LOOKING BACK AT CULTURA
ON THE OCCASION OF THE CULTURA CONFERENCE AT MIT
OCTOBER 12-13, 2007

MARKING THE TENTH ANNIVERSARY OF CULTURA

PETER C. PATRIKIS
THE WINSTON CHURCHILL FOUNDATION OF THE UNITED STATES

I welcome this occasion to look back at the Cultura project and to look forward to its future avatars. I have had the pleasure, and I should really say the privilege, of being tangentially involved in the Cultura right from its inception and of having had the opportunity to watch the collaborative work of Gilberte Furstenberg, Sabine Levet, and Shoggy Waryn from the early formulation of this major project. When I was at the Consortium for Language Teaching and Learning, Cultura received the first of its many grants. What Gilberte, Sabine, and Shoggy may not know is that I sat on the NEH panel that reviewed and funded a Cultura’s proposal. Not everyone on the panel quite understood the import of this project, but I explained with the subtlety of a sledgehammer that this was the foreign language pro-ject par excellence. I have enjoyed many other opportunities of a close engage-ment with Cultura, so I feel like one of those admiring relatives (perhaps a very distant great uncle) who can take no credit but who nonetheless takes enormous pride in what Cultura has become.

Cultura can be considered one of the premier applications of computer and Internet technology to the foreign language teaching and learning, but what we also have to recognize is that technology does not a great teacher make. It is the great teacher who makes the best use of technology. As an illustration, I would like to step back before Cultura, before Dans un quartier de Paris and before the completion of A la rencontre de Philippe to look at the pre-Internet, pre-computer classroom practice of Gilberte.

Some twenty years ago, I attended an annual meeting of the Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages and sat in on a presentation that Gilberte, whom I did not yet know well, made to a group of high school and college French teachers. The technological sophistication of the presentation rested with one projector used to display the transparencies of two Volvo advertisements. The car advertisements had been cut out from magazines, another low-tech achievement: one in French, the other in English. Gilberte asked the assembled teachers to read the American advertisement first and to pick out what they thought might be the salient features. To no one’s surprise everyone identified the words like “safety,” “family,” “protection,” “comfort,” “steel-cage,” and other terms promoting that automobile’s reputation for solidity and safety. The French ad looked much the same, having precisely the same photograph and the same type face but a slightly longer text. This time when the teachers were asked to identify the prominent terms they identified the words “luxe,” “élégance,” “confort,” “cuir” (luxury, elegance, comfort, leather). After reading the American and the French texts, the group began to contrast and compare the values of American and French Volvo consumers, with Gilberte constantly cautioning everyone not to lapse into national stereotypes and reminding them that it was an advertisement company that was seeking to appeal to what it considered to be the authentic local values of its audience.

As an aside, I checked the current Volvo France Web site and discovered that it is now almost a clone of the American site with its emphasis on safety. Yet the appeal of the car is not identical. Where the American site directs you to pages on safety, quality, environment, design, excitement, the French site has two noteworthy differences, when it mentions sécurité, qualité, environnement, design, plaisir (safety, quality, environment, design, pleasure). Clearly the Académie française has not banned the English word “design.” And I shall leave for your imagination and reflection why Americans seek excitement while the French seek “plaisir.”

This indulgence in anecdote seem like the mere rehearsal of ancient history and practice, but there, in a single brief exercise, were all the seeds of the extraordinary project that Cultura and its offspring would become. Note that such an exercise does not require, at the outset, reading skills of a high order, in the sense that it does not demand a deep knowledge of complicated syntax, morphology, and vocabulary. All the reader has to do is to spot nouns, verbs, or adjectives that might appear frequently or that might for one reason or another stand out. Such an activity is not what is commonly referred to as “pre-reading,” but it is effectively a kind of pre-reading. At the same time, this exercise is not superficial — it is not “skimming for meaning.” Instead, it represents an introduction to reading between the lines, the higher order activity that is central to Cultura. It asks the reader to interpret, not simply to process. It asks the student to think, not simply to parrot back a definition or a restatement. From the very beginning we recognize the cen-trality of reading to foreign language learning, the centrality of identifying cultural norms, the centrality of reflecting upon similarity and difference, the centrality of formulating hypotheses, and the centrality of testing and reformulating those hypotheses. It is, wonderfully, at one and the same time, very simple and very complex. Right from the very beginning, Gilberte was going to the heart of things, avoiding the banality and outright vacuity of so much elementary and intermediate foreign language instruction.

Any introductory text in anthropology informs us that culture is a social construct, and it is useful to remind ourselves that Cultura is, in different and multiple ways, a social construct. In the first sense, it is the collaborative construction of three individuals, all of whom brought and continue to bring different backgrounds, concepts, and interests to their own uses of Cultura. Now, Cultura has been adopted and adapted in other colleges and universities it has become a broader construction. It has created a wider international community.

Second, Cultura reconstructs itself constantly in every class here and abroad; each class in each country refashions itself within and by its own conversations, and each class here and abroad refashions itself in its conversation with its international partners. The social construct of Cultura is diachronic and synchronic. The Cul-tura Archives represent its history (for the archives of exchanges in all languages see http://cultura.mit.edu/xoops/modules/smartsection/category.php?categoryid=11 ), and each class recreates its own history. At the same time, the current elabora-tions of Cultura represent a globalization of Cultura that depends on new developments and not on the faithful transmission or literal copies of the original MIT text.

To say that Cultura is a social construct, however, does not take into account one of its principal achievements. The class that works together on Cultura or Cultura-like projects is a different phenomenon from other foreign language classes: there is an engagement in issues, an attention to the matter at hand, and a willingness to take risks that one does not often see elsewhere, no matter how wonderful the text or the film under consideration. In some sense, the class is the matter at hand, and all the students want a stake in it.

Elsewhere I have written about what I call dubious dichotomies (language and con-tent, learning and acquisition, achievement and proficiency, teacher-centered and learner-centered, and the many other polarities for which the field of foreign languages seems to have a hyperbolic affection), not because one cannot distinguish between this or that word — of course one can — but because these dubious dichotomies are often derive merely from trends and because they belong more to the politics of foreign language acquisition than to heuristics. Cultura has demon-strated the hollowness of many such distinctions. Take, for example, the dichotomy of teacher-centered and learner-centered. I do not believe that that dichotomy does justice to what is an authentic community of learning, to a room where no one has all the answers and where everyone can come up with new questions. Analo-gously, the dichotomy of language and content is not useful, because language without content is just grammatical tables and because content without language is an impossibility. The Cultura model is language throughout and content from the beginning in a seamless manner. Language and content are the obverse and reverse of the same coin. That same coin is the cross-cultural exchange.

There are other fundamental and radical aspects of the Cultura project to which I would like, in looking back, to draw your attention.

First, Cultura has redefined what a foreign language classroom can be for the student and for the teacher. Over the years, I have observed Cultura classes and have read the Web-based materials, and I have noticed something remarkable. Every language teacher knows all too well the problems of motivating students to respond. At times every teacher has probably wanted to wring a student’s neck and yell “Say something for heaven’s sake!” Without pandering to the narcissism of Generation X, Y, or Z, Cultura also avoids the trap of solipsism by forging a new community in the classroom each time the class meets. I would go so far as to say that Cultura has redefined responsibility, so that the word responsibility substantiates its double meanings of the intellectual ability to provide an answer and the ethical duty to provide an answer.

Second, Cultura is not a curriculum. It does not dictate a course and has been used for periods of class time varying from a month to an entire semester.

Third, Cultura is not a methodology, although it has implicit methodologies.

Fourth, Cultura is not a textbook, although it can be used as a collection of curricular materials. Indeed, Cultura goes very much against the grain of the textbook publishing industry that dominates and controls so much foreign language education. Cultura is the constant creation of new texts and new commentaries on those texts and the reading and re-reading of new and old texts. Despite the fact that all three originators are French and come out of the French educational system, Cultura is more than the practice of explication de texte applied to non-literary texts. (I used to think that it was as simple as that.) Cultura is in essence a modernized Talmudic exercise with layers of text and commentary building upon one another and creating new opportunities for other new texts and commentaries. Borges would feel at home in this labyrinth. After the Cultura Conference Gilberte Furstenberg brought to my attention a commentary on the Web that recognizes the radical revision of the textbook through student communication: see http://www.futureofthebook.org/next/text/2006/04/cultura_a_glimpse_at_the_futur_1.html.

And fifth, Cultura has created a mountain of data waiting to be explored by anthropologists, sociolinguists, and other specialists.
The Modern Language Association has recently issued the report of the Ad Hoc Committee on Foreign Languages http://www.mla.org/flreport. (A summary of the report will appear in the upcoming issues of Perspectives.) This report is unusual for the directness with which it addresses many issues and for the clarity with which it sketches new directions”: it proposes the major transformation of aca-demic programs. The report urges that it is high time to move beyond the standard configuration of lower-level “language courses,” which are presumed by some be-nighted colleagues not to have “content,” and upper-level literature courses, which pay attention solely to the language of the assigned texts and little attention to the language of the students. Yes, admittedly, many departments have beyond the lan-guage and literature model and have courses in film, non-canonical literature, and “culture,” with an uppercase or lowercase C, but many of those new offerings do little better than the literature courses they replace or augment in addressing the language development of the students. The report calls for a unified language curriculum addressees the intellectual needs of students at all levels of instruction and that consciously seeks to deepen the broaden students’ knowledge and use of all aspects of the language being studied.

That report speaks of moving beyond a configuration that has outlived its time and place to models that place trans-lingual and trans-cultural competence as the goals. In this context, “trans-lingual” means that the model is no longer the impossible ideal of the adult educated native speaker (pace the FSI/ILR standards) but rather the speaker who moves back and forth between languages and cultures. In this context, “trans-cultural” evokes the ability to reflect on both cultures, one’s own and the culture(s) under study.

Need I state the obvious? For more than a decade Cultura has been doing what my colleagues and I on that MLA committee have put before the entire profession as a challenge for the future. Cultura — and I can quote the words of the report — “re-situates language study in cultural, historical, geographical, and cross-cultural frames.” Cultura is cultural inquiry meant explicitly to advance language competence, knowledge, and understanding.

I shall not comment on the irony that this major advance in humanistic learning has arisen out of an institute of technology and not out of our colleges and universities that vaunt their humanistic offerings. This remarkable project has been redefining the boundaries of foreign language instruction for ten years, and I am confident that it will continue to do so. Let us celebrate this tenth anniversary of Cultura by looking forward to the developments in the next ten years.

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