q&A session with the students about some of the experiences he narrates in the memoir: We talked about this as being a very typical experience. Although, of course, he came from a much wealthier background, and then he drew the students out and said, “Oh, look, you know, I don’t want to embarrass you but is there anyone who …?” And nine out of ten students would talk, and if you just probed a bit, they would do that. So that really enabled them, other students, to actually empathise a lot more and not see this as a distant thing. (personal communication, 1 March 2018)5

Regarding how guided discussions in the classroom can be used to prompt reflection and understanding, Huggard explains that there were times when he deemed it pertinent to ask students from refugee backgrounds whether they were willing to share aspects of their experience that were similar to what was being analysed in the text: “I took it upon myself, which was risky, to see this as a way of helping those Afghan students who were there, actually drawing on their experience. And I would try to preface it by saying ‘we are talking about some aspect of what you went through’” (R. Huggard, personal communication, 1 March 2018). This had to be done with much tact, and great awareness of the classroom environment. The aim, of course, was to ensure that sharing such experiences would be conducive to understanding and demystifying them and that it would help build empathy amongst students, and not the opposite, cause distress due to relieved trauma, or fetichising of the refugee students’ experience. Huggard points out how it was also important to balance the 5  In this example, where Mazari himself came to the school to speak to the students, and when students from refugee backgrounds shared their experiences with the class, any instances of empathy experienced by the students could be attributed to non-narrative empathy, empathy that was brought about by direct contact with people and not mediated through a text. As we will argue later in this section, when we delve into perspective-taking, students at Cranbourne Secondary College found themselves in a very unusual position studying The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif, where they could experience both narrative empathy through the text and non-narrative empathy for their peers.

4  “ORGANIC” CULTURAL LITERACY—A CASE STUDY 

103

discussion, and problematise the fact that the experiences of students from Afghan refugee backgrounds could be widely different from those Mazari went through, and to avoid turning students into “representatives of the Afghan refugee plight”. “I remember around then […] there were some kids from those earlier days, some Afghan boys, who were quite happy to […] explain why they were so different” (R. Huggard, personal communication, 1 March 2018). Like Huggard, Radivo also emphasised the importance of shared reflection in building understanding, and points out how many of her ESL student were willing to share their own experiences during those collaborative reflections. In particular, when it came to elements of the text pertaining to the conflict in Afghanistan, and many of the ethnic and religious tensions in the region, students from an Afghan refugee background were very eager to recount their experiences. Yes, they did, because they felt a persecuted people. And they said yes, we are the Hazara too, that’s what it was like for us. And then all these discussions evolved. We went to Pakistan from Afghanistan, because we were being persecuted and the Taliban did this, and the Taliban did that. And it was terrible, Miss. And we knew someone that, you know, had experiences with them, it could have been their father, it could have been their grandfather. So yes, [the text] did actually generate discussion about difficult experiences that they’d actually gone through. Yes, that did emerge, indeed. (Personal communication, 1 March 2018)

Radivo elaborated on the advantages of having students in class who had gone through similar experiences to those narrated in the text. She explains how the discussions that ensued from sharing those experiences helped foster empathy amongst students: “One of the boys in there, he was a little bit older, and he actually did learn the craft of rugmaking. And that really just exploded the discussion” (personal communication, 1 March 2018). Although most of Radivo’s students had an Afghan background, not all of them did. The text allowed those students from non-­ refugee Afghan backgrounds to be, in Radivo’s words, “sympathetic” towards their peers (personal communication, 1 March 2018). Perspective-Taking As discussed in Chap. 2, perspective-taking is a widely used technique in a number of fields (Toegel and Barsoux 2016; Nikolajeva 2012, 2014;

104 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

Pinker 2011), one that we incorporate into our own teaching practice to help students develop their cultural literacy. We will discuss this in more detail in Chap. 5. Interestingly, it is also a technique that Huggard and Radivo used when teaching The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif. As mentioned before, the VCE English curriculum at the time the memoir was taught required pairing two different texts with a common theme, in this case The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif and Miller’s The Crucible: “So you taught part of one text, part of the other, and then you pulled out a whole lot of elements that they had in common” (personal communication, 1 March 2018). Huggard explains that the approach he usually takes when comparing such texts involves helping students to practice perspective-­ taking and subjectivity, to develop their ability to put themselves in someone else’s shoes. This was not just in the case of The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif and The Crucible, but with any two seemingly disparate texts, such as Twelve Angry Men and The Return of Martin Guerre in previous years. His argument is that when students are able to put themselves in different situations and understand them, it is much easier to establish links between such situations, to draw more robust comparisons (R.  Huggard, personal communication, 1 March 2018). When The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif was taught, this was particularly important, because in Huggard’s view it could also help exercise the students’ empathy and understanding (which in our own teaching practice, would be steps towards helping them develop their cultural literacy). Huggard and Radivo were able to teach the text in a unique context in which a significant number of their students could relate to the experiences narrated by Mazari, and this in turn helped students with non-refugee backgrounds develop their empathy and understanding. Huggard explains that under less exceptional circumstances, when he teaches texts that appear to have little in common with his student demographic, this approach still plays a very important role in the learning process: My all-time favourite, absolutely favourite novel, I think has to be Jane Eyre. And you always find that you know, 1840s, girl becomes a young woman in her situation … there’s not a kid I’ve ever taught that who wouldn’t say that was a great moment for them. I think kids say to me, “No one’s ever going to take it from me.” […] Because what they’re saying is, this was one of those transformative moments. (Personal communication, 1 March 2018)

4  “ORGANIC” CULTURAL LITERACY—A CASE STUDY 

105

Huggard argues that what is so “transformative” about moments such as those experienced by his students reading Jane Eyre—a similar notion to Meyer and Land’s idea of threshold concepts, where one passes “through a portal, from which a new perspective opens up, allowing things formerly not perceived to come into view” (2010, ix)—is that the students are able to connect with the text despite how removed their circumstances are from those of the characters in it: “That to me is part of this whole cultural element that sits behind. I think once you get to Year 10, 10 and 11, but ten is certainly the cusp of it, certainly getting on to 11, that’s what you should be doing” (personal communication, 1 March 2018). What Huggard describes alludes to Gerrig’s ideas of transportation, the experience of becoming deeply immersed in a story and connecting with it at a cognitive and emotional level (2009). This connection with the text in spite of the readers’ contrastingly different circumstances to those of the story they are reading is the basis of the aforementioned notion of narrative empathy. It is important to note here that the instances of empathy that the students at Cranbourne Secondary would have experienced as a consequence of reading The Rugmaker are most likely a combination of Keen’s notion of narrative empathy, “the sharing of feeling and perspective-taking induced by reading, viewing, hearing, or imagining narratives of another’s situations and condition” (Keen 2014, 34), and the more general definition of empathy we adopted before, where we are able to put ourselves in someone else’s position, “we feel what we believe to be the emotions of others” (Keen 2007, 5), but without this experience being necessarily related to literature. Even though The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif is not fiction, but a memoir based on Mazari’s real-life experience, the empathy the students experienced by virtue of reading the text alone still falls under Keen’s definition of narrative empathy, for it was brought about by a narrative, and not the students’ direct interaction with Mazari. However, in this particular case, this is compounded by the fact that many of the students in both Radivo’s and Huggard’s classes did get to meet Mazari after reading the text, through visits to his shop organised by the school, or through visits that Mazari paid to the school, and by the fact that students from non-­ refugee backgrounds had direct, real-life exposure to classmates with refugee backgrounds. Thus, there is an amalgam here of narrative empathy brought about by the text and real-life empathy experienced through the students’ interaction with Mazari and their classmates from refugee backgrounds.

106 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

According to Huggard, there were several options for the writing exercises in the close-text analysis of The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif. One of these involved perspective-taking, writing a creative piece from the point of view of a character in the book. One of the things I would certainly say is when students wrote in that creative way, or in a hypothetical way […], it was quite clear, they were able to empathize more because they were able to put themselves in that kind of context, realize, what would that have been like for me? Particularly because, you know, at the beginning of the text, [Mazari is] very much a young boy who’s just part of a family, minding his own business doing his own thing. And he’s thrust into this other kind of world. And that’s why in some ways it was a particularly useful text. Because it normalised [the experience of being directly impacted by conflict]. (Personal communication, 1 March 2018)

Huggard argues that due to its clarity and accessibility, The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif helped students develop their subjectivity and capacity for empathy, because it made it easy to understand Mazari’s point of view. According to Huggard, the text was able to provide that sense that it wasn’t someone else’s experience, but it became, “What would that have been like for me?” And that’s how you capture the most powerful thing we can enable people to see: that could be me. What would I have done? How do I respond to that? That becomes a much more internal process. (Personal communication, 1 March 2018)

In this sense, following Colvin’s definition of the term, the reflection conducted by Huggard with his students appears to provide the text with a liminal, dual function as both “mirror” and “window” (2017). As Colvin argues, “mirrors are narratives that reflect the reader’s experience or identity back to them, while windows are narratives that give readers a glimpse into an unfamiliar experience or story” (2017, 1). But through the type of reflection that Huggard’s students engaged in, they were able to use the text as a “window” into the experience of another, a markedly different experience, and in so doing, find commonality with elements of that experience, turning it into a “mirror”. Thus, Huggard’s students exercised both their perspective-taking skills and their identification and in so doing also exercised their empathy.

4  “ORGANIC” CULTURAL LITERACY—A CASE STUDY 

107

Radivo too explains how in her view reading The Rugmaker of Mazar-­ e-­Sharif also helped develop empathy in ESL students. “There was a lot of connectivity,” Radivo points out (personal communication, 1 March 2018). For those ESL students from non-refugee backgrounds, the experience was akin to that of Australian-born students reading the text. For students with refugee backgrounds, whether Afghan or not, the similarities between their own experiences and those narrated in the text made it easy to put themselves in Mazari’s shoes. Radivo explains, They saw the persecution of this person, and it was just a person, just trying to be himself in an environment that just prevented him from being able to do that. And it’s just the removal of basic, I think, rights. And yes, I believe that there was a lot of empathy that emerged within the students in response to the study of that text. (Personal communication, 1 March 2018)

Similar to Huggard, Radivo explains that one of the activities she encouraged in her class was perspective-taking through creative writing. Students would assume the point of view of a character in the text and try to describe a particular situation from that point of view. In Radivo’s experience, the students responded well to the tasks that involved them exercising their positionality. They found them engaging and appeared to enjoy them. I think that they approached the task with ease. I didn’t think that they were traumatized by having to do it, and the empathy was there right from the start. They always had it, because they could relate to that. So I don’t think that anything negative came from it. It was a positive experience. (D. Radivo, personal communication, 1 March 2018)

In the example described by Radivo, the mixed cohort of her class was able to exercise both its “identification” and “perspective-taking” skills, albeit in a different way. Because unlike Huggard’s, Radivo’s class included a number of Afghan students with a refugee background, for them the text would have been more of a “mirror” narrative, allowing them to identify with Mazari’s experiences. For those students coming from a non-­ refugee background, the text would have been either a “window” narrative that allowed them to exercise their perspective-taking or, as in the case of Huggard’s class, a dual, liminal narrative with both “window” and “mirror” elements.

108 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

4.8   Impact: A Shift in Perspective Incorporating the text into the Cranbourne Secondary College curriculum had a profound impact on the school. According to Huggard, it helped change the attitudes of some of the teachers towards students from refugee backgrounds: “I think from that point of view, something like Rugmaker kind of did open up, to be honest for staff” (R. Huggard, personal communication, 1 March 2018). The shift in attitudes amongst students from non-refugee backgrounds towards students from refugee backgrounds was one of the most palpable results of incorporating the text into the curriculum. Huggard explains that many students started having markedly different views from their parents in regard to the refugee community, because they had a new understanding after reading The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif, of the refugee experiences some of their fellow students had undergone: “They saw those students as part of their world. And that’s what’s happened here. That’s been a success story this place. You know, this is one of the things I guess, in my own mind, I think, we did achieve that” (personal communication, 1 March 2018). Ema Stefanovic studied at Cranbourne Secondary College alongside Shabnam Safa. According to her, reading The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif as a student from a non-refugee Afghan background was a challenging, transformative experience. She describes it as both “difficult” and “saddening” (personal communication, 17 May 2019) but nonetheless transformative very much as Meyer and Land define their idea of threshold concepts, where one passes “through a portal, from which a new perspective opens up, allowing things formerly not perceived to come into view” (2010, ix). Stefanovic comments in this regard, To put it in context, 2013 was when we read the text. That was the year of the Federal election and the front page coverage of some newspapers that had headings along the lines of “Stop the Boats”. That election was very much focused on the policy of the major political parties regarding treatment of refugees who at that time were labelled as “queue jumpers”. After reading the text people had understood better what it meant to leave one’s homeland. That helped cease the prior discussions of “boat people” and “illegals” by my peers who were not from a refugee background. The people who did continue to agree with Liberal and Labor policies of “stopping the boat people” were challenged in their views because they had read this text. (Personal communication, 17 May 2019)

4  “ORGANIC” CULTURAL LITERACY—A CASE STUDY 

109

After reading the text, Stefanovic’s understanding of students from a refugee Afghan background at Cranbourne Secondary College changed dramatically and irreversibly: It made me emotional […] However, it did make me break out of my bubble and begin to realise the injustice and the marginalisation that human beings face and those human beings weren’t on the other side of the world. They weren’t on the other side of the country. They were at my school. They were in my classroom. They were my friends. (Personal communication, 17 May 2019)

Stefanovic explains that the text took her on “a journey of revelation of understanding” (personal communication, 17 May 2019). According to her, it “helped me empathise and appreciate my Hazara friends more and helped me understand how they might view things” (personal communication, 17 May 2019). She acknowledges how Mazari’s memoir changed her perceptions of her fellow classmates, “the persecution and struggles of Hazaras” and helped her view under a different light the “public discourses about detention centres”, as well as “the devastation of losing all power and autonomy in detention centres” (personal communication, 17 May 2019). There were elements of the text that allowed her to understand and empathise with views that were not her own and that were in fact fundamentally different from some of the values she holds dear, such as the notion of arranged marriage. In his memoir, Mazari explains his approach to arranged marriage and how his experience of it worked well for him and his wife. In this regard, Stefanovic explains, “The text helped challenge views I held” (personal communication, 17 May 2019). Stefanovic points out that other publications have helped her develop her empathy towards different groups, but emphasises how formative the experience of reading The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif was: Books, articles, documentaries are all instrumental in broadening one’s knowledge about the plight of those around them. I do have to say though that The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif has really stuck with me the most. The way it was written and the fact I became aware of the experiences of people around me who had experienced what Najaf Mazari had experienced was profound. (Personal communication, 17 May 2019)

In her opinion, the memoir allowed her to better understand her fellow students’ background, and in doing so, exercise her subjectivity and

110 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

empathy, which helped in the way in which she related to them. Stefanovic appears to have experienced narrative empathy through the text, which grew into, or took place at the same time as more general empathy for her fellow students from refugee backgrounds. Furthermore, she also appears to be experiencing Nussbaum’s idea of “complex compassion”, which she defines as “helping behaviour that responds to the specific features” of someone else’s plight, as seen “from that person’s point of view” (2013, 149). As Stefanovic explains, reading The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif allowed her to go beyond exercising her empathy and subjectivity in understanding her classmates and engaging in action: After learning about the injustices faced by Hazaras I was driven to do what I could to help people of refugee backgrounds because the political response to people seeking refuge from persecution was not sufficient. I became involved in a local organisation in Dandenong volunteering every Saturday for a period of two years to tutor students of mainly Sri Lankan Tamil background. (Personal communication, 17 May 2019)

The above also seems to indicate that through the text, Stefanovic has expanded what Nussbaum calls her “circle of concern” (2013, 262). According to Nussbaum, this is one of the main functions of tragedy, to teach society how to engage with, and negotiate difference effectively by exposing us to the possibility of suffering, and in so doing, our own vulnerability. It is also a possible outcome of engaging in reflection with a dual lens, personally and collaboratively, in both an inward and outward looking way, in order to better understand one’s community. When collaborative, shared reflection becomes part of the experience—as in Stefanovic’s case, who was a student of Huggard’s and engaged in exercises of structured, collaborative reflection in his class—this allows readers to understand that were circumstances any different, we could be the ones experiencing the hardship of the characters whom we read about. According to Stefanovic, after reading The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif, there was a clear change in student attitudes at Cranbourne Secondary College: “There was an atmosphere of acknowledgement and also relief [from Afghan refugee students] of not having to explain their story” (personal communication, 17 May 2019). In our view, these students were starting to develop their cultural literacy. Safa’s experience of reading The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif supports many of Stefanovic’s views. Safa explains how reading the text helped her

4  “ORGANIC” CULTURAL LITERACY—A CASE STUDY 

111

better communicate with her fellow students. Narrated from the point of view of an adult, and with an adult’s hindsight and maturity, the book was able to explain aspects of Safa’s experience that she herself had struggled to articulate: “I just felt, as we were reading the book, it was my first time reading the book as well, I felt, ‘This explains things so much better than I ever could!’” (personal communication, 30 May 2018). Safa understood her own limitations in telling her story, and felt comforted in not having to do it, because of the text—“I realised that I don’t explain things that well!”—but was very encouraged to see how her fellow students from non-refugee backgrounds could draw parallels between her previous anecdotes and different elements of the text (personal communication, 30 May 2018). The text seemed to open a space that allowed other students to understand (not harmonise or erase, but draw meaning from) that “destabilising difference” Safa experienced. There was also a sense of validation in having some of her own experiences, which were often misunderstood or deemed as completely unrealistic, mirrored in print through someone else’s story. Reading The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif helped counter the scepticism that students from non-refugee backgrounds often had in regard to their classmates’ stories—a scepticism that may in part be attributed to the organic destabilisation they went through and which to a degree is understandable given how removed some of those experiences were from the everyday life of many Australian-born students. Safa remarks how it was not unusual for students to be incredulous of many of her anecdotes and how this attitude changed dramatically after her fellow students read the text: [Reading The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif] made a huge difference. All of a sudden people knew who we were, you know?, where we were from. Why we said we were Afghans, but we didn’t really look … Afghan. Or why we didn’t fit what they thought an Afghan would look like? Why our facial features are so different to, say, the rest of Afghans […]. The Rug Maker did make that a lot easier. And the fact that […] the book follows his journey to come to Australia? That had a huge impact on everyone. All of a sudden they knew that it’s not easy to come to Australia or like, you know, how much you actually give up to get here. And how much it really is the last option, when you decide that, all right, let’s pack our bags, or sometimes you don’t even get to pack your bags, and go to another country, and let’s start everything all over again. Because that is the best option. (Personal communication, 30 May 2018)

112 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

Safa also noted a dramatic change in the school, particularly after The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif became part of the curriculum: “Things started getting a lot better. And by better I mean a lot more culturally inclusive, inclusive of diversity” (personal communication, 30 May 2018). An example of this was the conspicuous “Afghan corner” that Safa had spoken about before, where Afghan students used to congregate when she studied at Cranbourne Secondary College. She shares, “Surprisingly, that corner doesn’t exist anymore. There’s no need for that corner, there’s no people in corners. Everyone is just together” (personal communication, 30 May 2018). In Safa’s opinion, reading The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-­ Sharif helped her to relate in a different way to fellow students at Cranbourne Secondary College: It definitely helped because everyone had to [read The Rugmaker at] the same time. We’ve been trying to explain these things to them, how we lived or, you know, the journeys that some of us have taken here would make no sense. But surprisingly, all of a sudden, when it came from a book that they were reading, it was all there. (Personal communication, 30 May 2018)

Safa explains how, from her perspective, after reading The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif there was a clear shift in the way her fellow students from non-refugee backgrounds related to her, and her fellow Afghan friends. Students from refugee backgrounds, including those from Afghanistan, went from being an Otherised, not-well-understood minority, to a minority that the broader student community could empathise with, one that was not marginalised, but well thought of. The reasons behind the refugee students’ perceived differences were no longer unknown; they were explained through a narrative framework that made perfect sense and clarified the non-refugee students’ doubts. In Safa’s words, We were not mysterious, terrifying creatures. You know, we were humans. We had our own human stories, right? Like, the struggles they’d come from? Maybe they related to some of the stuff that they read in the book. Like, oh, okay. We actually have similar problems. I’ve gone through similar stuff. I can relate to that bit or actually I understand everything, not everything but to an extent what you have been through and why you are here. Maybe you’re not that terrifying after all. (Personal communication, 30 May 2018)

4  “ORGANIC” CULTURAL LITERACY—A CASE STUDY 

113

Once again, Safa seems to be describing a dual, liminal function that text had as a “mirror” and “window” narrative, providing her peers with a glimpse into the world she had come from, whilst at the same time allowing them to find common ground between their struggles and hers. Furthermore, as in Stefanovic’s case, what Safa appears to describe in relation to the shift in attitudes in her fellow students is an expansion of their “circle of concern”. After reading The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif, the students from a refugee Afghan background who were previously shunned were incorporated into other students’ circle of concern. There was an awareness of their background and, consequently, of the particular needs associated with that background, an acknowledgement and respect for Ramadan and, in short, greater empathy. One of the effects of including the text in the Cranbourne Secondary College curriculum was introducing Australian students from non-refugee backgrounds to the notion that there is great diversity within the refugee experience, Afghanistan and, more broadly, Islam. Notwithstanding the fact that Safa has a refugee Afghan background, her journey from Afghanistan to Melbourne was very different from Mazari’s: Me and my family, we didn’t come by boat. I know that like 80% of the people who are around me, that that’s how they arrived to Australia. With mine and Najaf’s story that was very different. That was just one part that I couldn’t relate to, but that I could totally understand. (Personal communication, 30 May 2018)

In the same way that Mazari’s story helped illustrate the diversity of the refugee experience, stereotypical, ignorant notions of Afghanistan and Afghan culture were challenged, providing students with a new understanding. Safa explains in this regard, You think of it as just a just a country somewhere with terrorists in it, right? But it’s a country that’s got all this populations. They’ve got their own problems. They’ve got their own ways of doing things […] Like, we’ve got five big ethnic tribes, and in each of those tribes, there’s like a million other branches and all these … affairs people don’t really know about … they don’t get them of course. (Personal communication, 30 May 2018)

114 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

According to Safa, reading the text began to alter students’ perceptions of Islam.6 It helped them understand “Muslims don’t all come from the same country from the same culture, you know. We [Afghan Muslims] don’t even speak the same language as most of the other Muslims” (personal communication, 30 May 2018). This was a revelation for many of Safa’s fellow students, and after reading The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif, it had a direct effect in the way she and other Afghan refugee students were treated. There were a lot of people who were very open to engage, to just be friends. We started getting a lot more hellos at lunchtime, you know, just walking past, as people walked past you […] The students were more open and engaged with us afterwards. I had two friends who wore a scarf … after we read The Rug Maker of Mazar-e-Sharif, people actually started coming up to

6  Similar to her fellow students from non-refugee backgrounds, Safa explains how studying other texts allowed her to better understand Australia. For her too, texts served as “window” narratives into the new context she found herself in. Prior to encountering certain elements of Australian culture, or even Melbourne sites, literature served as an introduction, at times a simulator of sorts, for what her experience would be like, helping her prepare for “the actual thing”: The week that I started Year 9, they were reading a book. I actually do not remember the name of the book, and I did come in the middle of it, and sort of picked up from the middle. But they were talking about the Queen Victoria market and the Batman area and then we went and we did a visit to Queen Victoria market, just stuff like that. That was very, very new stuff for me, but the book made it easier to understand that setting, all that context rather than going and asking someone with my little broken English at the time. It just kind of put things in context. […] I do remember going to my parents and telling them about coming to Victoria Market like, “Oh, there’s this this market, you know, and it’s like this, this this”, and then we went and we did it with [my parents]. And I was just like, oh, such a big thing. Yeah, for me, the books did help. (Personal communication, 30 May, 2018) Safa elaborates on this, explaining that prior to coming to Australia, she did not know that the Holocaust had taken place. She was taught about it at Cranbourne Secondary College. “It made me realize how limited my knowledge about the world was, about history. […] They didn’t talk to us about what happened in Germany in the 1930s. Or what happened in Africa with apartheid and everything.” One of the school texts that helped understand the enormity of the Holocaust, and empathise with friends who were related to Holocaust survivors, was The Boy in Striped Pyjamas. Safa explains how reading this novel helped her understand that while her friends themselves had not lived through the Holocaust, belonging to families with members who did had an impact on them: I know it’s not their personal experience like my friends but some of them do come from that background. They have family members who have come from that time. It did make me realize that we’re not the only ones going through this in Australia, like you know, it has happened time and time and over and over again. (2018, pers. comm. 30 May)

4  “ORGANIC” CULTURAL LITERACY—A CASE STUDY 

115

them and talking, like other girls, would actually, they’d make friends. (Personal communication, 30 May 2018)

Safa remarks in particular the impact that this had in her fellow students’ understanding of and respect for Ramadan: People were just being very sensible after [reading The Rugmaker], not offering food to everyone who was fasting around them, not eating food around people who were fasting, to that extent […] That was very good to see. To go from “I don’t actually understand why you’re not eating” to “Yeah, I respect that, and as a show of respect I’m not going to eat around you because it’s not appropriate […] And I’m not going to offer food”. (Personal communication, 30 May 2018)

According to Safa and Huggard, it appears that even the Polyhood festival was positively impacted after incorporating The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif into the curriculum at Cranbourne Secondary College. As mentioned before, the Polyhood festival began with the aim of showcasing different elements of Island cultures to the school community. However, this later expanded into featuring other cultural groups that […] morphed into including a whole lot of Afghans. And last year, you couldn’t get in the theatre. The theatre sits 250, and it was packed with families and people a lot of staff and others. So that shows how things have transitioned, you know. It’s been a huge transition. And so the group that was considered to be the new group [Afghans], is now mainstream.

Safa comments on her perception of Polyhood after reading The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif at School, It just became this massive thing, you know? People were just so proud to show off their cultures. We could dress up in our own cultural clothes and we ran the whole program […] And all of a sudden it was a huge thing. And since then […] it has become a massive cultural celebration that students run on their own […] It has included fashion shows it has been […] ­massive, a whole one day affair, not just an hour, one night. (Personal communication, 30 May 2018)

A further, palpable change that came about after The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif was MultiPride, which built on some of the ideas of

116 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

Polyhood. Like Polyhood, MultiPride is an ongoing co-curricular programme at Cranbourne Secondary College with a focus on cultural inclusion. It was formed as part of a collaboration with Casey Council, but it is predominantly a student-led initiative that built on the ethos of inclusivity, “cultural diversity [and] cultural acceptance” (personal communication, 1 March 2018) that Polyhood was based on: The goals of the MultiPride Program are to promote cultural awareness throughout the school, targeting students from Years 7–12 and creating links with the local community. It also looks at the issues facing the various cultural groups and how to resolve them. New students are always welcome to join MultiPride and after committing they are given a maroon school jumper and a badge. These signify that they are recognised as MultiPride members and are approachable in the school yard. If students have any issues they would like to talk to another student about they can do so with a MultiPride member and the information will be related to the Principal Team. Students meet once a week at lunchtime in the conference room. (Cranbourne Secondary College 2019)

Stefanovic remarks on the creation of MultiPride, “A few years after I graduated I noticed that a new leadership group had been established […] it was a group of students from refugee and migrant backgrounds representing the voice of their peers to teachers, to the principal and also to the local council. It was great to see” (personal communication, 17 May 2019). Huggard points out that the shift in the culture of the school has been so effective that its community is not aware that this was not the way the school operated a few years ago: “People don’t even react to it. That’s what it is. So isn’t it interesting the way any organisation is, though particularly in schools, when there’s a change at a period of time, and people then think it’s always been like that?” (Personal communication, 1 March 2018). Huggard points this out too: “There’s a kind of blend, and nobody thinks about it” (personal communication, 1 March 2018). He discusses the particular case of sports at Cranbourne Secondary College. Prior to reading The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif, boys would usually play sports with other boys from the same background. However, post reading The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif, “You got here at any day of the week and there are lots of boys playing soccer,

4  “ORGANIC” CULTURAL LITERACY—A CASE STUDY 

117

all different backgrounds. Yeah, that’s been a big shift. […] You can see that just here. That certainly happened.” (personal communication, 1 March 2018).

References Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2020a). 2001 Census QuickStats. Retrieved January 20, 2020, from https://quickstats.censusdata.abs.gov.au/census_services/ getproduct/census/2001/quickstat/SSC21451?opendocument. Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2020b) 2006 Census QuickStats. Retrieve January 20, 2020, from https://quickstats.censusdata.abs.gov.au/census_services/ getproduct/census/2006/quickstat/SSC21189?opendocument. Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2020c). 2011 Census QuickStats. Retrieved January 20, 2020, from https://quickstats.censusdata.abs.gov.au/census_services/ getproduct/census/2011/quickstat/SSC20344?opendocument. Castles, S., Hugo, G., & Vasta, E. (2013). Rethinking Migration and Diversity in Australia: Introduction. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 34(2), 115–121. Colvin, S. (2017). Literature as More Than a Window: Building Readers’ Empathy and Social Capacity Through Exposure to Diverse Literature. Voice of Youth Advocates, 39(6), 24–29. Correa-Velez, I., Gifford, S.  M., & Barnett, A.  G. (2010). Longing to Belong: Social Inclusion and Wellbeing Among Youth with Refugee Backgrounds in the First Three Years in Melbourne, Australia. Social Science & Medicine, 71(8), 1399–1408. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2010.07.018. Correa-Velez, I., Gifford, S. M., McMichael, C., & Sampson, R. (2017). Predictors of Secondary School Completion Among Refugee Youth 8 to 9 Years After Resettlement in Melbourne, Australia. Journal of International Migration and Integration, 18(3), 791–805. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12134-016-0503-z. Cranbourne Secondary College. (2019a). History. Retrieved October 18, 2019, from https://cranbournesc.vic.edu.au/our-college/history/. Cranbourne Secondary College. (2019b). Polyhood: 2005–Present. Retrieved October 19, 2019, from https://cranbournesc.vic.edu.au/learning/co-curricular-programs/polyhood/. Cranbourne Secondary College. 2019c. Multipride. Retrieved October 22, 2019, from https://cranbournesc.vic.edu.au/learning/co-curricular-programs/ multipride/. Dumenden, I.  E., & English, R. (2013). Fish Out of Water: Refugee and International Students in Mainstream Australian Schools. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 17(10), 1078–1088. https://doi.org/10.108 0/13603116.2012.732120.

118 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

Garvey, D. (2001). Boongs, Bigots, and Bystanders: Indigenous and Non-­ Indigenous Experiences of Racism and Prejudice and Their Implications for Psychology in Australia. In M.  Augoustinos & K.  J. Reynolds (Eds.), Understanding Prejudice, Racism, and Social Conflict. London: Sage Publications. Gerrig, R. J., Love, J., & McKoon, G. (2009). Waiting for Brandon: How Readers Respond to Small Mysteries. J Mem Lang, 60, 144–153. Gillard, J. (Prime Minister). (2010, July 6). Moving Australia Forward. Address to the Lowy Institute For International Policy, Sydney. Goddard, C., Latham, S., & Briskman, L.. (2008, September 1). Unwarranted Cruelty. The Australian, 14–15 (from above publication) Hiorth, A., & Molyneux, P. (2018). Bridges and Barriers: Karen Refugee-­ background Students’ Transition to High School in Australia. In S.  Shawna Shapiro, R.  Farrelly, & M.  Curry (Eds.), Educating Refugee-background Students: Critical Issues and Dynamic Contexts (pp.  125–143). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Howard, J. (Prime Minister). (2001). Transcript of Howard’s Speech. Retrieved from https://pmtranscripts.pmc.gov.au/release/transcript-12332. Iqbal, N., et  al. (2012). Resettlement Experiences of Afghan Hazara Female Adolescents: A Case Study from Melbourne, Australia. International Journal of Population Research, 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1155/2012/868230. Junker, C. R., & Jacquemin, S. J. (2017). How Does Literature Affect Empathy in Students? College Teaching, 65(2), 79–87. https://doi.org/10.108 0/87567555.2016.1255583. Jupp, J. (2007). From White Australia to Woomera the Story of Australian Immigration (2nd ed.). Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press. Keen, S. (2007). Empathy and the Novel. New  York, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Keen, S. (2014). Novel Readers and the Empathetic Angel of Our Nature. In M. M. Hammond & S. J. Kim (Eds.), Rethinking Empathy Through Literature. Routledge: Taylor & Francis. Koirala, S. (2016). Refugee Settlement in Australia and the Challenges for Integration. In S. Si Fan & J. Fielding-Wells (Eds.), What is Next in Educational Research? (pp.  119–129). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Retrieved from https://link-springer-com.ezproxy.lib.monash.edu.au/book/10.100 7%2F978-94-6300-524-1. Kwek, G. (2009, April 22). 90% of Asylum Seekers Win Refugee Status. The Sydney Morning Herald, 7–9 (from above publication). Mann, J. (2012). The Introduction of Multiculturalism in Canada and Australia, 1960s–1970s. Nations and Nationalism, 18, 483–503.

4  “ORGANIC” CULTURAL LITERACY—A CASE STUDY 

119

Manne, R. (2010, September). Asylum Seekers. The Monthly. Retrieved from https://www.themonthly.com.au/nation-reviewed-robert-manne-commentasylum-seekers-2706. Manne, R. (2016, October 28). A History of Cruelty: The Origins of Australia’s Uniquely Harsh Asylum Seeker Policy. ABC Religion and Ethics. Retrieved from https://www.abc.net.au/religion/a-history-of-cruelty-the-originsof-australias-uniquely-harsh-as/10096410. Marsh, K. (2012). ‘The Beat Will Make You Be Courage’: The Role of a Secondary School Music Program in Supporting Young Refugees and Newly Arrived Immigrants in Australia. Research Studies in Music Education, 34(2), 93–111. https://doi.org/10.1177/1321103X12466138. Mazari, N., & Hillman, R. (2008). The rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif. Elsternwick, VIC: Insight Publications. McAdam, J. (2013). Australia and Asylum Seekers **. International Journal Of Refugee Law, 25(3), 435–448. https://doi.org/10.1093/ijrl/eet044. McMichael, C., Nunn, C., Correa-Velez, I., & Gifford, S. (2017). Resettlement of Refugee Youth in Australia: Experiences and Outcomes Over Time. Forced Migration Review, 54, 66–68. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/ docview/1876052329/. Meyer, J.  H. F., Land, R., & Baillie, C. (2010). Editor’s Preface. In R.  Land, J.  Meyer, & C.  Baillie (Eds.), Threshold Concepts and Transformational Learning (pp. ix–xlii). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Mogelson, L. (2013). The Dream Boat. The New York Times Magazine. Naidoo, L. (2012). Refugee Action Support: Crossing Borders in Preparing Pre-­ service Teachers for Literacy Teaching in Secondary Schools in Greater Western Sydney. International Journal of Pedagogies and Learning, 7(3), 266–274. https://doi.org/10.5172/ijpl.2012.7.3.266. Naidoo, L. (2013). Refugee Action Support: An Interventionist Pedagogy for Supporting Refugee Students’ Learning in Greater Western Sydney Secondary Schools. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 17(5), 449–461. https://doi.org/10.1080/13603116.2012.683048. Naidoo, L. (2015). Educating Refugee-background Students in Australian Schools and Universities. Intercultural Education 26, no., 3, 210–217. https://doi. org/10.1080/14675986.2015.1048079. Nikolajeva, M. (2012). Guilt, Empathy and the Ethical Potential of Children’s Literature. Barnboken—Tidskrift För barnlitteraturforskning/Journal of Children’s Literature Research, 35(0). https://doi.org/10.3402/clr. v35i0.18081 Nikolajeva, M. (2014). Reading for Learning: Cognitive Approaches to Children’s Literature. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Press.

120 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

Nussbaum, M.  C. (2013). Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Phillips, J. (2017a). A Comparison of Coalition and Labor Government Asylum Policies in Australia Since 2001. Parliamentary Library (Updated February 2, 2017). Phillips, J. (2017b). Boat Arrivals and Boat ‘Turnbacks’ in Australia Since 1976: A Quick Guide to the Statistics. Parliamentary Library (Updated January 17, 2017). Pinker, S. (2011). The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. New York: Viking. Refugee Council of Australia (RCOA). (2008). Australia’s Refugee and Humanitarian Program: Community Views on Current Challenges and Future Directions. Sydney, NSW: RCOA. Retrieved from http://www.refugeecouncil. org.au/r/isub/2008-09-IntakeSub.pdf. Riggs, D., & Due, C. (2010). Friendship, Exclusion and Power: A Study of Two South Australian Schools with New Arrivals Programs. Australasian Journal of Early Childhood, 35(4), 73–80. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 183693911003500409. Sidhu, R., Taylor, S., & Christie, P. (2011). Schooling and Refugees: Engaging with the Complex Trajectories of Globalisation. Global Studies of Childhood, 1(2), 92–103. https://doi.org/10.2304/gsch.2011.1.2.92. Spinks, H. (2011, July 27). Australia-Malaysia Asylum Seeker Transfer Agreement. FlagPost, Parliamentary Library blog. Sutton, P. (2009). The Politics of Suffering: Indigenous Australia and the End of the Liberal Consensus. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Toegel, G., & Barsoux, J.-L. (2016). How to Preempt Team Conflict. Harvard Business Review, 94(6), 78–83. 117. Toohey, P. (2013). Quarterly Essay 53 That Sinking Feeling: Asylum Seekers and the Search for the Indonesian Solution. Melbourne: Schwartz Publishing Pty. Tozer, M., Khawaja, N.  G., & Schweitzer, R. (2018). Protective Factors Contributing to Wellbeing among Refugee Youth in Australia. Journal of Psychologists and Counsellors in Schools, 28(1), 66–83. https://doi. org/10.1017/jgc.2016.31. Tran, L. (2015). Internationalising the Stxudent Experience and Cosmopolitan Learning: Theoretical Concepts and Examples of Practice from the VET Sector. Paper presented at the Learning and Teaching for a Globalised World: Internationalisation of the Curriculum SIC Forum 2015, Melbourne. Uptin, J., Wright, J., & Harwood, V. (2013). ‘It Felt Like I Was a Black Dot on White Paper’: Examining Young Former Refugees’ Experience of Entering Australian High Schools. The Australian Educational Researcher, 40(1), 125–137. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-012-0082-8.

4  “ORGANIC” CULTURAL LITERACY—A CASE STUDY 

121

Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority (VCAA). VCE Curriculum. Retrieved January 20, 2020., from https://www.vcaa.vic.edu.au/curriculum/ vce/Pages/Index.aspx?Redirect=2. York, B. (2003). Australia and Refugees, 1901–2002: An Annotated Chronology Based on Official Sources.

CHAPTER 5

Embedding Cultural Literacy in Higher Education

While in the previous chapter we examined an “organic” instance of the building of cultural literacy skills in a high school cohort, in this chapter we examine the introduction of cultural literacy in the Higher Education curriculum. We begin with an introductory section, where we outline the Open-Space Learning (OSL) techniques most often used in teaching cultural literacy. These techniques are versatile and easily adaptable to different disciplines and subject matters. Following the description of these techniques and some brief examples of instances where they have been used in Higher Education, we present the case study of a unit at Monash University where cultural literacy was embedded into the curriculum through the choice of particular texts and Open-Space activities, namely, perspective-taking and role-play. A description of a number of these activities is followed by interviews with two students who studied the course. The subject matter of the unit in question was not cultural literacy, which presents a good opportunity to explore how cultural literacy can work in the curriculum design of a unit with a different core focus. To finalise, the chapter also discusses the influence that these texts and activities had on the students’ awareness of their own empathy.

© The Author(s) 2020 G. García Ochoa, S. McDonald, Cultural Literacy and Empathy in Education Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59904-1_5

123

124 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

5.1   Open-Space Learning Techniques As discussed in Chap. 3, OSL plays an important role in our approach to destabilisation. The activities in this section have been used in a variety of Higher Education contexts. Their purpose is to create a sense of destabilisation for participants within a safe, controlled environment, which can later be unpacked and interpreted through a carefully structured process of reflection. As with the case study we analyse later in this chapter, these exercises are not necessarily tied to the subject matter of a unit and can be easily deployed across a variety of contexts as a modus operandi to develop students’ cultural literacy. This goes back to the main aims of OSL and its history with the CAPITAL Centre, where best practice strategies sought to teach students creative thinking and performance skills while “at the same time, teaching them how to transfer these skills to their learning in other subjects” (García Ochoa et al. 2018, 513). This embodied knowledge of any given subject (economics, mathematics, philosophy, etc.) acquired through Open-Space Learning is known as “active performance” (Monk et al. 2011, 1). In our teaching practice, we aim to do something very similar with skills and knowledge pertaining to cultural literacy. Even if the subject matter of a unit is not cultural literacy, this can be embedded as a set of transferable skills, an approach that helps students better understand their learning of any subject. Thus, the activities we discuss have been used in a variety of contexts: within the Higher Education classroom, as part of study abroad programmes, leadership retreats and during Higher Education conferences and symposia that aimed to destabilise both students and educators. There follow descriptions of eight OSL techniques that have been adapted and successfully applied to a variety of disciplines and educational settings. Warm-up: Clapping This activity is a good ice breaker for sessions that seek to stimulate collaboration and provoke thinking about how collaboration works. The activity is playful in nature and very physical, incorporating elements of embodied learning. Most participants tend to find these two elements, physicality and playfulness, destabilising in the classroom context, which often carries associations with seriousness and intellectual rather than physical dexterity. In this sense, the activity is a very effective introduction to destabilisation, as participants are destabilised in a non-threatening, playful manner.

5  EMBEDDING CULTURAL LITERACY IN HIGHER EDUCATION 

125

The warm-up lasts from five to ten minutes. It is referred to as “1-2-3 Clap” (García Ochoa et al. 2018, 514). The activity requires a relatively free, open space. Ideally, the facilitator will ask participants to stand up and form a standing circle, but if there is no room for this, participants can simply work in pairs and stand up facing each other. The facilitator asks for a volunteer to demonstrate the activity. If the group does not have an even number of participants, the facilitator can join in. The aim of the exercise is to count to three taking turns, creating an ongoing cycle, so to speak. The facilitator begins by saying “1”, the volunteer “2”, the facilitator “3”; then the volunteer says “1”, the facilitator “2” and the volunteer “3”. The demonstration finishes. The pairs of students around the room start doing the activity by themselves. After a few minutes the facilitator stops the activity and reassembles the group for a new demonstration (García Ochoa et al. 2018, 514). This next demonstration includes a small variation. Instead of saying “1” at the beginning of the counting cycle, this is replaced by a clap, thus enhancing the embodied nature of the activity. The pairs take up this second round with the clapping variation. After a minute or so the facilitator stops the activity and calls back the volunteer (García Ochoa et  al. 2018, 514). During the next demonstration, a new variation is introduced. The exercise is almost identical, but instead of the number “2”, the participants will stamp their foot. The activity now incorporates a clap, a stamp of the foot and saying the number “3”. The pairs take up this activity. After a few minutes the facilitator brings the activity to a stop and calls back the volunteer (García Ochoa et al. 2018, 514). For the final demonstration, the number “3” is replaced by a click of the fingers. The pairs now take up the final activity. The facilitator finishes the warm-up by asking the participants to drop the gestures and return to counting (García Ochoa et al. 2018, 514). The activity is seemingly simple, but as the variations are incorporated, participants realise how challenging it is to attune oneself to their partner while remaining focused on one’s task. The challenge, however, is non-­ threatening; it is perceived as a game, which allows participants to relax and open themselves to learning from the experience of destabilisation. There is always laughter involved. The warm-up is followed by a short collaborative reflection, usually conducted orally with the group. Participants tend to comment on the focus needed on one’s partner in order for the

126 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

exercise to work correctly. They also often note that the warm-up requires a high degree of concentration and brings together both intellectual and physical activities. In the context of cultural literacy, this warm-up “is particularly useful as it requires an unusual degree of focus on others. Participants cannot help but notice difference and similarity. Reading one another for cues is essential for the activity to work” (García Ochoa et al. 2018, 514). This warm-up has been used in a number of undergraduate units at Monash University. It was incorporated as an introduction to a student leadership retreat that brought together students from Monash University and Pennsylvania State University. Similarly, it is one of the onsite (India and Italy) introductory activities used as part of one of Monash University’s study abroad programmes, the Global Immersion Guarantee.1 The warm-up was also used in workshops on pedagogy that took place during the first and second Biennial Cultural Literacy in Europe Conferences in London and Warsaw (2015, 2017). A Long Short Walk This activity can take place in groups or individually. It shifts from the very personal space of the warm-up into a broader cultural space, focusing on the creation of meaning. The facilitator chooses a walk that would normally last around 10–15 minutes at a “normal”, leisurely pace. Ideally, the environment would be familiar to the participants, but this is not compulsory. The walk can be outdoors or indoors (e.g. pacing a laboratory or a performance hall). The facilitator prepares a map for the participants, outlining a precise route they must follow. The participants can work individually, or in groups of three to five, depending on whether group work and collaboration are a desired outcome. The facilitator can allocate one route for all participants or different routes, depending on the context. The participants need to spend around 45 minutes doing the walk, taking note of the difference between this slow approach and the usual time it would take to do this walk (this is why, if possible, it is ideal to choose a 1  The Global Immersion Guarantee is a funded overseas study opportunity for all first year Bachelor of Arts, Bachelor of Global Studies and related double degree students at Monash Universities. It encompasses travel to one of five possible locations: India, China, Italy, Malaysia or Indonesia. Many of the activities in this section have been used as pre-departure, preparatory exercise for students or onsite activities. For further information, see: https:// www.monash.edu/arts/learning-abroad/global-immersion-guarantee

5  EMBEDDING CULTURAL LITERACY IN HIGHER EDUCATION 

127

familiar walk, as they will be able to compare their previous experience of a 15-minute walk to doing it in 45 minutes). It is vital to stress that progress must be slow, and that participants should not rush to finish early, which would defeat the purpose of the exercise. Participants must be able to maintain a dual focus of observation here, taking in their surroundings at a different pace, but also reflecting on their role in this environment, and taking notice of their own reactions and any changes in themselves. At the end of the walk, the participants reconvene and engage in shared, collaborative reflections with the other participants or groups, on their observations during the walk. If a 45-minute walk is not possible given the spaces available, the exercise can be modified to turn, say, a 5-minute walk into a 15-minute walk. By slowing down and taking the time to notice their surroundings at a different pace, without being told to do so explicitly, participants are encouraged to “read carefully the semiotics of an environment and the behaviour of the individuals and groups in it. It is an activity that promotes ‘noticing’ as a means of engagement and response” (García Ochoa et al. 2018, 515). This activity was developed by Dr Nicholas Monk for the Institute for Advanced Learning and Teaching at Warwick University. It has been used in two undergraduate units at Monash University, “Reading Across Cultures” (discussed further in Chap. 6) and “Global Shakespeares”, the latter delivered jointly between Monash and the University of Warwick as part of an international collaboration between the two universities (García Ochoa et al. 2018, 515). Theory Building For this exercise it is necessary for the facilitator to prepare a set of images, anywhere from 8–12 will work, that relate to a key concept explored in the class. Careful consideration of the selection of the images is central to the success of the task. The facilitator needs to strike a balance between images that will have a “set”, obvious interpretation for the class that would encourage participants to reproduce exactly the ideas they have been exposed to, and having images that are tangentially linked to those ideas, but would require a depth of knowledge the cohort may not possess in order to make those links obvious. The aim of the activity is to get participants to work in groups to construct a “theory” or a narrative from the images, which allows them to explore a key concept of the class in a way that is both unique and

128 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

meaningful for them and which can also be shared with the broader cohort. For the first part of the activity, participants are separated into smaller groups of four and five. Each group is given the same set of images to work with. The aim is that they use the images to build their own “theory” in relation to the key concept explored in class. There are no set parameters for how participants use the images other than the proviso that all images need to be used. The participants may also be provided with other materials they can use for the exercise, such as Blu-tack, tape, sticky notes, markers and pens and paper (these materials are not compulsory, and their use can be adapted to the context of the session). Participants are given 40  minutes to finish the task. They usually approach the task in a variety of ways, with some groups jump-starting in their theory-development, working with images in a “trial-and-error” approach, while other groups step back and spend considerable time in discussion before formulating their “theory”. No set approach is correct, and each group is encouraged to explore its own dynamic. It is important that the facilitators are available to support the groups if they require it, but care is taken to ensure that facilitators do not comment or question the work done by the groups in a way that would suggest their approach is “wrong” or in a manner that would inhibit the generation of ideas and discussion within the group. Participants are given a timing call at the 20-minute and 10-minute mark in order to keep them aware of the constraints of the environment and to ensure that there is enough time for the second part of the exercise. After the groups have completed the task, they are given a few minutes to step back before presenting to the rest of the cohort. Participants are asked to mentally note differences in approach and process for the task as well as differences and outcomes. They are also asked to reserve these for a wider reflection post-task so as to have the presentation of each group’s theory without presenters feeling the need to adapt/defend based on feedback from outside the group. Immediately after the presentations, the second part of the task begins. Participants are asked to sit and write a rapid journal entry reflecting on their experience of the task. After the writing session, participants re-join the group to share their experience and offer comments and considerations. If possible, participants are then asked to do a second short piece of reflection a few days after the task. Here, they are asked to consider their experience of the exercise, linking it to the key learnings of the unit and incorporating other experiences from within or beyond the unit itself

5  EMBEDDING CULTURAL LITERACY IN HIGHER EDUCATION 

129

(e.g. their personal lives, mainstream culture, etc.). The physical, embodied use of images to represent theory tends to be destabilising to students, albeit in a controlled manner, that lends itself well to reflection. If this activity is used early in the teaching period (first or second week of a semester), it can be repeated close to the end of the teaching period, for participants to reflect on the different ways in which they approached the task the second time. The participants are broken into the same groups and given the same set of images at the end of the semester. The second time the task is less destabilising, as the participants are familiar with the process and tend to be less intimidated by the idea of “theory building”. However, facilitators need to be attentive to the struggle that comes from attempting a task with a greater level of formal, academic knowledge and the role of pre-existing knowledge and experiences. We have used this technique across a number of subjects and year levels. We first trialled it in a unit called “Forms of Identity” which was synchronously co-taught between Warwick University and Monash University, with cohorts based in both Melbourne and Warwick who would meet using a state-of-the-art telecommunications system shared between the universities, known as the portal (see Lindgren et al. 2015). The activity was used again with different variations in another unit co-­taught between Monash and Warwick Universities, “Global Connections”, and a Monashbased, first year undergraduate unit, Leadership for Social Change (LSC) 1. A Gastronomic Tour of the World! This activity focuses primarily on visceral sensations of discomfort in relation to unknown cultural artefacts, in this particular case, food. The activity is an excellent introduction to the topic of unconscious bias, and it can be transferred and adapted to biases and preconceptions in regard to any discipline or topic of discussion. The aim of the activity is two-fold: for participants to question ideas of normality and hence understand their own biases in a disciplinary or cultural sense and to reflect on how they usually react to that which falls outside those notions of normality. With caution and restraint? With fear? With a sense of joy and adventure? Or is this contextual, depending on the type of “unknown” presented to them? The facilitator shows participants a PowerPoint (PPT) presentation with photographs of “exotic dishes” from around the world. Pausing at each slide, the facilitator explains, in detail, what the dish in question consists of, where it is from and how it is eaten. It is the facilitator’s

130 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

prerogative to decide what dishes to include for the exercise, but effective past examples have included bird nest soup, the Sardinian cheese casu marzu, fried rattlesnake, escargot, haggis, kangaroo, fried grasshoppers and steak tartare, to mention only a few. After each slide, the participants need to answer the following questions with a simple show of hands: • Has anyone tried this dish before? • Who would try this dish? • Who would not try this dish? At the start of the exercise, before the participants see the first slide, they are asked to be mindful of what they are feeling/thinking/experiencing, in particular when they see a dish they do not want to try. This introduces participants to multidimensional destabilisation and reflection, providing a framework for them to articulate their cognitive and affective (visceral) dimensions. They do not need to share this with anyone, just be aware of the sensation, whether it be disgust, repulsion and so on, and if they feel the need, to jot down a few notes on the sensations experienced. Once the facilitator has explained all the slides in the PPT presentation, participants are asked to write a short, 200-word reflection on what they experienced when they saw a dish they did not want to try. What were their feelings? Thoughts? Sensations? This individual reflection is followed by a collaborative, shared reflection within the group, where willing participants share their reflections and gently interrogate their reactions. If time permits, this is repeated for dishes participants were interested in trying. Why were they drawn to these dishes? The participants’ reactions are not judged as right or wrong, good or bad. The important thing is to reflect on, and try to ascertain where those reactions come from, to raise awareness of the multidimensional nature of their destabilisation and reflection and the implications that these may carry; to understand what elements of the participants’ background have led them to experience certain stimuli in certain ways. What determines our ideas of normality, familiarity and safety? In an Australian context, for example, kangaroo steak may seem perfectly “normal”, but is it possible for participants to realise that this is not the case in most parts of the world? Can “weird” just mean “different”? Have they ever considered that what they would describe as “normal” dishes can be as exotic to someone from India, or a Mexican participant who would eat fried grasshoppers without hesitation? This allows for a deeper discussion on cultural

5  EMBEDDING CULTURAL LITERACY IN HIGHER EDUCATION 

131

readability through different permutations or markers or normality. The facilitator explains to participants that the reactions experienced during the food exercise can be extrapolated to other scenarios where difference, “otherness”, is experienced. In their professional lives, this may take place through cultural, disciplinary or other forms of difference. It is important that participants become aware of these sensations when they experience difference and to interrogate them; this opens the door for further development of awareness of their own empathy. In time, developing this reflective approach as an attitude, as a modus operandi, is what challenges notions of ethnocentrism and intolerance across disciplines and cultures and facilitates interactions in culturally diverse settings. This activity was incorporated into an undergraduate translation unit at Monash University, it was used as part of a preparatory module for Monash’s study abroad Global Immersion Guarantee programme, and it was part of the student leadership retreat that brought together students from Monash University and Pennsylvania State University. The activity was also part of the Higher Education workshop of the second Biennial Cultural Literacy in Europe Conference in Warsaw in 2017, which aimed to teach educators/facilitators the importance of destabilisation and to provide a first-hand experience of the type of destabilisation their students/session participants could expect. The activity was successfully incorporated into a professional development workshop for a stakeholder external to Monash University. Let’s Go Bananas! Similar to the previous activity, “Let’s go Bananas!” questions notions of normalcy and preconceptions around status and methodological approaches. Participants are grouped into pairs or small groups of three to five; each group is given a banana. The facilitator gives the groups five minutes to determine what is the “best” way to peel their banana. When the five minutes are up, each group nominates a speaker to explain their conclusions to the class. The speaker must come to the front of the class and give their explanation with their back to the rest of the participants. They can only use words, not hand gestures. There is an embodied aspect to this exercise, a physicality that helps participants engage with it in a very visceral way: the tactility of the banana, its smell and dimensions. Often, the first challenge participants face has to

132 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

do with language in relation to peeling the banana. Which part is the top and which the bottom? Is the stem the top? Is this determined by the way the fruit grows? Had they ever stopped to consider this? What assumptions did they make? When they spoke about peeling the fruit, why was their particular strategy “the best”? In relation to what? Again, were there any assumptions involved in their rationale that they were unaware of, for example? After explaining their answers to the group participants write a short reflection of the activity, examining the skills and knowledge they used and any insights they may have gained. This gives participants the opportunity to engage with the different dimensions of destabilisation and reflection. They explore the visceral dimension through the physicality of the banana and the unorthodox nature of the activity and its cognitive dimension by pondering on the significance this may carry. This is followed by a collaborative, shared reflection with the group. The activity prompts participants to question cultural artefacts they usually take for granted, the most obvious being hierarchical structures. A participant, for example, shared that she had never “questioned the setup of a boardroom, just as she had never questioned the structure of the banana”; she had always taken both for granted (García Ochoa and McDonald 2019). What was the most important position in a boardroom meeting? What determined this? Did this change from culture to culture? Another participant shared how her idea of “normal” was being challenged: if something as mundane as the way one peels fruit could be this diverse, what was one to think of more important things, like human rights and freedom of speech? This dynamic exposes students to the dual lens of reflection discussed in Chap. 3, both inward looking, but also shared and collaborative, providing the opportunity for applying and contextualising new knowledge within the context of a community The activity was modified and done online, asynchronously, as part of an undergraduate translation unit at Monash University. For the modified version, the students had to do this in groups, not by themselves, and instead of nominating a speaker who would explain a chosen “best” strategy to the rest of the group, students had to submit written explanations of their individual strategy via an online forum (in this case, there was no way for the practitioner to ascertain whether the students had actually done the activity on their own, or just written their speculations about it). This activity was also used during the student leadership retreat that brought together students from Monash University and Pennsylvania

5  EMBEDDING CULTURAL LITERACY IN HIGHER EDUCATION 

133

State University. The activity was also part of a professional development workshop for the former Australian government’s Department of Immigration and Border Protection. We incorporated this activity into the Higher Education workshop at the Institute for Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw as part of the second Biennial Cultural Literacy in Europe Conference in Warsaw in 2017. Still Image or Tableau The use of this Tableau exercise can be challenging for both participants and facilitators in an academic context. It is important that facilitators be aware that the level of destabilisation involved due to the physicality of the exercise can be overwhelming unless they have a background in theatre and/or performance, or if the activity has been preceded by other activities in the semester (or working relationship with participants when this is done outside an educational context) that incorporate embodied learning, to the extent that the participants are comfortable with this way of working.2 In this exercise, participants are broken into small groups of three or four. The aim of the exercise is that they create a “living image”, a tableau vivant with their joined bodies that represents their understanding of a concept, idea or set of conclusions to something they have been working on in class. The facilitator presents material to the participants related to the concept or idea in question. The material may be in the form of text, photographs, video and so on. There are two rules to the still image: everyone must be silent during the final moment of presentation of the tableaux to the rest of the class, and all the participants in a group need to be in physical contact with one another. All other possibilities are open to them. In this way, participants are challenged to embody their learning in the most literal sense and to collaborate with each other through the embodiment process. Given the fully embodied nature of this exercise, it is important to do a prior warm-up in order to break the ice and ease participants into the embodied modality. A warm-up like the clapping exercise outlined earlier is ideal. After the warm-up, the participants are given approximately half 2  When we ran this exercise as part of the shared Monash-Warwick unit, it was very useful to have the participation of Professor Jonothan Neelands from the University of Warwick, who has a background in drama and theatre education.

134 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

an hour to plan their tableau. This is followed by a relatively short time to physically put together the tableau, five to ten minutes, to allow them to embrace their instinctive reactions to the exercise (more time can often result in reticence or inhibition). Participants then present their tableau to the broader group and have an opportunity to talk through their conclusions and rationale. After every group has presented, participants are asked to “rapid write” their immediate reflections on the task, focusing on their emotive and physical reactions to the embodiment of knowledge. They are then asked to leave that reflection for a few days, re-read it and follow it with a second reflection that takes into consideration their initial “reactive” reflection. The second reflection asks participants to take into consideration a broader reflective context beyond the ideas of the exercise. They are encouraged to incorporate their learnings from across the semester and from outside the unit. An example of how this exercise worked well in a session took place in the unit mentioned before, “Forms of Identity”, synchronously co-taught between Warwick University and Monash University. For this particular exercise, participants were interrogating understandings of family identities. Participants focused on “traits” that belonged to or were passed down/across family groups. The activity came later in the semester, so that participants had had an opportunity to explore multiple notions of identity (cultural, biological, philosophical, etc.). The participants were provided with different images of families and asked to interpret these images through the critical lens they had developed across the semester, presenting their conclusions as the tableau vivant. Participants were given 30 minutes to work through their interpretations in shared reflections with each other, allowing them time to make connections and brainstorm. In this example, given that the subject matter was “family”, it was particularly important to create a safe and supportive environment for the students, as notions of family can often evoke very personal and emotional responses from participants, particularly when these ideas become embodied. Status Workshop The aim of this activity is to destabilise participants’ ideas of social status through a series of embodied exercises. Notions of status are present in every culture, no matter how egalitarian or hierarchical a society may be.

5  EMBEDDING CULTURAL LITERACY IN HIGHER EDUCATION 

135

Whether status is avoided because of the implications of inequality it conveys, or embraces, cultures do not operate without a certain conceptualisation of status. Ideas of status are so innate to our cultural conceptualisations of the societies within which we operate that it is often easy to take them for granted and not question them (particularly when in a position of privilege). Therefore, status is “ideal material for work of this kind as it is a phenomenon that … is often deeply embedded in practices and behaviour that individuals would rarely find time to think about” (García Ochoa et al. 2016, 555). Here, the multidimensionality of destabilisation takes centre stage, in particular its emotional dimension. It is important to take into consideration that for some participants, perceptions of status and the connotations that go with them can be a delicate topic, and as such, it is the facilitator’s duty of care to manage the activity and destabilisation, with tact and care (García Ochoa et al. 2016, 555). An effective way of doing this is by incorporating a warm-up exercise, such as the introductory clapping activity described at the start of this section. In most cases, a single warm-up exercise is enough for the session to work effectively, but it is important that the facilitator remains vigilant of the participants’ mood throughout the session and intervenes if someone is experiencing distress. The facilitator provides a working definition of status for the purpose of the exercise, or the group as a whole can come up with one such definition. An example of such a definition can be “behavioural power in relation to space and other bodies” (García Ochoa et al. 2016, 556). This is just a working definition for the purpose of the exercise and not to be taken as the definition of status. After a warm-up exercise, the facilitator distributes a pack of playing cards to the participants. The picture cards are removed, so that only numbers remain, and the ace cards are used as the lowest card in value (1). Participants will need to embody the status accorded to them by the number on the card they are given (1 = lowest; 10 = highest). Prior to initiating the activity, the facilitator should model one or two status ranges, such as high status (8–10) and low status (1–4). Medium status (5–7) tends to be more challenging, as it calls for more everyday behaviours, while high and low are easier to extrapolate (García Ochoa et al. 2016, 555). The facilitator gives the participants a random card, making sure other participants do not see it. Following are the four stages to the exercise:

136 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

(1) every participant is asked to find a space to create a still image clearly showing their status number; (2) they are asked to walk around the room as their status number, but not yet to interact with other participants; (3) once participants find a way of moving in the space, they began to interact with other bodies non-verbally, (4) finally, speech is added once a relevant scenario has been suggested. (García Ochoa et al. 2016, 556)

The above four stages take five to ten minutes. Once completed, the participants line up across the space to create a “status scale” (García Ochoa et al. 2016, 556) from the lowest to highest, still, without showing their card to anyone. After the status scale is formed, the participants show each other their card numbers. This is followed by a collaborative reflection where the participants share their choices with the rest of the group and reflect on where their interpretations of status came from. After the collaborative reflection, the second part of the activity ensues. Once again, the facilitator distributes the cards to the participants, but this time, participants are not able to see their own card. They must, however, make it visible to others. They repeat the stages a-d in this new iteration of the exercise. The challenge here is to determine their status based on the reactions of the other participants. The activity is followed by a short period of self-reflection, ideally in written form (200 words or so, or dot point ideas). The exercise is a good introduction to cultural readability through semiotics, and an explanation of how status, like other cultural conceptualisations, manifest differently across cultures, how different cultures “read” and interpret status. In interdisciplinary or culturally diverse groups, shared, collaborative reflections tend to be particularly fruitful, as it is possible to contrast different understandings of status and its markers across cultures and disciplines. This exercise was first used with a focus on cultural literacy in April 2015, during the first Cultural Literacy in Europe Biennial, which took place in London that year. Subsequently, it has been used in a number of undergraduate units at Monash University and as part of the student leadership retreat with students from Monash University and Pennsylvania State University.

5  EMBEDDING CULTURAL LITERACY IN HIGHER EDUCATION 

137

Perspective-Taking This exercise encompasses a range of activities that are very versatile and can be easily adapted to a number of different disciplinary contexts and subject matters. The aim is to help participants exercise their ability to understand someone else’s point of view, which can in turn help them develop awareness of the multiple dimensions of their cognitive-affective empathy skills. The intensity of the exercise can be calibrated by the facilitator according to the requirements of the session. It can go from a mostly intellectual reflection (the least experiential form of experiential learning), where participants open themselves to listening to others’ points of view without judgement, to fully embodying someone else’s perspective through role-play (not quite the same as the notion of iso-immersion discussed in Chap. 3, but certainly an advanced instance of destabilisation). The exercise is based on Ginka Toegel and Jean-Louis Barsoux’s research and techniques on pre-empting conflict in diverse teams (2016). According to Toegel and Barsoux, conflict in teams does not occur because of differences between team members, but because of a “perceived incompatibility” amongst those differences (2016, 81). They argue that taking a proactive approach to pre-empting these conflicts before they take place is much more efficient than managing conflict once it occurs. Toegel and Barsoux provide a series of simple exercises that can be used to dispel this notion of incompatibility across differences. To this effect, they recommend having “five conversations”, each based on a topic that they have identified as most relevant to teamwork interaction “how people look, act, speak, think, and feel” (2016, 80). Toegel and Barsoux provide a series of questions and statements for each of these topics that team members can ask each other, and which serve as icebreakers for newly formed, diverse teams. Based on the work of organisational behaviourist Edgar Schein, Toegel and Barsoux recommend starting their questions and statements with the phrasing “In your world…?” and “In my world…”, in order to reinforce “the idea that underlying sources of differences are irrelevant. What does matter is the attitudes and behaviors expressed as a result of each person’s cumulative personal and professional experience” (2016, 80). Here are some examples, by topic, of the questions participants may ask each other: Look: “In your world, what makes a good first impression at work? A bad one?” (2016, 81)

138 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

Act: “In your world, how important are punctuality and time limits?” (2016, 81) Speak: “In your world, does silence mean reflection or disengagement?” (2016, 82) Think: “In your world, is uncertainty viewed as a threat or an opportunity?” (2016, 83) Feel: “In your world, how do people express anger or enthusiasm?” (2016, 83)3

Toegel and Barsoux’s “Five Conversations” create an excellent foundation for participants to start practising perspective-taking, to engage within a safe and controlled environment, with ways of thinking and behaving that may be drastically different to their own. In our view, this can be a fantastic introduction to the concept of cultural readability. In our teaching practice we have expanded and elaborated on Toegel and Barsoux’s work to help students further develop their perspective-taking. Depending on the time and resources available to the facilitator, the following variations and elaborations can be adapted to any class involving teamwork. Once the students have had the Five Conversations in their teams, the facilitator asks the team to choose one aspect of one topic where group responses were particularly diverse. For example, during the “Look” conversation some students in a group may have expressed that informal attire makes a good first impression at work, while some may have said that formal attire does. The students who expressed that informal attire would make a good first impression have to work together and write a list of all the reasons why their peers who chose formal attire as a good example of a good first impression would do so. In their peers’ view, what do they think is good, valuable and to be desired about formal attire? The other members of the group, those who chose formal attire, also write a list of reasons why their peers chose informal attire. Every item in the students’ lists must be written as a positive statement. This simple exercise helps students practice positionality by adopting their peers’ perspectives and understanding how someone may value something that is of little or no importance to us. Ideally, the students would be able to do this with at least one aspect of each of the five topics, but this can be adapted according to how much time is available. The activity is followed by a brief, 3  For more examples of questions on the above topics, refer to Toegel and Barsoux’s “How to Preempt Team Conflict” (2016).

5  EMBEDDING CULTURAL LITERACY IN HIGHER EDUCATION 

139

collaborative group reflection to prompt students’ awareness of their empathy skills. Once the above exercise is finished, the students go back to the first aspect of the first topic where group responses were diverse, in this case, formal versus informal attire. Now, students need to write a list of adjectives, or brief statements, hypothesising how their peers would “read” or “perceive” them. That is to say, the students who expressed that informal attire is something appropriate need to hypothesise how informal attire would be perceived by those members of their group who value formal attire and vice versa. An important ground-rule for this part of the exercise is that the adjectives or statements used cannot be offensive. They will inevitably carry negative connotations (that is part of the exercise), but the language used needs to be carefully mediated by the facilitator. This part of the exercise is also followed by a group reflection. The last part of the perspective-taking exercise involves writing a “Group Contract”. Based on the students’ new knowledge of the needs of each group member, and how they approach each of Toegel and Barsoux’s five topics, the students need to agree on what are the appropriate parameters for working together. This document can be written in class or as homework and it becomes a good reference point for the team if any disputes arise. This exercise and its variations have been used in two undergraduate units at Monash University, “Leadership for Social Change 1” and “Leadership for Social Change 3”. Later in this chapter they are discussed in more depth in relation to “Leadership for Social Change 3”, where they are used as an introduction to embodied learning through role-play.

5.2   Case Study: The Bachelor of Global Studies and Leadership for Social Change The Bachelor of Global Studies (BGS) is a specialised undergraduate degree at Monash University that focuses on “teaching students how to lead positive social change & excel in a competitive job market. It is designed for high achieving, socially conscious students” (S.  Carland 2019, pers. comm. 7 June). At its core, the degree problematises what it means to be “global” in this day and age and prompts students to reflect on their rights and responsibilities as global citizens. The Bachelor of Global Studies is intercultural and interdisciplinary in nature, with a strong

140 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

focus on teamwork and collaboration. It offers the possibility of doing one of four Specialisations: (1) Cultural Competence, (2) International Relations, (3) International Studies or (4) Human Rights. The Bachelor of Global Studies can be studied on its own or as a double degree with Law, Science or Commerce. An element of the degree that make it markedly different from a traditional Arts degree is that students must do a compulsory core unit at each year level, “Leadership for Social Change”. “Leadership for Social Change” will be the focus of this section, in particular its third year iteration, which all Bachelor of Global Studies students must do in order to graduate from their degree. It is particularly representative of how cultural literacy can be embedded into a Higher Education curriculum that does not expressly focus on cultural literacy. The discussion on Leadership for Social Change 3 includes interviews with two students, one who specialised in Cultural Competence and one who specialised in International Studies. Leadership for Social Change All students enrolled in the Bachelor of Global Studies at Monash University must do “Leadership for Social Change” as a core unit. There are three, progressive iterations of LSC at year levels 1, 2 and 3. The focus of these three units is to prompt students to question how they can bring about positive social change in their community and society at large and eventually put these ideas into practice. To this effect, LSC aims to balance theory and practice, starting at a predominantly theoretical level in first year and becoming increasingly “hands-on”, until third year, when students engage in a practical project. While the units are informed by principles of intercultural competency and interdisciplinarity, cultural literacy is not a foundational component of all these units. Given their interdisciplinary nature, teaching for these units requires, first and foremost, flexibility. Each unit covers a variety of topics, and no educator is expected to be an expert in all of them. This type of teaching destabilises educators, who must show flexibility in how they facilitate these topics for students, adding the expertise of the teacher’s disciplinary background. BGS students have different disciplinary skills and backgrounds, and this too requires adaptability as educators. Students doing a double degree with Science will understand a topic in a very different way from those doing Law or Commerce. The aim in the classroom is to draw out the richness of these diverse disciplinary perspectives and teach

5  EMBEDDING CULTURAL LITERACY IN HIGHER EDUCATION 

141

students how to navigate these differences in their groups effectively and efficiently.  eadership for Social Change 1 L In this unit, the first six weeks of the semester introduce students to the three core ideas of the subject: leadership, social change and the global. During these six weeks, the unit explores these ideas in depth, problematising students’ preconceptions and exploring ambiguities. From week 7 to 12, students are presented with three major “global topics”. These three global topics are used as case studies to which students will apply their new knowledge on leadership, social change and the global. There is a very strong emphasis on teamwork throughout the semester.  eadership for Social Change 2 L In this unit students will build on the work of Leadership for Social Change 1. The unit enables students to compare and contrast a range of solutions to local and global challenges affecting young people in different historical, linguistic, cultural and geographical settings. The unit focusing especially on developing an understanding of social change and leadership across a range of cultures and disciplines. Students develop the skills necessary to critically engage with a range of sources and practical contexts relating to leadership and social change, drawing on a variety of disciplinary approaches and real-world contexts. In the workshops, students reflect on, then critically engage with, specific social change issues in relation to the themes of youth, community and conflict.

5.3   Leadership for Social Change 3 Leadership for Social Change 3 is a third year capstone unit for the Bachelor of Global Studies. Capstone units at Monash University are designed to allow students to demonstrate the skills and knowledge that they have acquired throughout the study of a certain major and usually involves “a research project or an industry internship” (Monash University 2019). They require a heavier workload than other units (in the case of Leadership for Social Change 3, e.g. the unit is worth 12 points, as opposed to Leadership for Social Change 1 and 2, which are worth 6 points each). Leadership for Social Change 3 teaches students how to apply the knowledge and skills acquired in the first two years of their course to topical, real-world issues. Since its inception in 2017, the real-world, topical

142 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

issue studied has been the Syrian conflict and the Australian settlement of thousands of culturally and linguistically diverse Syrian refugees in Victoria.4 Thus, even though the subject matter of the unit is not literature, cultural literacy or intercultural communication, cultural literacy can still be embedded into the unit alongside the subject matter of refugee resettlement. The unit is divided into two parts. Part One is front-loaded with the necessary theory and skill-development that will allow students to tackle the practical component of the unit in Part Two. Part One is six weeks long. It showcases a number of guest lectures by industry experts who are actively involved in the issue to be explored during the semester. During these weeks, the unit consolidates the ideas introduced in Leadership for Social Change 1, and reinforced in Leadership for Social Change 2, so that students may have a more holistic, in-depth understanding of the topic. Through a variety of texts, including fiction and non-fiction narratives, testimonies and film documentaries, students research the refugee experience from the refugees’ viewpoint. These texts are supplemented by government reports, policy documents and statistical data. Students are introduced to cultural literacy skills to formulate empathetic responses to the challenges faced by these stakeholders in responding to the resettlement of refugees in Victoria. Students explore the following key questions: 1. What is the difference between the Australian government’s understanding of the refugee experience, and how it responds to it through its legislation and resettlement programmes and the actual experiences of refugees as narrated by them? 2. If there is a gap between these two points of view, how can it be bridged to better serve the resettlement process? 3. What are the issues faced by refugees and the local communities into which they settle? 4. What have we learnt from the challenges, successes and failures of previous periods of immigration and resettlement of migrant and refugee communities in Victoria/Australia? 4  There is also international iteration of Leadership for Social Change 3 that began in 2019, in Borneo. The unit has a firm emphasis on local indigenous peoples in Malaysian Borneo and their experience with palm oil, with multiple guest speakers from local indigenous groups. As the unit is delivered overseas as a two-week intensive course, it will not be part of this case-study discussion.

5  EMBEDDING CULTURAL LITERACY IN HIGHER EDUCATION 

143

5. How can we successfully apply the lessons from these previous examples to the present case of the Syrian resettlement? 6. How may we apply these lessons to predicted instances of future forced migration trends resulting from climate change, religious and cultural conflict and food/water insecurity? In Part Two, from week 7 to 12, students are involved in a practical project in relation to the settlement of refugees in Victoria. This can be an internship with a stakeholder working in the field, or an interview with a stakeholder, also working in this field (previous stakeholders have included non-governmental organisations (NGOs), branches of government and the private sector). The students are exposed to the challenges and complexities of their stakeholder’s work. Through this process, the students develop an understanding of the roles, objectives, challenges and strategies of this organisation in relation to refugee settlement. As the final outcome of this experience, the students help develop a strategy to tackle at least one of the issues faced by their stakeholder organisation. One of the unorthodox elements of Leadership for Social Change 3 was that the course incorporated a wide variety of texts to help students understand the complexities of the refugee experience from different points of view. There was a particular focus on understanding the relationship and contrast between the “macro perspectives” that shaped the refugee experience—such as national and international policies that directly affect refugees—and the “micro perspectives”, which is to say, the refugee experience as narrated and described from the refugees’ viewpoint. This is where cultural literacy comes into play as an embedded approach. One of its aims was to help students explore and develop their perspective-taking in order to improve their understanding of the refugee experience through the multidimensional framework of empathy (cognitive/affective) adopted by Keen (2007). In so doing, the approach also sought to help students develop awareness of their own empathy. The semester readings included documents on Australian and international policies pertaining to refugees, government reports, reports by NGOs, accounts of refugees who had been settled in Australia, accounts of asylum seekers in detention, documentaries, memoirs and fiction. Given the emphasis that the unit placed on understanding the refugee experience from the point of view of refugees, it aligned with Junker and Jacquemin’s admonition that one should be mindful that the key objectives of a course do not “conflict with the objective of building empathy” (Junker and

144 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

Jacquemin 2017, 84). In this sense helping students become aware of their own capacity for empathy, and teaching them how to reflect on it, was conducive to the wider objective of the course. Leadership for Social Change 3 from a Student Perspective For the purpose of this case study, we interviewed two Monash graduates who successfully finished Leadership for Social Change 3: Emma Casey and Camille Murphy. Emma Casey specialised in Cultural Competency, while Camille Murphy specialised in International Studies. In Casey’s opinion, the variety of texts in the course provided a good balance that helped to enrich her understanding of the refugee experience. She points out how the importance of both refugee accounts and works of fiction in helping her make the refugee experience more “relatable”. Casey explains: It was quite different to a lot of other units that I’ve taken, which are very heavily theory based. […] There were academic texts in this as well, so we did certainly have plenty of theory as well, but I think probably coming back to […] it being a lot more personal a lot more relatable. I think that’s probably where it helps to have some works of fiction. And perhaps the documentary as well. (E. Casey 2019, pers. comm. 15 August)

Murphy also touched on this during her interview, arguing that in her experience, without texts that gave insight into both the macro and micro perspectives of the refugee situation, she would not have been able to grasp its complexity. I think it’s harder with the policy to get through, but they were important to read. And I think if we only had policy, people wouldn’t enjoy reading as much. Okay, so I do think the variety was important. I do remember some of the government documents were really long. But they do give you an understanding of why refugees have the experiences that they do. For example, when we were reading about how difficult it was to get an emergency refugee visa. It was easy to understand why so many refugees are forced to come through unorthodox routes rather than waiting on their visa situation for two years. (2019, pers. comm. 22 August)

The students in Leadership for Social Change 3 were exposed to diverse texts on refugee stories, written by refugees or the children of refugees. There was a chapter from the memoir The Happiest Refugee, by Anh Do;

5  EMBEDDING CULTURAL LITERACY IN HIGHER EDUCATION 

145

the compilation of short, non-fiction narratives by asylum seekers who were in detention, They Cannot Take the Sky; the documentary Freedom Stories; and the short story “The Boat” by Nam Le. In regard to these narratives on the refugee experience, Murphy comments, “I remember that a lot of the stories that we had read were very honest” (2019, pers. comm. 22 August). She elaborates on this: Lots of people were confronted by what they were reading. Often, when you talk about refugees who are already in Australia, you’re just talking about how happy they are to be here. […] They don’t really talk about all the terrible things that caused them to become refugees, their experience while they were refugees. And these texts did. And so I do remember that. (2019, pers. comm. 22 August)

Interestingly, the narrative that both Murphy and Casey remembered in most detail was Le’s “The Boat”, which is a fictional short story in an eponymous collection of short stories by Le. Le was born in Vietnam and came to Australia with his parents as a refugee when he was one year old. Unlike the narrative in The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif, the story of “The Boat” is fiction; it is not his personal account of the journey. It is the story of a young woman who embarks on the journey from Vietnam to Australia by boat, but dies in the attempt. The students had to read “The Boat” early on in the semester, during their second week of class. The other assigned readings for that week included a book chapter on Australia’s multicultural policy, from Jupp’s From White Australia to Woomera: The Story of Australian Immigration; a summarised chronology on Australian immigration and refugee experiences from 1901 to 2002, compiled and edited by the Social Policy Group; and an introductory guide to the basic steps of a research interview. This was the first step in the course towards embedding cultural literacy in the curriculum, by providing the students with an insight into both the refugee experience and the Australian government’s policies on refugees and how the two relate. “The Boat” was the only work of fiction the students read as part of the course. One of the in-class activities for that second week incorporated the principles of Open-Space Learning through active performance, where students could have an embodied sense of their knowledge. The activity involved role-play, as an elaboration of the perspective-taking exercise discussed at the beginning of the chapter. There were three primary aims to the activity: the first was to help students exercise their cultural literacy by

146 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

prompting them to understand someone else’s point of view. The second was to teach students how to become more aware of their own cognitive-­ affective empathy skills. The third aim was to practice the basic steps of a research interview. Activity Description Warm-up: after a 20-minute shared reflection on the different Australian policies on multiculturalism and refugees over the twentieth century (which students had to read prior to coming to class), the students were allocated to groups of four or five. They were given a simple warm-up exercise using embodied learning. This warm-up exercise was an adaptation of the “Clapping” exercise outlined at the beginning of the chapter with the suite of other OSL activities. The exercise was modified so that students could engage in an embodied manner with the subject matter of the course, but its principle is very much the same. The warm-up still required students to attune to each other. The students worked in pairs. There were three “rounds” for the warm­up exercise. During the first round, a student in each pair shared with their partner everything that came to mind in regard to the topic of “global studies”, but they only had ten seconds to share their ideas. The listening partner was in charge of timing the ten seconds. When the ten seconds were over, the listening partner clapped their hands and cried “Stop!” The students would swap roles, and once both had shared their ideas on “global studies” that would bring the first round to an end. The warm-up was repeated twice more, the only variation being the topic to be shared. During the second round the topic was “social change”, and during the third, “leadership”. After the activity there was a brief collaborative reflection where students were asked to share their views on the exercise. Most thought that it was “pointless”, as ten seconds was not enough time to adequately share their ideas. At this point, the real aim of the exercise was disclosed. The students were presented with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ (UNHCR’s) most recent figures on the forced displacement of people due to conflict or persecution (approximately 37,000 people per day). They were explained that, in accordance with those figures, every time their partner cried “Stop!” four to five people were forcibly displaced from their homes. The exercise is a sober reminder of the enormity of the refugee crisis and a good introduction to the embodied learning activity

5  EMBEDDING CULTURAL LITERACY IN HIGHER EDUCATION 

147

that follows. It exposes students to multidimensional reflection and destabilisation, as it usually provokes a visceral shift, albeit a slight one, that prompts them to reflect on their privilege in relation to the great challenges of our time. Role-play activity: after the warm-up, we proceed to the main activity, which involves role-play as an embodied instance of perspective-taking. Two students in each group had to role-play the two main characters of Le’s “The Boat”, Mai and Quyen. The other two or three students had to be representatives of the Refugee and Special Programs Branch (RSPB) within the Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs sent to interview them. In the scenario presented to the students, Mai and Quyen had survived their boat capsizing and had been rescued by the Australian navy. Mai and Quyen are staying at a refugee hostel, of the kind that housed asylum seekers in Australia prior to 1991. The representatives of the RSPB need to discover, through an interpreter, the most pressing problems Mai and Quyen are facing right now, and how to help them, in order to ascertain whether they can be granted refugee status. In order to further scaffold the role-play experience, the students may begin with a 20-minute introductory session, where they try to understand the point of view of the characters in the text using Toegel and Barsoux’s Five Conversations model. The students ask each other questions, which they answer from the point of view of the characters assigned to them. Their responses must be based on evidence gathered from the text. The questions can be something along the following lines: Look: “In Mai’s world, what makes someone look threatening?” Act: “In Quyen’s world, what does someone need to do in order to be safe?” Speak: “In Mai’s world, does silence mean safety, fear, lack of knowledge, or rudeness?” Think: “In Quyen’s world, is there any knowledge of the workings of the Australian system for processing refugees and asylum seekers?” Feel: “In Mai’s world, does being interrogated by government officials inspire trust, or fear?”

After answering these questions, the students may move on to the fully embodied component of the activity. The students who had to embody the RSPB representatives had to write five main questions for the interview, and the students playing Mai

148 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

and Quyen had to answer them. The students were given 60 minutes in total for this activity, which was followed by a 30-minute reflection. Again, delving into the multidimensional nature of reflection, during this time students were asked specific questions about their thoughts and feelings in regard to the role-play experience. They were specifically asked to differentiate between how they felt and what they thought about the exercise. As mentioned before, this role-play exercise is, at heart, an exercise in perspective-taking, where students need to actively, consciously, put themselves in someone else’s shoes in order to develop a better understanding of their own empathy skills. In this case, perspective-taking is taking place through the preliminary conversations and the embodied learning component of the role-play exercise. By destabilising the students through the role-play exercise, and following this with a structured reflection on their thoughts and feelings, we sought to help them exercise the multidimensional framework of empathy mentioned before. We aimed to help students become aware of their affective and cognitive reactions regarding refugees, in order to have a better understanding of the refugee experience. In this way, this awareness of thoughts and feelings, and the complex empathetic experience, becomes part of a cognitive process for students. Building consciousness around their capacity for empathy, and how the exercise of perspective-taking they engaged in through role-play can help them exercise that empathy, is one of the main goals of our approach. In regard to her experience of reading “The Boat” and doing the role-­ play activities, Casey explains that “it was quite personal” (2019, pers. comm. 15 August). According to Casey, the text allowed her to develop a new perspective on the refugee experience that, in her opinion, she would not have been able to develop had she only been reading academic texts or government reports. In her interview she speaks about “connecting” with the character: “I guess it was a lot more engaging than kind of reading a list of dates and facts and numbers. So I enjoyed it. […] I enjoyed how kind of personal and human it was. And I think it helps me connect a bit more with what it might be like coming over as a refugee or asylum seeker” (2019, pers. comm. 15 August). It appears that given the immersive quality of Le’s story, more so than with other texts, both Murphy and Casey were able to experience Gerrig’s notion of “transportation” discussed in Chaps. 2 and 4, the state of becoming fully engaged with a text, when reading involves “a convergent process, where all mental systems and capacities become focused on events occurring in the narrative” (2009, 3). Murphy and Casey seemed to have

5  EMBEDDING CULTURAL LITERACY IN HIGHER EDUCATION 

149

experienced both cognitive and emotional transportation (Bal and Veltkamp 2013), in the sense that they were moved by the circumstances experienced by the characters in the story, but they also had a clear way of understanding and contextualising such circumstances at an intellectual level. In turn, this emotive-cognitive transportation led to empathy for the characters in Le’s story, that specifically literary empathy (2014, 1), or narrative empathy, “the sharing of feeling and perspective-taking induced by reading, viewing, hearing, or imagining narratives of another’s situations and condition” (Keen 2014, 21). In this particular scenario, the students were experiencing cognitive-affective empathy for the situation experienced by the literary characters in Le’s short story. Murphy vividly recalls the story’s ending and the impact it had on her: “I remember I was really shocked when she died at the end because you don’t expect that” (2019, pers. comm. 22 August). She explains that part of what made reading these texts such a destabilising experience (both cognitively and emotionally) was the knowledge that they were written by refugees. Even in the case of Le’s “The Boat”, which is fiction, the fact that Le is a refugee himself, and was narrating a story that resembled that of many other refugees, had a profound significance for Murphy: I think it had a big impact because it was written by someone who was a refugee. So it is kind of different when the person writing the book is writing about a lived experience, even if it’s not their exact experience. An experience that happened to others. Or heard about happening to others rather than someone who has never been a refugee writing a book about a refugee. Yes, I think the fact that they were refugees contributed to making the reading experience so impactful. (2019, pers. comm. 22 August)

For Murphy and Casey, Le’s text worked as a “window text”, in that it provided for both students “a glimpse into an unfamiliar experience or story” (Colvin 2017, 1), and both students seem to follow Colvin’s definition of window readers, able to engage with characters who may be fundamentally different to them and still put themselves in their shoes. Casey associates the connection that she felt with the characters in Nam Le’s “The Boat” with empathy, being able to better understand their point of view and, to an extent, understand their position within a given situation, hence another instance of narrative empathy related to literary characters, not real people. In this regard, she elaborates on the difference between

150 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

reading fiction and other types of texts and how the former is more conducive to empathy: It’s so easy to just read news articles […], or when you’re reading numbers and figures, you might be aware of what’s happening, but you don’t really feel it on that personal level, as much as reading a work of fiction where you’re sort of developing a relationship with the characters. All of a sudden you can put a name to those people. And you can kind of imagine what they might look like, how they speak, you can imagine their friends and family. So it does hit you a lot harder than just reading news articles, for example. (2019, pers. comm. 15 August)

Like Casey, Murphy was able to experience narrative empathy but points out that doing so was a confronting experience. This did not apply only to “The Boat”; in Murphy’s view, the non-fiction accounts by refugees covered in the course, although less memorable than “The Boat”, were confronting too. She explains in regard to these texts: I think it was important to read them. But I think that sometimes they could be challenging. I think all those important things are. They’re not easy to read, but you need to read them. They help you get a better understanding of the community and the world that you live in. (2019, pers. comm. 22 August)

Casey shared with Murphy the visceral, emotional element of the empathetic experience elicited by “The Boat” and other stories written or narrated by refugees: I guess, how difficult the experiences can be can make you feel quite emotional at times. […] I’m a history student. And often you can kind of disconnect a little bit when you’re reading history, when you’re reading texts about events that have happened years and years ago, but when you’re reading something that’s still happening, it kind of hits you harder in that way. So I guess I found it challenging, emotionally at times, but also, in terms of just understanding the politics and international relations from that kind of more, I guess, academic perspective, it was, it was challenging to understand the complexities of what’s actually happening. (2019, pers. comm. 15 August)

5  EMBEDDING CULTURAL LITERACY IN HIGHER EDUCATION 

151

Interestingly, both Murphy and Casey pointed out that reading the narratives of refugees assigned during Leadership for Social Change 3 led them to take action once the course was over and help newly arrived refugees to settle in Australia. Prior to Leadership for Social Change 3, Murphy used to donate money once a year to refugee-related organisations. After the unit and graduating from Monash, Murphy started volunteering for a Melbourne-based organisation that works with refugees. She explains the effect that reading these refugee accounts had in her decision to take action: I think [volunteering] started more regularly because of the course. And my Mum, she is a primary school teacher, and she actually worked with a lot of children who were born in refugee camps. So I had been exposed to that from a young age. […] So, I think I was reasonably aware, but I definitely became more aware because of Leadership for Social Change. It made me more confident to speak out, and argue with people spreading disinformation about refugees. So it had a big impact. (2019, pers. comm. 22 August)

In Murphy’s case, the texts in the programme were not the catalyst that led her to get actively involved in helping newly arrived refugees in Australia. However, she points out that the refugee narratives in the course, along with her personal background, contributed to this (2019, pers. comm. 22 August). Similarly to Murphy, once she finished her course, Casey started volunteering for an organisation: Shortly after I took Leadership for Social Change 3, I started doing a little bit of volunteering, because doing the interview at the Southern Migrant and Refugee Centre kind of made me think, Oh, well, what can I do? […] So I’ve been working with SAIL, the Sudanese Australian Integrated Learning programme since then, about October 2017. I think it did kind of make me a bit more aware of what was happening and want to do something to help in a way that I can do easily. It’s only a couple of hours a week. (2019, pers. comm. 15 August)

Like Murphy, Casey was specifically asked whether, in her opinion, the narratives of the refugee experience that she read as part of the course had had an impact on her, to the extent that they led to a shift from merely knowing about this issue, to contributing to it in a positive way, acting. In Casey’s case, the texts appear to have had a much stronger influence that led her to action:

152 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

Sometimes it can be a bit overwhelming. With so much, so much happening in the world, and it can be very easy to just sort of go, Well, I can’t do anything. I’m just gonna sit back. But I think having those personal stories makes you consider that these are real people. It just made me look for more options and really brought me out of that lazy attitude, I guess. (2019, pers. comm. 15 August)

This brings us back to our discussion in Chap. 3 on the temporality of reflection, and how the immediacy of reflection after an immersive experience does not necessarily equate to transformative, long-term learning in the student. Spurred by their understanding of the refugee experience after reading Le’s “The Boat” and other related texts, Murphy and Casey seemed to have acquired Nussbaum’s notion of “complex compassion” (2013, 149). They both moved from merely understanding and feeling empathy towards refugees, to putting into practice “helping behaviour that responds to the specific features of the” (Nussbaum 2013, 149) refugees’ plight, from the refugees’ point of view by volunteering their time to different organisations (C. Murphy 2019, pers. comm. 22 August; E. Casey 2019, pers. comm. 15 August). In so doing, it appears that both students, similar to Stefanovic in Chap. 4, increased their “circle of concern” (Nussbaum 2013, 262). Murphy explains that They Cannot Take the Sky, the compilation of non-fiction narratives about life in detention centres in Australia, also had a strong impact on her. According to her, the book gave her a more thorough understanding of the refugee experience. It helped her better understand the background and journey of asylum seekers who find themselves in detention and contrast that against the mainstream narrative that prevails in Australia. She shares how They Cannot Take the Sky in particular allowed her to empathise with asylum seekers in detention, and consequently, to better understand the effects that Australian policies on the mandatory detention of asylum seekers have on people’s lives. According to Murphy, They Can’t Take the Sky was really valuable because it was a reminder of the impacts of our policies in Australia on people who live in detention. It’s not a book written by someone who has gone through a traumatic journey and has finished that journey and suddenly they’re safe. These are people who have gone through a traumatic journey and are still living that experience every day based on decisions that our government has made. So I think it was really valuable. (2019, pers. comm. 22 August)

5  EMBEDDING CULTURAL LITERACY IN HIGHER EDUCATION 

153

The film documentary Freedom Stories, another prescribed text for the course, discusses the refugee and asylum seeker experience in Australia, both in and out of detention. Murphy remembered the documentary, but not as vividly as the stories in They Cannot Take the Sky or Le’s “The Boat”. Interestingly, the most memorable aspect of the documentary for her seemed to be “people’s faces”, rather than their stories: “I remember a little bit about the documentary. Yes. There’s lots of different people in the documentary. […] It was really helpful because I think when you can see people’s faces, it makes a difference when you can see people’s expressions. You take their word more seriously” (2019, pers. comm. 22 August). As we have pointed out before, it is difficult to ascertain with certainty to what extent reading helped develop empathy. This is the “chicken or egg” dilemma discussed by Keen (2007), Panero et  al. (2016), Pinker (2011) and Boker et al. (2004). Is empathy an innate attribute that allows some readers to identify more with characters, or are people who read more, prone to developing empathy? Does innate empathy in readers inform their ability to identify with fictional characters, or does reading itself develop the capacity to experience narrative empathy, which can later be transferred to real people? Unfortunately, in the case of Leadership for Social Change 3, it is also difficult to determine to what extent the texts prescribed as part of the course helped develop Murphy’s and Casey’s awareness of their own empathy for refugees, or whether the students found these texts impactful because of their existing empathy for refugees. In the course of conducting our interviews, we found that both students had had prior personal experiences with refugees that may have influenced the way in which they interpreted the texts of the course. Murphy comments in this regard, To be honest, I think that the people doing Leadership for Social Change are already more interested and more educated than the average Australian, on refugees. And I think that’s just kind of the nature for people doing that degree. They would take that kind of learning for themselves. […] I studied refugees in high school. In geography of all classes … migrations of refugees. In 2014, so that was right when Syria was happening. And so I learned a lot about refugees a lot I didn’t really know before, in that year. (2019, pers. comm. 22 August)

154 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

In addition to her high school studies, Murphy appears to have a background that provided her with a solid understanding of the refugee experience and perhaps a propensity to empathise with refugees: I don’t know how relevant this is, but I have lived my whole life in an Orthodox Jewish area (my family are non-practising Christians). The area is heavily influenced by the community who live here—ethnic Jews, religious Jews, Russian, Ukrainian, Israeli, American and other European Jews. I’ve had Jewish friends, neighbours, colleagues and teachers. It taught me a lot about diversity, because of how many different cultural groups there are living here. I didn’t realise how different it was growing up in Balaclava until I started working in the Northern suburbs. I think it really had a big impact on how I grew up. Many of the elder members of the community were Holocaust survivors and talked openly about their experiences as refugees. I was also already accustomed to living in an area that has been adapted to suit the religious needs of a group I don’t identify with, as there are lots of Orthodox Jews where I live who are very strict with religious observances. I think that’s what people are most afraid of, seeing their suburb change because of a new migrant group. But all Australian suburbs have changed constantly, ever since colonisation. So I knew change is inevitable, and to be embraced. (2019, pers. comm. 1 September).

Murphy was unable to pinpoint exactly where her prior knowledge on refugees came from, but she believes Leadership for Social Change 3 helped her to better articulate and consolidate that knowledge: “I feel like even though I was really young, I’ve learned about refugees. I was trying to think about how I know … I guess my parents must have told me. They’ve always been very pro-letting-people-into-the-country. So I don’t know. […] Joining the course, I think, made me more confident, in what information I knew was correct” (2019, pers. comm. 22 August). Murphy mentioned another significant childhood experience that, in her opinion, may have had an impact on her perception of refugees: “My mum, she is a primary school teacher, she actually worked with a lot of children who were born in refugee camps […] There are programmes for kids who don’t speak English at home to help them keep their English up, otherwise sometimes they don’t speak English for two months, during the summer holidays” (2019, pers. comm. 22 August). Murphy elaborates on this and her direct experience of her mother’s involvement with refugee children:

5  EMBEDDING CULTURAL LITERACY IN HIGHER EDUCATION 

155

When I talked to my mum about participating in this, she reminded me that in 2008, when I was in Year 6, she had a class with many children who were born in refugee camps, who didn’t speak a lot of English when they first started at school and had challenging starts to their lives. I spent time with them on some days off school and when my mum was volunteering in the holidays for a holiday programme where they could practice conversational English. It was the first time I’d seen so many people who spoke so many different languages in one place, and the first time I realised how privileged I am. It made a big impact on me to this day. (2019, pers. comm. 1 September)

In addition to this, prior to doing Leadership for Social Change 3, Murphy was exposed to a number of texts that enriched her understanding of people different from her. Some of these texts were expressly on the refugee experience, but not all. The earliest memory of such texts came from “primary school, sometime between 2006–2008” (2019, pers. comm. 1 September). The texts were Boy Overboard and Girl Underground by the English-born, Australian author of children’s book and young adult fiction Morris Gleitzman. It’s a kids’ book about refugees, essentially. About someone who was in a refugee camp. I remember that it had a really big impact. The first one is when they leave for Australia, and the second one is when they are stuck in a refugee camp, in Australia. I was probably not even ten years old when I read those books. And I read them at school as part of a reading group. And I found them really impacting. Definitely. (2019, pers. comm. 22 August)

In high school, Murphy read Ransom, David Malouf’s retelling of the Iliad which, according to her, helped exercise her subjectivity and empathy as “there were always people from different experiences interacting [in the background]” (2019, pers. comm. 1 September). There are some overlaps between Murphy’s and Casey’s background. Like Murphy, Casey mentions being exposed to a number of texts prior to doing Leadership for Social Change 3 that had an impact in terms of how she relates to people who are different from her. Casey also read Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, and by the same author, One Thousand Splendid Suns. Casey also mentioned Malala Yousafzai’s autobiographical book I Am Malala: The Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban as an influential text that allowed her to exercise her empathy and positionality.

156 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

I read quite a lot. I really enjoy reading. I read from a variety of texts, fiction, a lot of non-fiction. And my school […] we did do a few texts that were either about sort of race relations or from memory, difference. I think we also studied The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which was not specifically about refugees, but had some sort of themes about difference and about radicalization, which was quite an interesting read. (2019, pers. comm. 15 August)

Reflecting on her own empathy, Casey acknowledges that it is difficult to determine with certainty whether the empathy she feels for the refugee experience came about as a direct result of reading the texts in Leadership for Social Change 3 or because she has acquaintances with refugee backgrounds. In the case of Le’s “The Boat”, she explains, It’s difficult to say because I also have a couple of friends with Vietnamese background who have told me about their own family history. So I did perhaps have a little bit of prior knowledge, which I don’t know if I can separate. I don’t know if reading that text [“The Boat”] or talking to friends sort of helps me develop that empathy, or if it was a combination of both. Just a bit hard to kind of pinpoint exactly what it was. (2019, pers. comm. 15 August)

Interestingly, Casey does point out that in her opinion, the stories of refugees were what helped her develop her empathy towards refugees in Australia. Whether told by her friends’ family members who had undergone these experiences, orally or read in works of fiction like “The Boat”, according to Casey, these stories prompted her to try to better understand the circumstances of refugees in Australia (2019, pers. comm. 15 August). Similarly to Casey, Murphy also had a number of acquaintances with a refugee background. In Murphy’s case, she was not aware of her acquaintances’ refugee background until she read “The Boat” during her Leadership for Social Change 3 class: I’d known from people who came to Australia, Vietnamese refugees, but I hadn’t actually realized that they were refugees. I hadn’t really thought about it. […] I didn’t really realize until we studied this that a lot of Vietnamese people in Australia, pretty much all of them, had come as refugees. And not just migrated here like Chinese Australians who have been here since the Gold Rush. (2019, pers. comm. 22 August)

5  EMBEDDING CULTURAL LITERACY IN HIGHER EDUCATION 

157

Murphy shared an occasion when she realised that one of her close friends had a refugee background. “We were really good friends in my first year of high school. […] We saw each other at an event the same year I did Leadership for Social Change 3, and that’s when it clicked her parents had been refugees” (2019, pers. comm. 22 August). She elaborates on her conversation, “I was like, ‘So, how did your parents come to Australia?’, and she said, ‘Oh, we were refugees. And we were very lucky to come over here and my parents didn’t really talk that much about [it]’” (2019, pers. comm. 22 August). Both Casey and Murphy shifted from merely experiencing empathy, to engaging in complex compassion by volunteering with organisations that support refugees. However, given their background and understanding of the refugee experience prior to the course, it is difficult to determine whether they developed empathy for refugees because of the texts they read or whether the existing empathy they had prior to the course helped them feel empathetic towards the refugee narratives covered in Leadership for Social Change 3. Furthermore and along these lines, differently from the case of Stefanovic discussed in Chap. 4 and other students in Cranbourne Secondary College from non-refugee backgrounds, it is hard to determine to what extent Murphy and Casey were able to expand their “circle of concern”, which seems to have already incorporated refugees prior to them doing Leadership for Social Change 3.

References Bal, P.  M., & Veltkamp, M. (2013). How Does Fiction Reading Influence Empathy? An Experimental Investigation on the Role of Emotional Transportation. Public Library of Science, 8(1), e55341. https://doi. org/10.1371/journal.pone.0055341. Boker, J., Morrison, E., & Shapiro, J. (2004). Teaching Empathy to First Year Medical Students: Evaluation of an Elective Literature and Medicine Course. Education for Health, 17(1), 73–84. https://doi.org/10.108 0/13576280310001656196. Colvin, S. (2017). Literature as more Than a Window: Building Readers’ Empathy and Social Capacity through Exposure to Diverse Literature. Voice of Youth Advocates, 39(6), 24–29.

158 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

Do, A., & Ebooks Corporation. (2011). The Happiest Refugee. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin. García Ochoa, G., & McDonald, S. (2019). Destabilisation and Cultural Literacy. Intercultural Education, 30(4), 351–367. García Ochoa, G., McDonald, S., & Monk, N. (2016). Embedding Cultural Literacy in Higher Education: A New Approach. Intercultural Education, 27(6), 546–559. García Ochoa, G., McDonald, S., & Monk, N. (2018). Adapting Open-Space Learning Techniques to Teach Cultural Literacy. Open Cultural Studies, 2, 510–519. Gerrig, R.  J., Love, J., & McKoon, G. (2009). Waiting for Brandon: How Readers Respond to Small Mysteries. Journal of Memory and Language, 60, 144–153. Junker, C. R., & Jacquemin, S. J. (2017). How Does Literature Affect Empathy in Students? College Teaching, 65(2), 79–87. https://doi.org/10.108 0/87567555.2016.1255583. Keen, S. (2007). Empathy and the Novel. New  York; Oxford: Oxford University Press. Keen, S. (2014). Novel Readers and the Empathetic Angel of Our Nature. In M. M. Hammond & S. J. Kim (Eds.), Rethinking Empathy through Literature. Taylor & Francis. Le, N. (2008). The Boat. Camberwell, VIC: Hamish Hamilton an imprint of Penguin Books. Lindgren, M., McDonald, S., Monk, N., & Pasfield-Neofitu, S. (2015). Portal Pedagogy: From Interdisciplinarity and Internationalization to Transdisciplinarity and Transnationalization. London Review of Education, 13(3), 62–78. Monash University, Definition of Gateway, Cornerstone and Capstone Units— Faculty of Arts. Retrieved October 30, 2019, from https://www3.monash. edu/pubs/2019handbooks/undergrad/arts-08.html Monk, N., et  al. (2011). Introduction. In N.  Monk, C.  Chillington Rutter, J.  Neelands, & J.  Heron (Eds.), OpenSpace Learning: A Study in Transdisciplinary Pedagogy (pp. 1–9). Bloomsbury. Nussbaum, M.  C. (2013). Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Panero, M. E., Weisberg, D. S., Black, J., Goldstein, T. R., Barnes, J. L., Brownell, H., & Winner, E. (2016). Does Reading a Single Passage of Literary Fiction Really Improve Theory of Mind? An Attempt at Replication. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 111, e46.

5  EMBEDDING CULTURAL LITERACY IN HIGHER EDUCATION 

159

Pinker, S. (2011). The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. New York: Viking. Toegel, G., & Barsoux, J.-L. (2016). How to Preempt Team Conflict. Harvard Business Review, 94(6), 78–83. 117.

CHAPTER 6

Embedding the Curriculum in Cultural Literacy: Reading Across Cultures

6.1   Cultural Literacy at the Centre of the Curriculum “Reading Across Cultures” is a first year unit at Monash University, specifically designed with cultural literacy at the centre of the curriculum, in terms of both knowledge and skill acquisition. The unit is designed as a gateway for students doing the Cultural Competence Specialisation in the Bachelor of Global Studies (discussed in Chap. 5). The Cultural Competence Specialisation of the Bachelor of Global Studies encompasses an interdisciplinary field of study that fosters awareness of language and literature as critical sites of cultural interaction, negotiation, conflict and cooperation. The Specialisation centres cultural literacy in its curriculum by approaching the study of literature and language learning as methods for developing intercultural awareness. When it was created in late 2014, the Specialisation was originally called “Global Cultural Literacies”. This name was changed in 2018 for the sake of clarity and concision and to better portray the Specialisation’s aims. As a compulsory component of the Specialisation, students must do eight units of language study throughout their degree, following the entry point guidelines and order prescribed under the Bachelor of Arts at Monash University. The language options available are Chinese, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean or Spanish. In addition to

© The Author(s) 2020 G. García Ochoa, S. McDonald, Cultural Literacy and Empathy in Education Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59904-1_6

161

162 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

this, students must do a minimum of three study-abroad units, either through an overseas partner institution or by enrolling in a study abroad programme organised by Monash University. Only students doing the Bachelor of Global Studies are able to complete this Specialisation. Gateway units at Monash University such as Reading Across Cultures are defined as units that introduce the students to their area of study (Monash University 2019). Reading Across Cultures lays the foundations for students in the Cultural Competence Specialisation for future understanding and application of the basic theory and skills pertaining to cultural literacy. Even though Reading Across Cultures is a gateway for Cultural Competence students, it is also available to every student in the university as an elective. As a consequence of this, it attracts students from different disciplinary backgrounds (Marketing, Science, Law, Medicine, Business and Arts and Humanities), leading to fruitful in-class discussions (García Ochoa 2016). The unit is delivered over a 12-week semester, as a two-hour weekly seminar, without lectures. The majority of the students enrolled in it are in their first year of tertiary education, which usually involves a greater degree of pastoral care and foundational knowledge. In line with the tenets of Open-Space Learning (OSL), Reading Across Cultures provides a non-traditional, experiential learning context. The unit uses problem-based learning. It encourages students to assume responsibility for their own learning journey with support from their tutor/lecturer. The unit also utilises a number of assessments and activities (some of them already discussed in Chap. 5) that help develop cultural literacy through the use of destabilisation and reflection (García Ochoa 2016). The focus of each seminar is the analysis of a literary text by an author with a mixed cultural heritage or a non-Australian cultural heritage. The course alternates between the notions of literature as a window and literature as a mirror (Damrosch 2003; Colvin 2017; Tschida et al. 2014) discussed in Chap. 2, teaching students the difference between identification and perspective-taking, and how these pertain to developing awareness of their own empathy. The students were taught how to interpret and analyse three particular components of the prescribed texts: setting, character and dialogue. These three components of the texts became the pylons of the students’ literary analysis and assessment throughout the course. Three seminars at the beginning of the semester were devoted to each of these literary components (one seminar per component across three weeks), and another three

6  EMBEDDING THE CURRICULUM IN CULTURAL LITERACY: READING… 

163

seminars were dedicated to each of these elements of the text during the second half of the semester, to review and build on previously acquired knowledge (García Ochoa 2016). Basic concepts in literary theory and cultural studies were also provided throughout the semester to enrich the students’ analysis and understanding of how cultural differences can be navigated. These included the following: an introduction to the concept of unconscious bias; semiotics; the notion of “Otherness” as defined by Edward Said in Orientalism (1995); Joseph Campbell’s (2008) idea of the “Monomyth”; Farzad Sharifian’s (2011) theory of cultural conceptualisations in linguistics; Lawrence Venuti’s (1995) theory of the invisible translator; and Naomi Segal’s and Schirato and Yell’s different understandings of cultural literacy. In line with the principles of Open-Space Learning, and following our conceptualisation of cultural literacy in this book as a set of transferable skills and knowledge that students can apply to better understand new or uncertain experiences, as the semester unfolded, students were taught how to transfer the analytical and interpretative skills applied to the short stories studied in class every week to increasingly complex “texts” (García Ochoa 2016). Throughout the course, great emphasis was placed on the transferability of these skills. This approach also fostered the notion of cultural readability, and the text-like quality of society and culture discussed in Chap. 1. Students applied these skills to short stories, films and real-life scenarios. In line with this, the subject matter of the students’ three major assessments throughout the semester progressed from the analysis of short stories for their first assignment, to film in their mid-­ semester assignment and from film to a real-life scenario for their final group projects. The assessments for this unit also highlighted group work and collaboration as basic skills required to work efficiently across cultures. Students were allocated to diverse teams taking into consideration disciplinary background, cultural heritage, gender and whether they spoke a second language. The semester’s class activities and assignments were designed to work in relation to each other. The skills and knowledge developed throughout the course were cumulative, with each assessment delving deeper and building upon them. Each assessment incorporated at least one multidimensional reflection component, which prompted students to engage in reflection not during the experience (reflection in action), but reflection after the experience, following Schön’s ideas on reflection-on-­ action. The students’ reflections were marked based on the depth of their

164 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

analysis, their understanding of the knowledge covered in class and their ability to draw logical, evidence-based conclusions. Following, we will discuss three major assessments that throughout the semester underpinned the development our students’ cultural literacy.

6.2   Assessment 1: Perspective-Taking and Character Analysis, “Gimpel the Fool” Assessment Description The aim of the assessment was to help students develop awareness of their own empathy by practising perspective-taking, using skills and knowledge pertaining to literary studies, more specifically, character analysis. To that effect, the assessment made use of “embodied learning” and role-play to present the students’ analysis and introduced them to shared, collaborative reflection. Students were allocated into groups of four or five members, in which they would work throughout the semester. There was a maximum of five groups per class. Each group had to analyse one of the main characters in the short story “Gimpel the Fool” by the Polish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, which tells the story of a baker in small village, who appears not to be very intelligent and is consequently taken advantage of by the people in the village. The assignment was due on week 4 of the semester. The assignment was foundational for the unit in terms of laying the ground for group work, analysis, presentation and collaborative reflection. However, it was only worth 10% of the students’ mark, as it was also an introductory form of assessment that took place early in the semester. Preparation On week 2 of the semester (two weeks prior to their assessment), students are introduced to perspective-taking through character analysis. The prescribed texts for that week are Chinua Achebe’s short story “Dead Men’s Path” and an excerpt from Edward Said’s Orientalism, which is studied within the broader context of “otherness”. The exercise on perspective-taking with these texts is a variation of that described in Chap. 5. The exercise lays the foundation for the more embodied type of perspective-taking through role-play required for their assignment in week 4.

6  EMBEDDING THE CURRICULUM IN CULTURAL LITERACY: READING… 

165

This is a group exercise that requires collaborative reflection. Each group is assigned a different character in the story “Dead Men’s Path”. Based on the character assigned to them, each group needs to answer the following questions: • I am thinking about the topic of “otherness” from the point of view of (assigned character) • I think … (describe the topic from the point of view of the character assigned to your group) • What does your character think about this topic? What evidence in your text supports your assertions? The students are given 30 minutes to come up with their answers and to prepare a short presentation for the rest of the group. In order to exercise their analytical and critical skills, much emphasis is given to drawing evidence from the text. Any statements regarding the character’s point of view must be substantiated with evidence from Achebe’s short story. The presentations are followed by the first shared, collaborative reflection of the semester, where students can discuss any insights from adopting another’s point of view, particularly in light of Said’s ideas on orientalism. The activity introduces students to the basic cognitive displacement required for perspective-taking, and it provides a preparatory blueprint for their presentations on week 4. Instructions In order to scaffold the destabilisation process in this assignment and to avoid making it overwhelmingly confusing, the students were given basic, strict guidelines on how to analyse a literary character, taking into account the character’s age, occupation, gender, socio-economic status and the motivations behind their actions. The character analysis had to be substantiated with evidence from the text. After preparing their character analysis in their groups, the students had to present their findings in class as a role-play performance, where they represented the character they analysed, thus putting into practice the notion of embodied learning. Again, as part of the scaffolding required for destabilisation, the performance adhered to very strict instructions. The instructions were the following:

166 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

The groups selected one of its members to role-play the character that had been assigned to them. To strengthen the embodied component of the assignment, the student in question had to refer to the character in the first person when presenting the character analysis (e.g. “My name is Gimpel, and I am a baker by trade”). As an introduction to shared, collaborative reflection, the student was interviewed by the rest of the class in a group-presentation setting. Each group prepared a minimum of one question for the characters being analysed by their peers in other groups (this meant that each group needed to have a total of four questions ready for the class interview that followed the presentations). The student interpreting the character was interviewed and allowed to receive help from their fellow group members in answering the questions posed by the rest of the class. This allowed students to actively showcase their ability to work as a group and present the research and preparation on the character that they had done prior to the presentation. Discussion The activity introduced students to group work in diverse groups, but more importantly, it presented a controlled example of scaffolded destabilisation by means of Open-Space Learning and reflection. The embodied learning nature of the role-play exercise was destabilising for students and unorthodox in the context of a literary studies unit. Singer’s short story served as a “window text”, providing students with a “view” of a different, unfamiliar world and way of being (Nikolajeva 2014). It allowed students to reflect on their empathy skills through perspective-taking. It is important to note that in this particular instance, students were not practising perspective-taking in relation to a real person, but a literary character. In this sense, they were exercising what Hammond and Kim call “literary empathy”, which Keen refers to as “narrative empathy”, defined as “the sharing of feeling and perspective-taking induced by reading, viewing, hearing, or imagining narratives of another’s situations and condition” (2014, 21). By exercising the students’ narrative empathy, within this controlled, safe space, the assignment allowed students to feel cognitively and affectively destabilised in regard to a number of issues addressed in Bashevis Singer’s story (gender roles, the nature of evil, loyalty, etc.). The students were destabilised when they were prompted to understand, embody and defend the point of view of a fictional character who often had very little

6  EMBEDDING THE CURRICULUM IN CULTURAL LITERACY: READING… 

167

in common with them, and in so doing, to question their own ideas in relation to these issues. These instances of destabilisation were preceded, and followed, by very structured opportunities for shared, collaborative reflection. This took place in the form of the character analysis itself through the questions that each group had to pose for their peers, the process of answering the questions asked by other groups and the discussions that ensued, always moderated by the teacher.

6.3   Assessment 2: Film Analysis Description In order to actively practice the transfer of skills at the heart of cultural literacy, the assessment consisted of analysing a film clip, five to eight minutes long, so that students could apply the analytical reflective skills used in Singer’s short story, to a different type of text. This assessment task was divided into three stages: preparation, presentation and post-presentation report. We used a range of film clips, including Talk to Her by Pedro Almodóvar (Cámara et al. 2003), Fire by Deepa Mehta (1998), Malena by Giuseppe Tornatore (Weinstein et al. 2001) and Babel by Alejandro González Iñárritu et al. (2006). All stages of the assessment incorporated reflection and destabilisation to different extents, however, during the preparatory stage there was an emphasis on destabilisation, whilst during the two latter stages, the emphasis was on reflection. For this assessment, the students remained in the same groups as for their initial character analysis presentations. The assessment was due in week 6, halfway through the semester, and it was worth 25% of the students’ overall mark. Preparation At first, the students were not told what film they would have to analyse for the assessment. Aiming to destabilise the students in both a visceral and cognitive way within a controlled environment, each group was given a clue that would lead them to the film they were to analyse four weeks before their presentations, providing them with ample time to prepare. The clue referred them to one of five different staff members in the School of Languages and Linguistics at Monash University, who in turn held the next clue. Staff in the School of Languages who offered to help with this had to follow specific instructions in dealing with the students: they were

168 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

only allowed to speak to the students in a language other than English. The options were French, Spanish, Japanese, Indonesian, Italian, Korean, German and Tagalog. Only if the students were able to communicate in the language in question, would they be given the clue, which in turn, led them to the film they would have to analyse for the assessment. This preparatory section to the assignment was not assessed. Instructions The assessment itself consisted of analysing a film clip, five to eight minutes long, without watching the rest of the film. Once the students knew what film clip they had been assigned, they had to analyse the characters, setting and dialogue in it, referencing the theory that had been covered up to that point in the semester (unconscious bias, Said’s idea of the Other and the purpose of classic tragedy according to Martha Nussbaum). Then they had to hypothesise what the rest of the film, in its entirety, was about. The aim of this was to prompt students to use their analytical skills to draw meaning when the necessary context to do so is unavailable, or only partially available, which happens all-too-often in situations of cultural uncertainty, thus exercising their cultural readability by approaching the film as a text. This prompted students to question not only what they knew, but as Tran (2015) would argue, more importantly, what they did not know and how they could bridge that gap through creative ignorance given the restrictions imposed on them by the task. This destabilising component of the assessment had to be carefully scaffolded, in order to avoid students becoming overwhelmed by uncertainty. To this effect, they were given very specific instructions for the film analysis. The instructions were: WARNING: Do not do any research on the film that you have been assigned for this task prior to watching the scene that you need to analyse. Do not watch the full film either. If there are members of your group who have already watched this film, their contribution should focus on the second, comparative half of the assignment, not the analysis. One of the aims of this task is to practice transferring your analytical skills from one medium to another, in this case, from text to film. Your group will analyse the scene that you have been assigned in relation to the three elements of text that we have been working on: character, dialogue, and setting. Based on what you can infer about these three elements of the scene,

6  EMBEDDING THE CURRICULUM IN CULTURAL LITERACY: READING… 

169

you need to come to preliminary conclusions about what the film is about. You will not be marked on whether your conclusions are correct or incorrect, but on the strength of your arguments, which must at all times be evidence based. Once you have come up with these preliminary conclusions, watch the film. Compare your preliminary conclusions against what the film is about, and see where you were “right” or “wrong”. Include this reflection in your presentation. Your presentation must be ten to twelve minutes long.

Presentation The presentations themselves were not destabilising. They were not meant to be, since the students had already had the opportunity to present to the class during their character analysis assessment in week 4, and understood the format of the presentations. After their group presentations, the students were asked very specific questions by their teacher to start prompting the shared, collaborative reflection process. The following were some of the questions asked: 1. Were they able to transfer the skills that had been previously applied to the texts we read in class to the film? What was different? 2. How did they adapt to that difference? 3. In relation to the film clips themselves, how did they deal with the uncertainty of not knowing what the film was about, and only being able to “read” one small part of it? 4. What meaning were they able to draw from that film clip? What insights could they gather? What did they assume was the topic and plot of the story? There were also questions related to the clues that the students were given, and their interaction with staff members who did not speak English. The questions were as follows: . What were their reactions? 1 2. How did they feel? 3. How did they deal with the problem?

170 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

4. What skills did they make use of to understand the situation? Were the critical and analytical skills they used in real life similar to the ones we learned in class when analysing the short stories? 5. Did they become aware of any personal biases through this assessment (e.g. the expectation that everyone should speak their language and that they should be understood when they need to be understood)?

Reflection For the previous assessment on character analysis, the students’ reflection was predominantly oral, in the form of discussions with their teammates, the Q&A sessions that followed their presentations, and group discussion with the rest of the class, as well as feedback from their teacher. The second assessment introduced written reflection to the course. This component of the assignment came after the presentations, in the form of a short, written piece designed to encourage students to further reflect on the experience of their task. The first question asked them to discuss at least two challenges that they encountered throughout the process of doing their assessment and the specific way in which they were able to overcome such challenges. The second question asked them to identify the skills they used in this process and to hypothesise how these skills may be useful to them in the future. Discussion During the “treasure hunt” part of the assignment, the students were surprised to find staff members at their university, in Australia, who refuse to communicate in English. For many of them, this is the first time they have come across that linguistic barrier, making it a destabilising experience. The students usually had to regroup and formulate a strategy to communicate with the staff member, either in the language in question (usually using some form of translation software) or through other means. This is a destabilising element of the activity that helps raise awareness of some of the cultural biases and expectations students may have. In a safe and controlled manner, the students are presented with a common, real-­ world problem: struggling to communicate with someone when trying to complete a task, knowing that there will be repercussions if the task is not

6  EMBEDDING THE CURRICULUM IN CULTURAL LITERACY: READING… 

171

completed. The language barrier that was curated as part of the preparation to the assignment rendered the nature of the challenge perfectly clear. However, students were asked to reflect on different manifestations of this problem. What happens when we work with colleagues with different disciplinary backgrounds and, consequently, employ different technical languages? How can we navigate these differences productively and effectively and learn to communicate with each other? What tools do we have at our disposal? What happens when we share the same language, but a different cultural background, and thus interpret certain ideas differently, such as what it means to be punctual? In a playful, entertaining and non-intimidating manner (which is the ideal context for embodied learning), this activity allowed students to experience destabilisation. It required that they make use of their creativity and ingenuity to resolve the clues involved, but beyond this, it prompted them to reflect and exercise their problemsolving skills in order to obtain the title of the film that they had to analyse for their assessment. Furthermore, the reflective components of the assessment, both as individual, written reflection, and as a collaborative, shared one, helped students to process the above instances of cognitive and affective destabilisation.

6.4   Assessment 3: Ethnographic Analysis Description For this final assignment, the students had to visit a place of worship assigned to them and “read” it using the three elements of analysis that had been covered in class throughout the semester: setting, dialogue and character. The aim of the assignment was to consolidate the critical and analytical skills developed throughout the semester, in a way that would allow students to transfer those skills to a real-life scenario. The assessment was worth 35% of the students’ overall mark for the semester, and it was due on their final class. Preparation In terms of the students’ skills and knowledge acquisition, the entire semester has been a preparation for this final assignment. To ensure the experience of destabilisation would take place in a controlled manner, each of the places of worship assigned to the students was visited by the teacher

172 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

prior to the assessment to ensure that they were appropriate and accessible. The teacher provided the students with all information required prior to attending their allocated place of worship (address, emails and telephone numbers, whom to contact once they got there, basic etiquette, etc.). Additionally, from the onset, the students were given the option to do an alternative assessment if any of them refused, on principle, to visit their assigned place of worship. In the weeks leading to their final assignment (weeks 8 and 9), students were introduced to the differences between emic and etic field research and encouraged to discuss these ideas in their reflection and presentation. Week 8 introduced a preparatory activity for this assignment. This is one of the OSL exercises described in Chap. 5, “A Long Short Walk”, which requires students to spend 45 minutes on a walk that would usually take 15 and reflect on what they observe by slowing the pace. The seminar for this week focuses on critical analyses of setting in literature. This is the second time in the semester that students work on analysing setting (the first is in week 5, prior to their film analysis). Here, students are required to engage with setting in an embodied manner, transferring their critical and analytical skills to their environment and community. This serves as preparation for the real-life analysis that takes place as part of their ethnographic analysis. Instructions Part 1 The student groups for this task were the same as for the previous two assessments. Each group had to visit the place of worship assigned to them by their teacher (the options were a Buddhist temple, a Hindu temple, a synagogue, a mosque and a Greek Orthodox Church.) As with assessment 2, where students were specifically instructed not to research the film prior to watching the clip, the students were asked to refrain from doing any research on their assigned place of worship prior to their visit. Once again, the purpose of this was to make the experience as destabilising as possible, within a controlled setting. If a student in a group had a prior affiliation to their assigned place of worship, they were asked to refrain from sharing their knowledge with the rest of the group until the second part of the assignment.

6  EMBEDDING THE CURRICULUM IN CULTURAL LITERACY: READING… 

173

The aim of the exercise was for the students to visit the place of worship that they were allocated and “read” it and interpret it. This “reading” had to be done using setting, dialogue and character as the basis of their analysis. Based on what they could infer from their reading of these three elements, students had to reach preliminary conclusions about the cultural scenario that they had been assigned. The instructions asked students to answer three very specific questions: . What meaning can your group draw from this cultural scenario? 1 2. What is happening? 3. Why are people doing what they are doing? 4. What personal biases do you bring into your reading of this situation? Part 2 The reflection process came mostly during this second part of the assessment, as well as the question and answer session at the end of the group presentations, and through the students’ written pieces. The second part of the task prior to the presentation was to do basic research on their assigned place of worship. Once their preliminary conclusions were written, the students needed to do research on their assigned place of worship and compare their preliminary conclusions against their research, to see how accurate their preliminary conclusions had been. This comparison had to be included in their presentation. If there were members in the group who were familiar with the place of worship assigned, their knowledge would be applied to this second, comparative part of the assessment and not the initial analysis. The students were instructed to deliver a traditional, straightforward class presentation divided in three parts. During the first part of the presentation, students shared their initial interpretation of their allocated place of worship, discussing their analysis of setting, character and dialogue. This part of the presentation included the groups’ preliminary conclusions and explained the arguments behind them. During the second part of the presentation, students contrasted their preliminary conclusions with their latter research. The second part included questions by the teacher that would help students to further ponder on the experience. Did they initially interpret the setting, dialogue and character of their assigned place of worship correctly? If that was not the case, what did they misinterpret? How can these analytical and interpretative processes be improved

174 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

upon in the future? The third part of the presentation was a collaborative group reflection and discussion. Here, other groups asked questions to their peers, with the aim of encouraging them to further reflect on the experience (García Ochoa 2016). Written Reflection The written reflection for this assessment was more substantial than the previous one. It carried more weight within the assessment and was twice the prescribed word length. The students were asked to provide a more in-depth analysis of their experience. Their reflection had to discuss two challenges that they faced during the assessment and explain how they addressed such challenges and how they could employ the skills and knowledge learned as part of this experience in the future. In addition, they had to answer the following questions: 1. What has this assignment taught you in relation to the idea of the foreign? 2. Has your perception of this idea changed throughout the semester? How so? 3. How may this knowledge be applied in your everyday life?

Discussion The ethnographic analysis represents the culmination of the cumulative skills and knowledge of cultural literacy that the students learn throughout the semester. It required them to engage with a real-life scenario, to apply the material and skills that were covered throughout the semester and to be aware of their own biases when analysing a new, unfamiliar situation. For this assessment, the main instance of multidimensional destabilisation was the experience of going to an unknown place of worship, where students were immersed in a completely unfamiliar scenario. The assessment elaborated on the film analysis assignment where students were asked to reach preliminary conclusions on what the film was about based on a short clip. For this assignment, further exercising their cultural readability, students had to provide more nuanced answers to draw meaning from an unfamiliar, real-life situation. As with the film analysis, the students were told that they would not be marked on whether their preliminary

6  EMBEDDING THE CURRICULUM IN CULTURAL LITERACY: READING… 

175

conclusions were correct or incorrect, but on the strength of their arguments, which must at all times be evidence based. Thus, this assessment represented the culmination of one of the main aims of the course, which was the successful transfer of the analytical and interpretative skills learned in the classroom from one medium to another. As Chaps. 5 and 6 show, cultural literacy in Higher Education can be taught in a variety of ways. It can be at the centre of the curriculum in terms of subject matter, or it can be embedded as an approach that informs a curriculum with a different subject matter, or disciplinary background. In the case of Reading Across Cultures, the students’ individual, written reflections, as well as the collaborative group reflections that took place in class, showed a progressive understanding throughout the semester of the transferability of skills and knowledge associated with cultural literacy, that lay the foundations for better understanding and navigate cultural differences in their lives.

References Achebe, C. (2006). Dead Men’s Path. In C. H. Bohner & L. Grant (Eds.), Short Fiction: Classic and Contemporary (6th ed., pp. 478–480). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall. Cámara, J., Grandinetti, D., Watling, L., Flores, R., Fuentes, M., Chaplin, G., & Pathé Distribution Limited. (2003). Hable con ella Talk to Her. England: Pathé [distributor]. Campbell, J. (2008). The Hero with a Thousand Faces (3rd ed.). Novato, CA: New World Library. Colvin, S. (2017). Literature as more than a window: building readers’ empathy and social capacity through exposure to diverse literature. Voice of Youth Advocates, 39(6), 24–29. Damrosch, D. (2003). What is world literature? World Literature Today, 77(1), 9–14. https://doi.org/10.2307/40157771 García Ochoa, G. (2016). Reading across Cultures: ‘Self-Localization’ in the Higher Education Curriculum. The Journal of Internationalization and Localization, 3(2), 165–181. Iñárritu, A.G. et al., 2006. Babel (Movie 2006), Informit, Melbourne (Vic.). Mehta, D., Azmi, S., Das, N., Kharbanda, K., & Chowdhry, R. (1998). Trial Fire Films, New Yorker Video. In: Fire (Collectors ed., Letterboxed.). New York, NY: Zeitgeist Films: New Yorker Video. Nikolajeva, M. (2014). Reading for Learning: Cognitive Approaches to Children’s Literature. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Press.

176 

G. GARCÍA OCHOA AND S. MCDONALD

Said, E. W. (1995). Orientalism. London: Penguin. Sharifian, F. (2011). Cultural Conceptualisations and Language: Theoretical Framework and Applications. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Pub. Co.. Singer, I. B. (2006). Gimpel the Fool. In C. H. Bohner & L. Grant (Eds.), Short Fiction: Classic and Contemporary (6th ed., pp.  1035–1044). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall. Tran, L. (2015). Internationalising the Student Experience and Cosmopolitan Learning: Theoretical Concepts and Examples of Practice from the VET Sector. Paper presented at the Learning and Teaching for a Globalised World: Internationalisation of the Curriculum SIG Forum 2015, Melbourne. Tschida, C. M., Ryan, C. L., & Ticknor, A. S. (2014). Building on Windows and Mirrors: Encouraging the Disruption of ‘Single Stories’ through Children’s Literature. Journal of Children’s Literature, 40(1), 28–39. Venuti, L. (1995). The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London and New York: Routledge. Weinstein, H., Bernasconi, C., Tornatore, G., Bellucci, M., Sulfaro, G., Frederico, L., …, Miramax Home Entertainment. (2001). Malena (Widescreen Version.). United States: Miramax Home Entertainment : distributed by Buena Vista Home Entertainment.



Conclusion

When we began to write this book, the world was at the apex of global mobility. Never at any point in history had so many people moved about the globe with such ease. Movement was occurring for all manner of reasons, migration both forced and voluntary, tourism was more accessible to a greater number of people, the economies of the world were propelled forward by movements of goods and people in ways that demonstrated the acceleration of globalisation over the last century. In Higher Education this has been marked by the transnational nature of education and the need to prepare students to prosper in environments that were already and would continue to be transcultural, transnational and transdisciplinary. However, as we sit to write this conclusion, the very last act of completing this book, it is July 2020. In Melbourne, Australia, we have just gone into a second period of lockdown due to the global pandemic characterised by the spread of the novel coronavirus that we all refer to as Covid-19. Just in the last 24  hours, the United States has registered 60,000 new cases and topped 3,000,000 since the pandemic began. In Brazil and India, numbers are rising fast and are among the nations that jockey for a very much unwanted first place on the world ranking of cases and deaths. Across Europe restrictions begin to ease as both Italy and Spain in particular cautiously come out of the devastation of what we all hope was the first and only wave of the virus. In the United Kingdom, the struggle for containment continues as a debate rages around sending children back to

© The Author(s) 2020 G. García Ochoa, S. McDonald, Cultural Literacy and Empathy in Education Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59904-1

177

178 

CONCLUSION

school. In China, where the virus appears to have originated, they seem to be well on the road to recovery, but the news is populated with reports of localised outbreaks which send areas into immediate lockdown. It is not hyperbolic to say that there is no place on the planet that has not been touched by this pandemic. The unprecedented movement of people we mention above feels like it has come to a grinding halt. While, of course, there is still movement of people around the globe, this has diminished considerably. This has impacted many sectors and Higher Education in particular has immediately felt the impacts of the limitations on global movements and the need to change the experience of Higher Education for all our students. So, does our claim for the critical nature of cultural literacy as a twenty-­ first-­century skill still hold in the ways we have outlined in the preceding chapters? We would argue that not only does it hold it becomes of increasing importance as we see flickers of nationalistic fervour rise as people view those who are different, those who are ‘outsiders’ with increasing fear. Mobility still exists but has moved to virtual platforms and more than ever we have to work harder to understand, to ‘read’ difference. Unfamiliar situations abound, destabilisation is thrust upon us and it has never been more essential to develop ways of navigating the unknown. Throughout the preceding chapters we have argued for the development of cultural literacy as a critical competency for learners’ professional and personal development. Our definition and application of cultural literacy has a purpose and methodology far removed from the initial coining of this term by E. D. Hirsch in the late 1980s; it is decidedly not about asserting dominance or privileging a particular cultural model, in the case of Hirsch, Western culture (mostly American) in its varying forms. While our use of cultural literacy borrows from, and is closely aligned to, the definition of cultural literacy proposed by the Cultural Literacy in Europe Today group, led by Naomi Segal, we have sought to go beyond theorising the applicability of literacy and cultural studies skills and develop a practice of cultural literacy founded on experiences of destabilisation followed by a process of reflection to develop an ability to ‘read’ and draw meaning from the unknown. The process of meaning-making in cultural literacy is not solely about navigating and understanding the unknown, it also allows individuals to better understand what is presumed to be known. That is, developing cultural literacy necessitates a better understanding of self, our beliefs, frameworks of understanding and the limitations inherent in these.

 CONCLUSION 

179

Through recognising these limitations, we are able to move to a state of what Tran (2015) refers to as agentive ignorance. The potential for transformation offered by this shift in understanding is closely linked to the development of empathy. While literature and literary studies in particular have a contentious relationship with empathy, for cultural literacy the link between the two is still useful to consider. The degree to which literature fosters or builds empathy in the reader raises such questions as does the experience of other places or of an ‘other’ through the realm of literature create empathy where it didn’t exist before? Or does it simply develop and orient an individual’s existing empathetic capacity? For the purposes of cultural literacy, our interest lies to a greater degree with the awareness of empathy—that is, the ways in which engagement with literature, and the application of ‘reading’ skills across a range of cultural artefacts, makes a learner aware of their own empathy and to understand how that is triggered and what perception and knowledge shapes that empathy. This awareness more than any attempt to quantify literature’s role as a causal factor in the development of empathy positions the learner to engage openly and respectfully with the unknown. In developing cultural literacy in the Higher Education context, one of the key challenges is how we go about embedding cultural literacy in the curriculum so students are exposed to the foundational skills necessary to ‘read’ cultural artefacts. In this respect the development of a range of techniques and experiences that both offer a relevant and relatable engagement is key. Inherent in these experiences is an opportunity for students to experience, to a greater or lesser degree, destabilisation. As we have asserted, destabilisation is a critical component of the process of learning in our model of cultural literacy. It is through destabilisation that students are prompted to question their existing understandings and frames of knowledge. If a learner always remains in a position of comfort, then it is easy never to question one’s world view, sense of self or comprehension of another. While of course most of us have a natural capacity for sympathy, to build empathy, as we have defined it, requires us to understand different perspectives and the cognitive/affective dimensions of such perspectives. In making a culturally literate approach to the world, part of a person’s default method for engagement with new people, information, cultures and world views and their ability to tolerate and productively cope with uncertainty is significantly increased. The role of reflection that comes post destabilisation is where the skills of a culturally literate individual can be consolidated, through a critical,

180 

CONCLUSION

self-aware reflection on the moment or period of destabilisation that enables truly transformative learning to occur. As we have argued, for us there is no ideal timeframe on this learning outcome; in fact, as students integrate new learning into their frameworks of knowing, this has the opportunity to spur action in response to learning. While we do not believe in a hierarchy of importance in terms of the type of action that results from learning, it can bring about a shift in perception that opens the learner to new experiences from which to continue to learn or it may be a more marked action that results in change that has direct (positive) impact on how an individual acts or how they contribute to the broader community of which they are a part. The resulting action once again loops our model of applied cultural literacy back to the notion of ‘complex’ compassion and all that this offers. One of the key questions about the application of cultural literacy in the education sector that needs further consideration is the scalability of the approach. As we have shown, in the Higher Education context the development of these techniques across subjects and courses is relatively easy to facilitate. However, the primary focus of the deployment of these skills has been across fields in the Humanities and Social Sciences, which some may argue have a natural preoccupation and concern with developing the types of skill sets that we frame as cultural literacy. It is our contention that these skill sets can also be deployed in robust and integrated ways across any of the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines, as well as Business and Law, to mention only a few. The need to productively navigate the unfamiliar as well as the pressing need to work in transnational and transdisciplinary teams on some of the world’s most pressing issues would seem to make obvious the requirement for graduates to be culturally literate individuals who can maximise and create meaningful outcomes from interactions with other disciplines, cultures and ways of approaching problems and creating solutions. Beyond the Higher Education context, we have shown an example of how ‘organic’ cultural literacy can be profoundly impactful in the secondary education sector. The development of a greater number of resources and an awareness among educators and administrators of what cultural literacy is and how it can be applied has the potential to influence already existing practices in the study of literature in high schools and to shape these practices to maximise the development of cultural literacy in students. We would even suggest that in the primary sector there are opportunities to integrate age-appropriate practices that begin to foster a culturally literate approach

 CONCLUSION 

181

to engaging with the world. This is not the focus of our research, but fostering awareness of this in primary educators, who are trained in tertiary institutions, opens the door to the potential for embedding cultural literacy across an individual’s engagement in education across their lifespan. Of course, key to all of the above are the educators themselves. Often the techniques and approaches that work best to foster the development of cultural literacy in a classroom environment also require a shift in understanding of the fundamental role of the educator. While for many years the notion of the ‘sage on the stage’ has been rejected as a model of educational engagement, in reality most educators in the tertiary context have remained at the centre of disciplinary knowledge, at least as far as their classroom engagement is concerned. The displacing of this primacy is a key step for staff to undergo their own processes of destabilisation and reflection in order to foster an openness to learning with and from their students. That is by no means to say that disciplinary expertise should be abandoned or is unimportant, rather this expertise can be brought to bear on a range of issues and contexts and in doing so the greatest potential for impact and new knowledge comes from successfully navigating and creating meaning from new, hitherto unfamiliar or unknown, information and contexts. Independent of the profound changes and shifts being experienced across stage in 2020, there is no doubt that for our graduates to be the effective global citizens Higher Education aims to produce, their ability to move effectively across boundaries of discipline, culture and geography and the openness with which they do this will have a profound effect on their professional and personal trajectories. The skills of cultural literacy fostered during the Higher Education experience of our students help develop in them a way of acting in the world, and upon the world, in meaningful ways.

Index

A Acculturation, 5 Afghanistan, 69, 81, 84, 87, 88, 92, 95, 97, 99, 103, 112, 113 Australian Government Department of Immigration & Border Protection, 133 Department of Migration & Ethnic Affairs, Refugees and Special Programmes Branch, 150 B Boyd and Fales Model, 56 C Canon formation, 5 Casey, Emma, 144, 145, 148–153, 155–157 Circle of concern, 22, 30, 38–39, 110, 113, 152, 157 Compassion, 21, 27, 28, 30–33, 38, 39

complex compassion, 17, 22, 30, 31, 56, 110, 152, 157, 180 Core Curriculum, 7 Cranbourne Secondary College, 18, 65, 69, 70, 70n1, 79–83, 86, 87, 89–91, 91n4, 94–97, 99, 101, 102n5, 108–110, 112, 113, 114n6, 115, 116, 157 Critical consciousness, 60 Cultural Competence Cultural Competence Specialisation, 161, 162 cultural intelligence (CQ), 11 Cultural literacy Cultural Literacy in Europe Biennial Conference, 126, 131, 133, 136 Cultural Literacy in Europe Forum, 8, 10, 11, 14 culturally literate individual, 14, 15, 51, 53, 54, 62, 179, 180 Cultural theory, 11 Culture, American, 4 Culture wars, 2

© The Author(s) 2020 G. García Ochoa, S. McDonald, Cultural Literacy and Empathy in Education Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59904-1

183

184 

INDEX

D Decentring of self, 9, 10, 14 Destabilisation, 10, 14, 16–18, 28, 47–65, 69, 82–91, 94, 96, 97, 111, 124, 125, 130–133, 135, 137, 147, 162, 165–167, 171, 174, 178–181 Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity, 13 Dewey, John, 52–57 Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, 6 Discourse analysis, 11 E Education, U.S. System, 2 Educator, 18, 37, 48, 54, 58, 60, 62–65, 80, 96, 97, 101, 124, 131, 140, 180, 181 Embodied practice, 58 Empathy affective empathy, 25 cognitive empathy, 25 innate empathy, 34, 153 literary empathy, 28, 29, 100, 149, 166 narrative empathy, 17, 22, 28–30, 34, 101, 102n5, 105, 110, 149, 150, 153, 166 English language English as Second Language (ESL), 92–94, 97, 101, 103, 107 Freemont Intensive English Centre, 78, 79 Ethnocentrism, 131 Ethnorelativism, 14, 15 European Cooperation for Science and Technology (COST), 8 European Science Foundation (ESF), 8 Experiential learning, 11, 16–18, 47, 49, 52–60, 137, 162

G Gibbs Reflective Cycle, 55 Gillard, Julia, 74, 75 Global Immersion Guarantee, 126, 126n1, 131 Group contract, 139 H Hazara, 70, 72, 76, 79, 83, 84, 88, 93, 95–97, 101, 103, 109, 110 See also Immigration Hirsch, E. D., 2–8, 10, 12, 33, 63, 178 Huggard, R., 70, 70n1, 79–82, 92–108, 110, 115, 116 I I Am Malala, 155 Identity, Forms of, 129, 134 Imaginative displacement, 36 Immigration, 73, 142, 145 Immigration Restrictions Act 1901, 73 Institute for Literary Research, Polish Academy of Sciences, 133 Intercultural communication theory, 10 Intercultural competence theory (ICC), 11 Interculturality, 9 Intercultural training, 15 Interdisciplinarity, 3, 9, 140 International Studies, 140, 144 Irony, 26 Islamophobia, 71 K Keene, Suzanne, 22, 24, 27–29, 32–34, 36, 48, 105, 143, 149, 153, 166

 INDEX 

Kite Runner, The, 155 Knowledge, Openness to, 3 Kolb, David, 16, 51, 52, 54, 55, 57 L Leadership for Social Change (LSC), 18, 129, 139–146, 151, 153 Linguistics, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, 83, 85, 141, 163, 167, 170 List, The (Dictionary of Cultural Literacy), 6 Literacy, 2–4, 6, 8, 17, 178 the club (literacy), 4 Literary and Cultural Studies (LCS), 8–10, 12, 61–63 Literary practice, 10–11 M Malaysian government, 75 Malaysian solution, 70, 75 Manus Island, 74 Mazari, Najaf, 18, 69, 70, 92, 93, 97, 101–107, 102n5, 109, 113 Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Shariff, The, 18, 69, 70, 91–96, 99, 102n5, 110, 115 Minorities, 3–5, 30, 35, 112 Mirror/Window, 34–37, 106, 107, 113 Monash University, 18, 123, 126, 126n1, 127, 129, 131, 132, 134, 136, 139–141, 161, 162, 167 Multiculturalism, 5, 73, 146 MultiPride, 115, 116 Murphy, Camille, 144, 145, 148–157 N Narratives, 17, 22, 24–30, 32–37, 54, 58, 62, 69, 96, 100, 101, 102n5, 105–107, 110, 112, 113, 114n6, 127, 142, 145, 148–153, 157, 166

185

Nationalism, 5 Nauru, 72, 74, 75 Noor Foundation, 90 Nussbaum, Martha, 17, 22, 23, 25, 27, 29–33, 36–39, 56, 110, 152, 168 O One Thousand Splendid Suns, 155 Open space learning (OSL), 11, 15, 47, 50, 51, 123, 124, 145, 146, 162, 163, 166, 172 P Pacific Islands, 80–82 Pacific Solution, 70, 72, 74 Pedagogy, 22, 51, 70, 126 Pennsylvania State University, 126, 131–133, 136 Personality traits, 25 Political and cultural theory, 11 Polyhood, 81, 82, 92, 115, 116 Postcolonial studies, 11 PowerPoint presentation, 129–130 Progressiveness, 2 R Radivo, Danielle, 70, 70n1, 81, 82, 92, 93, 97, 98, 100, 101, 103–105, 107 Ransom, 155 Reagan, Ronald, 2 Reflection-in/on-action, 48, 54, 56, 57, 163 Reflective practice, 11, 52, 54–62 Refugee Action Support (RAS), 78, 79 See also Refugees Refugee and Humanitarian Program, 83

186 

INDEX

Refugees, 18, 39, 56, 69–84, 90, 92–95, 97, 99–103, 102n5, 105, 107–110, 112–114, 116, 142–157 Southern Migrant Refugee Centre, 151 Reluctant Fundamentalist, The, 156 RMET test, 25, 26 Rudd, Kevin, 74, 75 S Safa, Shabnam, 65, 70, 71, 83–91, 95, 108, 110–115, 114n6 Schirato, T., 8, 10, 11, 16 Scholes, Robert, 7 Schön, Donald, 48, 52, 54–57, 163 Segal, Naomi, 8–10, 14, 163, 178 Semiotics, 10, 11, 127, 136, 163 Sociolinguistics, 11 Sociology, 12 Special Interest Group in Higher Education, 9 Spivak, Gayatri, 10 Status Workshop, 134–136 Stefanovic, Ema, 70, 89, 108–110, 113, 116, 152, 157 Structured reflection, 15, 22, 148 Subjectivity, 35, 101, 104, 106, 109, 110, 155 Sudanese Australian Integrated Learning Programme, 151

T Tableau, 133–134 Tampa affair, 70, 72, 74 Terrorism, 71, 77 Theory Building, 127–129 Theory of mind (TOM), 25, 26 Transportation theory, 25 U UN Alliance of Civilizations– Education First, 90 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 71, 72, 146 US Peace Corps, 13 V Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE), 80, 81, 89, 92–97, 99, 100, 104 W Warwick University, 127, 129, 134 Western culture, 10, 178 White Australia Policy, 73 World literature World Literature Studies, 5–6 Y Yell, S., 8, 10, 11, 16, 163 Yoni test, 26