CULTURES & PEOPLE

Here are a dozen ideas that can encourage INTERESTED KIDS to discover more about the world and its people and cultures. Browse away, and find something that will pique the curiosity of your INTERESTED KID.

It’s a big world, and the future will belong to those who not only understand this but who are comfortable with cultural differences. From world population shifts to changes in the demographics of our communities to the globalization of production and distribution, people young and old need to develop the personal tools to live in a world whose boundaries are fading fast.

Many of the ideas in the section are explicitly directed at cultural exploration, sometimes in a virtual mode, while others challenge the readers to dig more deeply into aspects of their own lives, even to the extent of stepping out of comfort zones. The point is for the Interested Kid (and any accompanying adults) to enter each experience with an eager, open mind, ready to take in what is novel and exciting and then to reflect on how it relates to their own lives and aspirations.

PPL 1. Listen to some music from a tradition you’ve never listened to before
It should not be terribly hard to find music from unfamiliar traditions, if only because even Western “Classical” is so little heard and appreciated by young Americans in the age of American Idol; in many cities and suburbs, country-and-western music is equally rare. But while even an afternoon or evening of Mozart or Hank Williams might fit the bill here, I’d urge readers to push the envelope further still. Music concert of all kinds abounds on the internet and even on radio. 

What should the listener be alert for? New instruments, new voices, new languages, and sometimes even music whose entire structure and tonal properties are significantly different from the familiar. What activities or concerns generated this music? Are the familiar themes and anxieties of the listener’s culture present in the “new” music?

And if the internationally exotic is just not accessible, consider the multitude of musical traditions that have arisen and thrive in American culture but few of us fully know or appreciate: gospel, Delta blues, Big Band, traditional folk, Old Timey, bluegrass, Gullah, and dozens of distinct Native American musical forms. All of these are available on the internet, and many can be found on the radio.

(ALSO: The Arts and Creative Expression)

PPL 2. Plan and then take an imaginary tour around the world. Discover or imagine places you would like to visit, and then, using the internet or resources found in a library or perhaps at a travel agency, plan out the details of a trip that would take you there. Make a detailed itinerary and a record of the things you want to “see;” you could even make a budget that included travel, lodging, and food.
A virtual or fantasy trip, planned out by using a variety of web resources, can liberate the young spirit to imagine what it might be like to be somewhere else as well as encouraging speculation along the lines of “The ten places I would like most to visit are … because ….” It doesn’t matter what the draw of each destination might be—historical, cultural, culinary, sheer curiosity—what matters is that the child has picked it out.

Many schools assign students to plan a journey of this sort and combine it with mathematical and geographical instruction by giving students a budget and by requiring the development of a detailed itinerary and estimate of expenses. This might be a bit more than most children or teenagers would see as fun, but the idea of adding to the level of reflection and engagement by suggesting that the young traveler keep a journal or even illustrate and share seems within reason. Some time with a pile of National Geographic magazines might be a good source of ideas for this virtual adventure.

And who knows but what a particularly well-designed plan might become inspiration for later travel, like a circumnavigating gap year between high school and college; such odysseys are the norm among university-bound students in many European countries, and many colleges smile on and even encourage gap year travel or service.

PPL 3. Pick an important current issue in the news and follow it for a week or a month on two different news outlets (newspapers, news websites, radio, television...)—one of which is not from your native country. Talk about these events with an adult or two.
This exercise in comparative political science and news analysis is intended to help young people understand such complex concepts as point of view and self-interest as well as to uproot the participant from the single point of view with which one’s “home country” media may portray an issue.

The first challenge is to identify an ongoing issue that is receiving at least a moderate amount of play in the media. This may include any field, from politics to science to sports to the arts, although a sports issue probably ought to involve a sport that is truly international in its popularity base, as interesting as it might be to read what a Spanish newspaper thinks about a trade in an American sports league.

The second challenge will be to find a news source from another country; most major newspapers and news magazines have websites, and many large city or university libraries subscribe to at least a couple of English-language newspapers from other countries. English-language news sources from other nations include the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, The Times of London, and the British Broadcasting Corporation (United Kingdom); The Guardian.ng (Nigeria); The Japan Times and Asahi Shimbun (Japan); the Globe and Mailand the Montreal Gazette (Canada); The Hindu (India); The Star (South Africa); French News (France); Gulf Times (Kuwait); Al Jazeera English (Qatar); China Daily (China); and the International Herald Tribune. There are many more, and a thoughtful internet search (try “English-language news [country name]”) should find them; most national broadcast media also maintain written-word sites.

One thing for the young news hound to be on the lookout for are syndicated news stories from press agencies like the Associated Press and Reuters. These are often purchased and published in identical form by news outlets around the world and will not show appreciable difference from one outlet to another—although when they are different, it’s worth figuring out why.

In the end, the young person should consider the differences and similarities they have observed, and any interested adult should be delighted to hear about the project and the result.

(ALSO: Civic and Community Engagement)

PPL 4. Watch a sporting event on television or the internet that comes from a culture other than your own—cricket, bocce, Irish football
It is possible to find cable television or internet broadcasts that provide not only a view many unfamiliar world sports but also explanatory play-by-play (unless the broadcast is in a language unknown to the viewer).

Whether it's cricket, bocce, “Highland Games” events, Australian rules football, hurling, or lumberjack festivals, such activities give the thoughtful spectator an opportunity not only to marvel at the range of human ability to test ourselves but also to speculate on the nature of cultural difference and why certain kinds of activities appeal to certain people.

For many years ABC television’s bygone Wide World of Sports introduced viewers to sporting events of the sort we didn’t see every day. Fortunately our increasingly diverse society and the proliferation of cable television and internet sports channels make up for the cancellation of that show.

(ALSO: Sports and the Great Outdoors)

PPL 5. Read about and do an imaginary exploration a place that is part of your heritage—it could be a neighborhood, or it could be a country. Imagine what it was like to live there “back in the day,” and imagine what your life would be like if you lived there now.
It is common in schools for students to engage in exercises relating to their heritage, and questions among students such as, “What are you?” or “Where are you from?” (meaning, What is your ethnic background?) are a regular part of young people’s experience. And although a young person may know in some vague way that his or her ancestors are from Scotland or West Africa or Greece, they may not be truly able to imagine what it would be like to have lived and worked, or to live and work today, in an ancestral homeland. 

Furthermore, the person may also be unaware of specific information about his or her heritage, information that could be gathered either from existing family records or memories or from some library or internet research.

A challenge in this activity is assembling an itinerary that somehow authentically relates to known aspects of the young person’s family background. Where to go on an imaginary journey, what to see—these questions require choices and sometimes best guesses.

For young people who may be refugees, or adopted, or whose families may have been brought to America by force (as enslaved people, say), the challenges are more profound and potentially more troubling. Clearly some destinations may seem dauntingly unfriendly, while others may only be approximations of a family’s place of origin; although more resources are becoming available for the study of genealogy of slave families, many lead only to regions and not to specific localities. For some adopted children, the question of heritage may touch on emotional vulnerabilities as well as legal restrictions that may be better left alone until the child has arrived at legal adulthood, in which case this activity should be ignored for now.

With Americans so mobile a people (families in this country move on the average of once every five years), it does not take long for many miles to accumulate between generations; few youngsters can tell you, much less have visited in reality or in imagination, where all their grandparents were born. A virtual trip to one of these birthplaces, even if it just another town in the same state, will help connect the young person with his or her heritage in a new and meaningful ways.

PPL 6. Find a radio or television broadcast in the modern language you study or would like to study at school and listen to or watch it for a half-hour every week. For example, Spanish-language soap operas, soccer broadcasts, and game shows are pretty easy to find and understand. Or tune your radio (or use shortwave or streaming on the internet) to French-language broadcasts from Canada, Africa, the Caribbean—or France. And the shortwave radio spectrum opens up, quite literally, an entire linguistic world.
The multicultural reality of the United States is never more palpable than when one is channel surfing or seeking stations on the radio. AM radio in many metropolitan areas is a cornucopia of broadcasts in many languages, from Spanish to Hindi to Mandarin to Portuguese to.... And in almost every part of the country one can find several Spanish-language cable broadcasts featuring game and variety shows or soap operas (telenovelas) with vividly emoting actors. It is also possible nearly everywhere to find at least a few hours a week of programming designed for speakers of other languages.

Be patient and listen for familiar words and patterns. Even if the words are unintelligible, the sense of what is being communicated is often clear. Along with trying to suss out the meaning of the show, the thoughtful television viewer could muse on a number of questions:

•  What is the nature of the aesthetic or aesthetics that are being shown? Are the production values (pacing, scenery, make-up, dress, sound, color palette, and even the framing of each shot) like or not like what might be seen on a typical American English-language broadcast? The same questions, incidentally, could be asked about some of the BBC programming that is seen on American public broadcasting stations. (It is also possible that the child habituated to listening to a variety of British Isles speechways via the BBC—or public television’s anglophile Masterpiece Theater—will be that much more ready to appreciate the richness of Shakespearean language when encountering the Bard at school.)

•  What is being advertised? In what ways are the consuming patterns of the target audience like or not like those of mainstream North American viewers, at least insofar as comparisons can be made based on the ads seen or heard on similar English-language shows.

•  If you can find a sports show, preferably fútbol (what North Americans call soccer), how does the coverage vary from typical American sports coverage, if in fact you can observe differences?

•  What, actually, is the place of origin of the programming? Are you looking at shows produced in the United States or material produced in a country in which the language is the majority tongue?

•  Is the setting beyond the television studio visible? Do exterior scenes look typically “American” (like what you might see on an American-produced English-language sitcom, for example), or do they offer a glimpse of what you might see if you were visiting another land or culture? Can you actually define the differences, if any exist?

•  Beyond developing your skill in the language of the broadcast, can you make out any English words, or words from English that are just like words in the language? (These are called cognates.) Some people are concerned that, because of the spread of American cultural products like films and television shows, English is gradually “polluting” many other languages and thus threatening the cultures associated with them. Do non-English-language broadcasts on American radio and  television support this theory?

As a corollary suggestion, if the household has a DVD player or an account with one of the internet streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon Prime, it is usually possible to view many feature films either in another language—often Spanish or French—or with subtitles in English or another language. Try watching a favorite film on DVD several times through, using the other-language and/or subtitle functions. (Consider some Japanese anime—the films of Hayao Miyazaki, for example—that are already dubbed and sometimes come with original titles or soundtracks in Japanese.)

It is worth emphasizing to young viewers that nothing that appears in the frame of a film or television program is there by mistake. Watching a film when unable to understand the dialogue forces the viewer to attend carefully to the detail in the scene (it’s called mise en scène) in the struggle to make meaning out of what is being viewed. Sometimes this detail has symbolic or other content value that supports the theme or the storyline in subtle ways, and the astute viewer is alert for these elements.

(ALSO: Language and Literature)

PPL 7. Find the closest piece of Native American or First Nations territory to where you live and pay a virtual visit. Perhaps it’s a large reservation, or just a casino. Stepping onto what is legally Indian territory, even virtually, is a good reminder that half a millennium ago the whole North American continent had that status, and that American Indian people today represent a vibrant and important part of our population.

It is more than a little healthy as well as humbling to be reminded that aboriginal North Americans are still very much a part of the American landscape and that they maintain sovereign control over at least some territory in about forty states. As inadequate and even pernicious as the reservation system may be, it is a part of the national experience. A virtual trip that includes travel on reservation land is essential for giving children an understanding that the Native Americans, who seem to disappear from history books sometime around 1890, are still very much present in our society.

It is critically important that travel to Indian land be undertaken in a spirit of healthy interest and respect. The bane of American Indian tourism is that so many other Americans seem unable to move past the stereotypes of Indian customs that have long been prevalent in our entertainment media and even in our schools. 

There is also the matter of what social scientists call “appropriation of culture”: the utilization of Indian-made objects with cultural or spiritual significance by members of the dominant culture as entertainment or decoration—e.g., Indian devotional objects used as ornaments in homes and automobiles. How or even whether a non-Native person can respectfully own and display an Indian-made “dream catcher,” for example, would be a great adult–child conversation in conjunction with this activity.

White America has a long and unfortunate record of dismissing—and much worse—Native American cultures and people. The interested child of any age or race who is willing to make an effort to correct or repudiate this history, will be deepening his or her own understanding of an important issue as well as helping our society make progress toward a better place.

(ALSO: Civic and Community Engagement)

PPL 8. Find the website and read from as much as you can from an issue of a magazine about history (past or current) or archaeology. Old copies of the now-defunct American Heritage would be a natural choice, but there are plenty of current magazines about specific aspects of history—wars, ancient civilizations—that are pretty easy to find.
To whatever degree the past creates the present, a knowledge of the subtleties of history (as opposed to the collection of facts that often passes for history instruction in school) can be helpful in understanding how governments and societies make decisions, or at least how they can arrive at various predicaments. In history the persistence of certain issues and problems is known as continuity, and anyone who pushes their own study of history past the superficial level soon discovers that the problems of socioeconomics, ethnicity, foreign policy, religious conflict, and taxation that vex the world today also vexed the world a century or a millennium (or three) ago.

Magazines of history (as well as documentary programming on television, it must be added, although these are not the focus here for reasons that will appear below) provide multiple windows into small and specific aspects of history—a single person, place, or event, or a specific historical issue or trend. As these magazines are intended to entertain as well as to inform, the writing tends to be a good deal livelier than textbook prose and the overall coverage richer in terms of the inclusion of quotations and, above all, visual material. The best of the history magazines—and the classic American Heritage is the grand-daddy of the genre—solicit articles from the best writers of history and biography, and careful attention to design means that everything about the magazines is attractive and of high quality—so high as to make one wonder whether textbooks need be a dull as they usually are. Smithsonian is a fine example of such a publication.

The argument for going through an entire issue is that the activity will provide first and foremost an idea of the rich menu of material that such periodicals offer and secondly an increased probability of the young reader finding something of real interest; in addition, even the advertisements in such magazines can be fun, offering books, objects, and experiences that may be a bit out of the ordinary.

A couple of hours in front of The History Channel might have some of the same effect as reading a whole magazine, but to be blunt the quality can be uneven and sometimes younger viewers can find themselves watching an infomercial or a program that is distinctly pseudoscientific (aliens and UFOs make regular appearances on several “history” channels) without knowing it. We approve of the concept of the channel but believe it should be watched in at least loosely supervised doses.

Another point in favor of history magazines is that they last in physical form nearly forever, and, along with back issues of those being currently published, there are a number of bygone periodicals with a historical focus—Horizon chief among these—that are worthy of attention even forty years after their first appearance. Horizon, like American Heritage, first appeared in hardbound editions with superlative production values and excellent writing.

It’s worth noting here that historical narratives are likely to have their own biases and even to advance narrow or one-sided perspectives. An interesting comparative exercise might be to find an article written a while ago on a particular topic and then research that topic using contemporary sources—even Wikipedia.

(ALSO: Civic and Community Engagement; Language, Literature, and History)

PPL 9. Find the website and read as much as you can from a recent issue of a magazine about a place that you might want to visit or live in some day. Examples are New York Magazine, Arizona Highways, Cape Cod Life, and Up Here (about far northern Canada). There is a magazine for practically every city and region in the United States as well as for nations and cities outside the United States. Get yourself interested enough to think about planning a visit there some day.
If one cannot always travel to a new place, it is fun to imagine what it might be like to be there. Some “place-based” publications—New York Magazine, for example—are primarily intended for those who already reside in and are familiar with their eponymous location, while others—like New Mexico Magazine—are “destination” publications, filled with enticing material designed to coax readers into visiting or relocating.

Readers of these magazines should be looking carefully not only at the articles but also at details of content like advertisements, including even the smallest. What is the appeal of this place? How do those who live in and like the place present its “story”? What are some common graphic themes—colors, symbols—and images that readers are intended to associate with the place? What can be learned about the economic life of the place—real estate prices and the types of jobs or economic activities to be found there?

In the same vein, what can we learn about the cultural opportunities and activities in the place? Does the magazine focus any particular aspect of the fine arts or other cultural features in music, theater, or folk traditions? Is there anything about food that looks interesting or unique; are particular aspects of culinary heritage represented that may stem directly from the history of people who live there or who have immigrated there? What would make you want to visit the place on vacation or perhaps even move there? Does the place look as though it would be fun for children, or does the magazine focus only on adult-oriented subjects?

In the United States a fifth of the population moves every year; consequently learning to “read” a place and its culture is a valuable skill; a young reader can start mastering this skill by reading about a place. Specialized magazines focusing on a particular area have proliferated in recent years, and for the thinking child  learning how to read cultures with skill and in detail is a skill well worth having.

(ALSO: Language and Literature)

PPL 10. Trace your family history back as far as you can. Ask relatives for help; go on line.
For some children this will be much harder than for others, but all the basic resources needed are a family member or two and perhaps access to a good  internet database. This activity is a wonderful way for children to understand the nature of their own lineage as well as the influence of real historical forces on their own forebears.

For a fortunate few, primarily of English or Northern European heritage, there exists a body of written documentation that may even include published family histories. Beyond that, however, lies a wealth of genealogical resources and, more important, individuals with genealogical obsessions. Local libraries, if available, might be able to point the child (or the family) in the direction of people who will happily undertake specific research and whose interest in these matters is deep and whose knowledge is broad. Their guidance or assistance may help the child to locate marriage, birth, immigration, property, and death records, but it may suffice for the child to rely on the oral testimony of family members to construct a limited family tree that at least explains the child’s place in the cosmos.

For some children—adoptees, unaccompanied refugee minors, or others whose family records are hidden or have been obliterated by history—this activity could be much more challenging, and even potentially painful. 

Much adult guidance is called for in these cases, where it is even possible to run afoul of the law (with regard to statutes covering access to adoption records, for example). And as Alex Haley’s 1970s Roots project and more recently the Finding Your Roots program on public television have demonstrated, discovering the details of the heritage of those who came to America not by choice but by force can be extremely difficult, although resources to assist research in this area are more extensive now than they were thirty years ago.

One sees advertisements frequently these days for internet genealogical resources, which sometimes come with high subscription prices and that therefore should not be accessed without adult permission and supervision. These can be helpful for an investigating child or adult with an abiding interest and sufficient resources to cover the cost.

But at some point most children will express a desire to learn more about their lineage and family history, and this is not infrequently the subject of school projects. Whatever the amount of information to be found, the object of the exercise is to help the child in the development of a positive personal heritage and identity.

It can be very interesting to a child to establish that this heritage shows the influences of history—most people’s forebears have been part of one or another of history’s large-scale migrations—and of the cultures from, through, and into which they have passed. Even if specific information or evidence is scarce, sometimes family lore can also be a powerful thing in a child’s life.

PPL 11. Find the website and read as much as you can from a recent issue of a magazine a magazine or newspaper whose content is about a cultural, religious, or gender group that is not your own: The Advocate, Essence, Savoy, Ebony, Latina, aMagazine, or a local or regional paper or magazine devoted to the Jewish or Roman Catholic religious community. If you are a member of a cultural or ethnic minority, you might look at “mainstream” publications like Time or The Atlantic or even Outside orNational Geographic. How does the publication that represents or focuses on a culture different your own seem different from and the same as—content, layout, advertisements—magazines or newspapers that you normally encounter?
Like viewing films or television broadcasts from other cultures, looking at magazines with a specific ethnic, cultural, or spiritual focus opens, for many of us, a window into a hitherto little-known world. Along with explorations of the aesthetics at work in these publications—their graphics, their layout, the nature of the images displayed in both editorial and advertising copy—there is also an opportunity for thoughtful content analysis. What issues are being addressed? What editorial stance can be discerned? How are the topics of articles like or unlike articles in publications that one might commonly read that represent that majority culture or that would be readily associated with one’s own culture?

In addition, some analysis of the advertising content would be interesting. What “mainstream” products are being advertised, and how are the ads for these products like or unlike products in mainstream publications? What products seem to be unique to or directly connected with the culture or group at whom the magazine is aimed? How are these products advertised?

As we live in a society in which the dominant, white, European culture makes up a shrinking majority of our population, reading about and understanding the concerns of other groups as these are represented in their own media can be a powerful tool for building cross-cultural understanding. It can also be reassuring to know that the same brands of automobiles one drives or cottage cheese one eats are equally a part of the experience and aspirations of other Americans whose “differences” are often more emphasized in society than the characteristics we all share.

The possibility exists here that the young reader may encounter editorial opinions or content that will surprise or even unsettle. We would hope very much that this activity would be undertaken entirely in the spirit of empathy and open-minded curiosity, but it is true that historically marginalized or oppressed groups may express positions in their publications that may be hard for complacent or untutored readers to digest or appreciate. The reader and his or her adult guides must be ready to discuss what the reader encounters and to work hard to understand and make sense of unfamiliar or unsettling points of view. This, after all, is the point of the exercise: to build the child’s capacity to recognize, understand, and respect other viewpoints, even if they conflict with his or her strongly held beliefs or unexamined positions. But history demonstrates that nothing kills real thought and the prospects of a truly democratic society more effectively than permitting the survival of unquestioning intolerance.

(ALSO: Language and Literature)

PPL 12. Create  a menu and prepare a meal (or order out from a restaurant, if it can be done safely) featuring a kind of national or ethnic cuisine you’ve never tried. Whatever you do, don’t have a Coke.
Eating what some grocery stores still call “ethnic” food is an experience as old as our nation itself—European settlers were trying pumpkin and corn as part of the same cultural exchange that gave native American Indian peoples a taste for breads and cakes. Within living memory Italian cuisine, once considered exotic, has become a staple of mainstream American cooking, and today tacos, Chinese take-out, and pad thai can be had in nearly every American community.

The stipulation about beverages—no familiar cola drinks—challenges the child to step away from the ubiquitous and try out the particular. Lassi, tchai, or guaraná soda are emblematic of the cultures that have produced them and deserve a taste; the finicky eater can always order water to wash down the distasteful, although the open-minded eater may be pleasantly surprised. It might be harder to resist the fried potato, which eked its way into global cuisine a hundred years ago in various shapes and degrees of spiciness, but remember that macaroni was once a delicacy to be found only in eastern Asia. Perhaps this ought to be a reminder that, like so many other aspects of human experience, taste itself seems to be subject to globalization, and that restaurants serving the cuisine of a diverse planet are standing firm against the goal once stated by McDonald’s executive, to serve every meal to every person on the planet every day.

Vive le différence! we say.