Globalization and me

I try to blog monthly about what's new in my life or on my mind, but these days the answer to that is often... grad school. It's been kinda hectic. Rather than foregoing a February post altogether, I thought I'd share a recent assignment that was slightly more readable and personal than most. In this class, "Globalization and Contextualization in Education," we're discussing what globalization is and how it affects education, as well as other facets of life and society. So an early assignment had us reflecting on our story, perspective, and context as they relate to globalization.

My experience with globalization began before I was born, when my mom spent five years after college in Austria. She taught me German from the day I was born – it helped that my dad worked for a German company’s Vermont branch and that we spent a total of a year in Munich for his job by my second birthday. After that, though I stayed in North America for the next twelve years and my German lessons dropped off until high school, I still benefited from my parents’ international perspective and visits from their European friends. I also have vivid memories of the three international ESL students in my class: a Chinese girl and two refugees – a Bosnian boy and an Albanian girl; I became friends with both girls in middle school. Despite growing up in a small, homogeneous Vermont town where many residents had deep roots, I grasped early on that the world was bigger than what I could see.

A German family friend taught classical guitar to my brothers and me for years in Vermont. We loved playing with her two girls!

By college, I’d developed a passion for languages and a dream of moving overseas to a developing country – specifically Cambodia, ever since I’d heard a volunteer tell fun stories and show cute pictures. Though I’d mainly considered teaching English, since TESOL isn’t a common bachelor’s degree and I wanted to keep my options open, I studied French and German education. My language classes delved into questions of history and culture that fascinated me, particularly regarding immigration in Europe. My honors thesis focused on the experiences of second-generation Turkish-German and North African-French youth and the role of Islam in their constructed identities. Between that project, teaching English conversation at an international Christian student group, and the friendships I developed with students from Egypt, Malaysia, Japan, and beyond, I began to gain an awareness of non-Western perspectives.

After a brief stint filling in for a German teacher on sabbatical, I attained my dream of moving to Cambodia at the tender age of almost-23. In my job interview, I told the principal of Logos (a Christian international school in the capital, Phnom Penh) that I’d be in over my head as an English literature teacher, and he told me that they were desperate enough to hire me anyway. So I came, hoping I wouldn’t rue my two-year contract. Though most teachers and some students were North American, most of my middle and high school students were Asian, hailing from Cambodia, Korea, Singapore, and beyond. It was immediately clear that our so-called American school was influenced by far more than just US culture, and though it took time, I loved the challenge of finding effective communication styles, humor, and motivational techniques for the unique subculture of “Third Culture Kids” in my classes.

Students in this choir hold passports from 8 countries and have lived in even more.

In my second year, I began a French program in addition to my English classes, and soon began pondering why I was teaching it. In the US, teaching foreign languages felt noble: I was expanding students’ horizons and forcing them to think beyond their own cultural perspectives. In Cambodia, my students were already multicultural and often multilingual, and for every kid who dreamed of traveling to Paris or chatting with French neighbors, there were two who joined my class just to get a break from reading Cambodian. (In their defense, with the world’s longest alphabet and no spaces between words, the Khmer script truly is a beast.) Before my arrival, except for one semester with a Mandarin teacher, students had been required to study Khmer from elementary school through tenth grade. Now that I was there, students could abandon Khmer after eighth grade and switch to French. Besides their dread of the alphabet, there was the power differential: some of my students from wealthier, more “developed” countries disdained all things Cambodian as inferior to their native culture and language. On service trips, I realized many of my non-Cambodian students had almost no Khmer conversational ability. Was I partly to blame by giving them an out and teaching them the language of a wealthy, powerful nation? I encouraged my French students to continue practicing Khmer and did my best to lead by example, studying it myself as much as possible. I looked for ways to celebrate non-Western Francophone cultures in class, even though I was much more knowledgeable about Europe. I also became peripherally involved in developing a Khmer track for non-native speakers, one that included more conversation, less literacy, and more interactive teaching methods, in hopes of empowering and motivating my expat students to communicate more in Khmer.

A beautiful goodbye letter from my dear Khmer friend Thavy

My other hesitance about teaching French pertained to its relevance to my students. Though Cambodia was a French protectorate through 1953, most French speakers were slaughtered in the genocide under Pol Pot, and after 1979 the public schools soon switched to English as their primary foreign language. French is still used in Cambodia’s medical diagnoses, prescriptions, and the labels of some imported foods, but little else. My principal agreed that though French certainly did more to foster students’ English vocabulary, its importance was fading in comparison to Chinese, not only in Cambodia but worldwide. When I announced that my sixth year would be my last, he hired a Mandarin teacher (much more competent than the first one) to replace my French classes. Of course some students were sad to lose the French option, but many enthusiastically dived into Chinese. I was glad and in some ways relieved. It did cause me to ponder, though, how languages wax and wane in conjunction with the economic and political power of their speakers. That was the year that my dad lost his job again, as Asian competitors increasingly conquered his niche of the technology industry.

When Logos’ parent organization started a training program for Cambodian teachers during my fourth year, I was eager to become involved. I’d enjoyed befriending many of them and wanted to deepen my relationships with them. I taught two weekly classes: one on English pronunciation and one on writing. The next year, I assisted a Cambodian teacher (my original Khmer tutor) in simplifying the English for some education resources in order to translate them into Khmer. In my last year, I mentored a new Cambodian teacher at Logos, observing her and helping her set goals for growth. My interest in training Cambodian teachers, along with all my questions about globalization and education, ultimately led me to Lehigh and to the M.A. program in Comparative and International Education. I’d still love to return to that teacher training program after graduating. In the meantime, I’m starting my thesis, which will focus on the Student Council program mandated for Cambodian public schools, exploring its participants’ emotional intelligence and civic identity. I also hope to wrangle through some of my concerns about why, how, and to what extent I hope for Cambodian education to globalize. While Cambodia’s schools are far from perfect, even my stubborn remnants of “white savior mentality” don’t expect foreign meddling or the copying and pasting of other nations’ successes to yield easy progress.

A major influence on my perspective of globalization is my Christian faith, since I believe God created humankind full of diverse languages and cultures in order to mirror his own beauty and creativity. Christians therefore have a moral obligation to not only tolerate but celebrate that diversity, learning from others and considering others’ needs before our own. In my opinion, that includes fighting against isomorphic trendsetters and unseen powers-that-be to revel in the beautiful quirks of the local as unique manifestations of God’s glory. I’ve always been one to root for the underdog, and I hate seeing smaller, less-powerful countries like Cambodia drown in foreign influences or be divided up by global superpowers. I want my Cambodian students to have excellent Khmer; I want them to publish books in Khmer; I want them to preserve their language and culture in the onslaught of English language and Asian Tiger influences, even as they become fluent in English and learn to compete internationally. On the other hand, I don’t believe we can revert to worldwide isolationism; today’s world is inherently connected and interactive, a fact that is likely to be ever-truer in the future. That’s why I believe it’s important for Americans, who have a louder voice than most in shaping the unseen forces of globalization (from corporations to military to media) to learn how to truly see and value smaller groups. That’s far from a comprehensive resolution to the tension, but it’s a first step, and one that’s facilitated by globalization as the world comes to our doorstep through migration and technology. It’s one reason I was passionate about helping my students become effective communicators in English – their stories need to be heard, and others around them need help to raise their voices.

As I reacclimate to US culture after six years of mostly living in Cambodia, I’ve been horrified at some people’s xenophobia and desperation to protect their culture from outside influences. Case in point: How could New Hampshire, where voters pride themselves on attending many campaign events and carefully weighing all candidates, overwhelmingly vote for Trump in yesterday’s caucus? His appeals to fear remind me of similar approaches from reviled French and Cambodian politicians when I experienced elections in those countries, and at the time, I hadn’t imagined that such a politician could rise in the US. While some of his supporters probably believe their group is entitled to dominance in the US, I believe many others are foolishly underestimating their collective power in relation to the power of seemingly threatening newcomers.

Then again, my own grasp of power distributions is also tenuous at best. How accurately and completely do I know current national affairs, let alone the broader global situation and historical context? That’s one thing that’s struck me in recent class readings. Globalization is such a complex, vast, and multifaceted phenomenon that my puny attempts to understand it feel about as effective as an ant trying to map out New York City. I’m hesitant to generalize about our world when my vantage point is so small and there’s so much that I’ve never contemplated, let alone witnessed firsthand. Without excusing racism or wrongdoing, maybe I need to extend a bit more grace to those who strike me as “overly American,” remembering that globalization’s forces can bewilder the best of us. I need to remember that lesson from childhood: the world is far bigger than what I can see. All I can do is keep my eyes and ears wide open, embracing every opportunity to explore new nooks and crannies. I don’t understand globalization, but I want to keep learning.