Poster Presentation/Demo Abstract
Cultura is a Web-based, intercultural project, started at MIT in 1997 thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. It connects MIT students taking a French class with students in France taking an English class for the duration of a semester. Its goal is to help students understand the values, attitudes, beliefs and concepts inherent in each other’s culture.
Cultura has since been adopted by other institutions and adapted to many other languages and cultures connecting students in the US and sch countries as China, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Philippines, Russia, Samoa and Spain.
Statement of the problem or issue
In a traditional language class, most students spend their time learning how to speak the language, but the culture inherent to the language is often left at the periphery or dealt with at a superficial level. Cultura is an attempt to reverse the equation and make culture the main focus of an intermediate language class.
The goal of Cultura is to develop and support a new methodology for learning about another culture, with American and foreign students constructing together a better understanding of each other’s culture. It is built upon an interactive process that involves interactions with multiple materials – raw or mediated – and peer to-peer interactions.
Description of activity, project, solution, and outcome
Sharing a common website, students at MIT and in France compare materials from their respective cultures and exchange their observations in online forums, to try and understand the origin of the differences they have discovered. In the process of comparing these different materials (ex: their own answers to a series of intercultural questionnaires; national surveys and statistics; French films and their American remakes; French and American media as well as literary and historical texts; and images or videos that students upload themselves on the site) students explore, for instance: what individualism, freedom, success, rudeness may mean in their respective cultures; issues of formality vs informality; the different modes of interactions between people in different contexts; etc.
Importance or relevance to other faculty, staff, students, departments, and programs
Cultura is an initiative that provides a concrete illustration of how in-depth intercultural understanding can be developed. Even though it takes place within a language class, it can be of interest to any department and program that emphasizes the need for students to be able to communicate more effectively across cultures.
It perfectly fits into the overall MIT global initiatives.
Sabine Levet, Senior Lecturer in French, Foreign Languages and Literatures
Gilberte Furstenberg, Senior Lecturer in French, Foreign Languages and Literatures
(Presented at MIT Educational Technology Fair 2009)
Topic Area(s)
3. Supporting global learning experiences