Blog Post #3 -- Heather

As I read Carol's Crossing Cultures piece I was particularly taken with her idea that "[t]he most rewarding way to cross cultures is to converse over time with international students about our perceptions of cultural differences and build toward a mutual understanding."  I was reminded, as I continued to read, that cultures exist in many forms, not just internationally.  Teaching in prison is an everyday exercise in cross-cultural communication.  There are challenges that arise from the tension between the carceral space and the academic space.  There are words that are acknowledged as verboten, like "guard" in place of "officer," and there are concepts that are understood, but not acknowledged.  For example, it is not okay for a non-incarcerated person to call an incarcerated person a "convict," but prison culture recognizes a "convict" as someone who has "done good time" or followed the rules of inside leadership.  In the same way that the tutors of international students seek to build bridges by exchanging stories about their lived experiences, so too do educators in the prison space. Certainly the stories shared by many incarcerated students feel like they should never have occurred in the United States, but it is also more likely than not that you will find common ground.

Comments

  1. IanFebruary 5, 2019 at 9:28 AM

    Such a fascinating and important additional dimension to the notion "crossing cultures" outlined in the reading. I strongly agree that if we limit ideas of culturally-informed tutoring to an "international student" phenomenon we miss the myriad ways in which all students and all writing sessions present their own legitimate cultural challenges. Certainly the physical and social isolation of students experiencing incarceration is one ready example, though so too is the cultural alienation that comes with living in a college/urban setting for the first time, as is the case with so many first-semester freshmen at Iowa.

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