The Big Easy: Literary New Orleans and Intangible Heritage

Rationale for Unit

Culture as an intangible has been a big part of the seminar on the Big Easy. Originally, I was interested in the idea of having students become ethnographers and enter the unfamiliar through the cultural nodes existing in the city of Chicago–Chinatown, Little Italy, Pilsen, etc. Using the cultural milieu of New Orleans as my model, I would help students understand the geographic ideas of migration, distribution, concentration, diffusion, etc. I still plan to do that unit but, as is always the case with the amazing intellectual carnival that is the Yale seminar experience, I began to realize that I was missing a critical first step. Students, or all of us for that matter, need to understand their own acculturation, their own "cultural lenses" through which they see the world before entering another culture as a responsible ethnographer. In short, they need to first become auto-ethnographers. For this unit students will begin the work of personal archeology digging through the layers of their own experientially developed culture.

This is no small task. Drunk off the heady hormonal cocktail that is adolescence, ninth graders are known for their hyperbolized solipsism. Right or wrong, always or never, beautiful or nasty–these dichotomies serve in many ways as protection against seeing the complexity of the world without a fully developed frontal lobe. As Deborah Tannen writes in You Just Don't Understand: "We all know we are unique individuals, but we tend to see others as representatives of groups. It's a natural tendency, since we must see the world in patterns in order to make sense of it; we wouldn't be able to deal with the daily onslaught of people and objects if we couldn't predict a lot about them and feel that we know who and what they are. But this natural and useful ability to see patterns of similarity has unfortunate consequences. It is offensive to reduce an individual to a category, and it is also misleading." ² The hallways of America's high schools offer great examples of categorization leading to unfortunate consequences.

Such reductionism and misinterpretation is the motivation for this unit. Yet, it is the adolescent's unfinished brain which makes room for the transformative. It is in adolescence when the shell of our own insecurities thickens. Most of the time, insecurity serves as a blunt instrument to oversimplify the world and make rigid judgments that preserve our sense of self. Yet insecurity within a safe space allows for a soft heart to seek compassion and to find the courage to look within oneself first to see the choices we are making and work to change ourselves.

Viktor Frankl, author of Man's Search for Meaning, introduced the idea of logotherapy following his experience in a concentration camp during World War II. At its core, logotherapy is the idea that our choices represent our agency. "Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom." ³ The space must be created through purposeful reflection. My unit aims to maintain the tension between information and reflection.

Metacognitive reflection is the cornerstone of cultural awareness. The ability to know what you know and to reflect on that knowledge before responding to stimuli is the essence of self-improvement. The sum of our experience, whether it be 15 years or 40 years, shapes the way we see the world. For much of this time, we were unaware of what we were learning. This indoctrination created layers upon layers of lenses that alter our perspective and, therefore, our reactions. With disciplined reflection, these layers can begin to be made visible and selected or deselected as a matter of purposeful choice. "True intercultural competence requires (atleast) a heightened sense of self-awareness, an ability to self-assess, enhanced perceptiveabilities, and a proclivity to reflect on experience. In other words, intercultural development requires metacognitive maturity." ⁴ While I don't anticipate my ninth graders to arrive at full metacognitive maturity, I believe that this unit is the first of hopefully many opportunities to create an ever-extending gap between their perceptions and their actions. It is this space, this gap between perception and judgment, that lies at the heart of my unit.