Intercultural learning for happiness

When times become hectic, chaotic, when life tests you, when you´re afraid or anguished or simply tired, what becomes the most important thing in life? Happy moments do, don´t they?

Our society has trained us with an idea of success that makes us feel empty and alienated. This is why so many people seem to turn to alternative disciplines such as yoga (while of course their ancient wisdom and the contact with spirituality inherent in these disciplines needs to be fully acknowledged), meditation, and other ways to think of that transcending us, apart from religions.

Language and intercultural learning can also be much more than a means to an end, an instrumental purpose, and become something meaningful and transcendental. But that will depend of the quality of the bonds we can build in the learning process, the balance between cooperative and competitive that we create in the classroom/ or outside it if we do outdoor learning. It will depend on the amount of laughter and sharing, of kindness and learning to listen to each other, and also the ability to express anger, frustration, conflict in a way that is constructive not destructive. At the end of the day diversity and inclusion are about that, about dealing with our frustrations in the process too, allowing all that to surface and deal with that in a way that is powerful and empowering to all.

There was a series that became iconic in the 90s and of which our classrooms have been filled throughout time. Coincidentally, it was its 25th anniversary this week. We are talking about Friends, a story of five friends that became almost family, whose freshness and solidarity became what all of us viewers wanted to find in people. One of their protagonists said Friends would never happen at this time with so many screens in front of us, and no idle time to spare. Series such as Years and Years seem to be more iconic of these times, tragic yet hopeful and with a powerful idea of humanity and transcendence too.

If our classrooms can capture the joy and the fear, the hope and the despair of humanity and put it together in activities which can highlight the joy, while learning to understand all that that is different, while we learn languages, our work is certainly done.

(Andrea Assenti del Rio. Home intercultural learning www.homeintercultural.com.ar Instagram @homeintercultural)