Guide
Guide > Core: Introduction to the Cultura Guide > Overall Methodology

Overall Methodology

One of the main goals of Cultura is to develop and support a new methodology for learning about another culture - a methodology which allows students to personally and collectively construct their knowledge of a "foreign" culture. It is built upon an interactive process that involves interactions with multiple materials - raw or mediated - and multiple partners - learners, teachers, other students, other teachers and experts.

This multiplicity of voices is meant to lead students, under the skillful guidance of a teacher, to gradually construct, broaden and refine their own understanding of the other culture, in a concrete and dynamic way and in a continuous, ever-enlarging construction of the foreign culture.

Developing understanding of another culture is a process - a process which involves a series of stages that take the cross-cultural learner along a journey of discovery and reflection. Along those lines, we have developed an approach which itself unfolds along a series of steps designed to introduce learners to progressively more complex artifacts and broaden their scope of inquiry

Step 1: Students answer a series of identical questionnaires in their own language.

Step 2: The French and American responses appear side by side on the Web. The sheer process of juxtaposition allows students to immediately "see" similarities and differences between the materials. Both sets of students then analyze the various responses, see where they vary and in what way, and start forming initial hypotheses about the reasons for these differences.

Step 3: Students on both sides of the Atlantic enter, via on-line discussion forums, into an asynchronous conversation with their transatlantic partners in which they: share their observations and hypotheses; send queries for more details, clarification and more in-depth understanding of the differences they observed; respond to whatever question their transatlantic partners may have.

Step 4: Students are then encouraged to broaden their scope of inquiry and "check the validity" of their respondents' responses against a larger set of comparative French and American opinion polls which deal with many societal issues. This allows students to put their own initial observations as well as their transatlantic partners' comments and findings in a broader and more objective socio-cultural context.

Step 5: A wider and wider array of materials is made available to the students, which they continue analyzing in a cross-cultural comparative mode. This allows them to view their earlier findings through an ever different lens, and make newer and broader connections.

These other materials include:

• French films and their American remakes as well as press articles on those films. Analyzing films allows students to deal with issues unreachable through text only, such as the different ways in which humor, suspense, oral discourse or gestures can be used in very different ways.
• a variety of American and French media on the Web.
• a multiplicity of texts (historical, anthropological and literary) providing American points of view on French culture and French points of view on American culture, as well as comparative, cross-cultural texts.

Students are never asked to come up with any definitive statement about the other culture but to always review, revise and refine their findings in the light of the new materials and the new points of view.