Lessons Learned: Cultural Appropriation and Language Education

I am a white, middle-aged, Anglo male who was born and raised in an affluent country. As such, perhaps I am not the most qualified person to be writing about cultural appropriation. However, since cultural appropriation has been such a sensitive issue recently, I can’t help but think about its implications in education and, specifically, in foreign language teaching. 

As a student of Adult Education, I was lucky to have had the opportunity to participate in a course conducted by a professor who was also a Miꞌkmaq shaman. The idea was to introduce First Nations pedagogical practices and traditions to a group of “Eurocentric” Canadian graduate students and, for the most part, it was fascinating.

However, having had many years to reflect on the experience, one issue that the professor focussed on keeps coming back – this is the idea of “cultural appropriation”. 

Our professor was not a fan of “Euro-centricism”. She rightly believed that, as European invaders conquered foreign lands, they destroyed the unique knowledge that the indigenous peoples had built up over millennia while oppressing the people under European and Judeo-Christian cultural values. 

Of course, most of us can probably agree that this is a tragedy, and that the history of the world is rife with such loss and injustice.

She then went on to introduce a traditional method of talking through complex issues and resolving conflict within North American aboriginal communities. The “Talking Circle” is a process in which elders, along with individuals involved in a dispute, resolve problems in a very democratic and non-confrontational way. The rules are simple and firm – an object is passed from person to person around the circle, always in the same direction. Only the participant holding the object may speak, and they may speak as long or as little as they please. Participants are not permitted to make comments or ask questions directed at others in the circle when they are speaking. The circle continues until the issue has been resolved by unanimous agreement and when no one has anything else to add.

I could immediately see potential applications in language teaching. However, immediately after introducing the technique, the professor then instructed us never to use the Talking Circle, as it is a sacred ritual.

I objected, “Do you mean that we are learning about methodologies that we cannot put into practice? Why are we here then?”

The fact is that, since the dawn of time, people have been colonizing lands that belong to other people, looting their property, or, worse yet, annihilating their cultures and collective knowledge. Obviously, today, most of us regard this sort of behaviour as wrong but, in the global village in which we live, there must be a difference between invading a culture and oppressing its people as opposed to borrowing good ideas that add to the greater global community’s wealth of knowledge.

I believe that learning from different cultures makes us all richer, so whether we are adopting and adapting food, clothing, ideas, behaviours, or pedagogical methodologies, it is much better to learn from other cultures than it is to oppress or destroy them. 

In fact, if there is any chance that true globalization is a possible future outcome, it may be the best thing that we can do to preserve their knowledge.

A more detailed description of the Talking Circle activity can be found here in the Teachwise Resource library: