On Friday, our school campus was ablaze with red, white and blue. It was not American red, white and blue. It was not British red, white and blue. It was not even Australian red, white and blue. It was French tricoleur, and the reason for all the color was that we were celebrating Francophonie.
Francophonie is one of Awty’s most important annual celebrations of diversity, as it focuses our collective attention on a significant group that helps to give Awty its unique identity – our Francophone students (or ‘Francophonies’).
Contrary to some people’s simplistic view, the students who attend classes in our French Bilingual Section (FBS) are not all from France. Our French Bilingual Section is open to non-Francophone families, and according to the statistics I was given this week, just 53% of our current enrolment in the FBS are families with two
French parents. Conversely, 24% of the students in the FBS are from ‘non-French’ families in which neither parent is French nor do they speak French at home. Notwithstanding these statistics, French language remains a fundamentally important facet of Awty’s identity and educational programs.
Our Francophone students come from many of the 29 countries in the world that
Wikipedia identifies as having French as one of their official languages – Belgium, Benin, Burundi, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Canada, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Congo (Republic), Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, France, Gabon, Guinea, Haiti, Ivory Coast, Luxembourg, Madagascar, Mali, Monaco, Niger, Rwanda, Senegal, Seychelles, Switzerland, Togo, and Vanuatu. In addition,
there are other countries where French is widely spoken, including Algeria, Andorra, Cambodia, Laos, Lebanon, Mauritania, Mauritius, Morocco, New Caledonia, Tunisia, and Vietnam.
A tangential thought has suddenly sprung into my mind: that list makes me realise how many fascinating places there are in the world that I have yet to visit!
But back to the topic... On Friday this week, we asked all the students in the Primary School to wear either a red, white and blue top or a Francophonie T-shirt (like the one I am wearing at my desk in the photo above). The celebrations began
with a fashion show in the Globe at 8:15 am, where the multinational clothes worn by the children highlighted the diversity of the Francophone world. We continued with special lessons and workshops throughout the day, a special Francophonie quiz expo, artists’ and musicians’ performances, outdoor French games, and then an hour-and-a-half long Francophonie concert in the PAAC on Friday afternoon. The day finished in our new Café with a wonderful pot luck dinner in the evening hosted for the entire Awty community by our French Section parents.
Our Francophonie day represented a fabulous celebration of French culture, life, innovation and cuisine. It is easy to understand why Francophonie has taken its
place as one of Awty’s premier annual events. It is difficult to think of ways in which Francophonie Day could have been improved.
Having said that, I believe it is important for us as members of an international school community to see events such as Francophonie as being an important step along the pathway towards building international-mindedness, rather than being our ultimate destination. The question I constantly ask myself as an international educator is ‘what should be our NEXT step as we seek to develop true international-mindedness
among our students?’.
To answer that question, the concept of the ‘cultural iceberg’ can be very helpful, which probably explains why it is being used more and more often in many international schools. The concept is a simple one. Only about 10% of an iceberg is visible above the surface of the ocean. As the crew of the Titanic realized far
too late, the majority of an iceberg (about 90% of its mass) is hidden beneath the surface of the water.
In 1976, the American anthropologist and cross-cultural researcher, Edward T Hall, suggested that culture was like an iceberg, and in doing so, claimed that there are two broad components of culture. First, he claimed that the external, or surface, culture (which is easily visible) comprises about 10% of the total concept, while the remaining 90%, which is usually hidden below the surface, is internal, or deep, culture.
External surface culture (the visible 10%) is explicitly learned, conscious, easily changeable and mainly comprises objective knowledge. On the other hand, internal deep culture (the hidden 90%) is implicitly learned, unconscious, difficult to change and mainly consists of subjective knowledge.
When people first experience contact with other cultures, they usually interact only at the surface level (the visible 10%), which is (to circle back to the metaphor) just the ‘tip of the iceberg’. Dealing with the visible 10% of another culture makes a relatively low emotional demand, but it remains superficial and fails to engage in deeper understandings, which can require a much more intense emotional load. Remaining at the surface level is rarely, if ever, an effective way to develop true international-mindedness.
If we are really concerned to form authentic international-mindedness in our school community, then we must challenge our students to engage with the internal, deep facets of other cultures. Celebrations such as Francophonie are an important, necessary, highly effective and thoroughly enjoyable beginning, but they are a means to set us on the right pathway; they are not our ultimate destination.
Celebrations certainly play a very valuable role in raising awareness, but they seldom require deep engagement with another culture. Deep engagement comes as students are pushed beyond their comfort zones…… and at this point , I am struggling to encapsulate all the thoughts that are flooding into my head as I write. Let me try and encapsulate my ideas into one single (but very long) sentence...
I believe that deep engagement with other cultures comes when students are pushed beyond their comfort zones to become aware of other world-views in which they consider different political ideals and systems; they appreciate different religious perspectives and how they make an impact on different societies; they understand multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, citizenship and nationality from various perspectives; they understand indigenous peoples and the concept of ethnicity; they come to appreciate the tensions between national interests and globalization; they understand the distribution and transfer of both natural and human resources; they can analyse the positive and negative impacts of trade and aid between countries upon people with different attitudes towards materialism; they can conduct a complete and balanced investigation of international efforts to address global environmental concerns and conflict; they understand why peoples from different cultures act differently towards the
implications of environmental sustainability; they attain fluency in one or more foreign languages, preferably language(s) from a different language family than their first language, in order to learn the processes and concepts behind others’ thought processes and worldviews; they truly understand the different historical and geographical backgrounds of several countries from the perspectives of residents of those countries; they become aware of the social structures within their own country and how these differ from other societies; they can make sense of the impact of resources, wealth and culture on education, women’s
rights, child labour, child poverty, human trafficking and other issues of international significance; and they fully comprehend the impact of human society on the natural environment, understanding the interplay between sustainability, diversity and environmental impact.
Whew! I hope that is the longest single sentence I will ever write. And yet, it is not exhaustive (even if it is exhausting); it is just - to repeat the analogy - a little more than the tip of the iceberg. Having achieved all the things listed in my long sentence, students will be in a great place to deepen their appreciation of the issues shown beneath the water surface in the iceberg graphic above. Yet even with all these understandings behind them, I suspect many students – even in our school which is arguably the best international school in the United States – will still have a lot to learn about other cultures in the years after they graduate, which is precisely why we try to instill a genuine passion for life-long learning in each and every one of our students.
Clearly, developing international-mindedness is an ambitious task. It involves far more than mastering the
content we place before our students in the classroom. It requires us as a school to model exemplary international-mindedness in our policies, our practices, our appointment of personnel, and the way we relate to our world. Developing true international-mindedness is a task that we are obliged to fulfill as part of our duty as educators in an international school. As our long-standing Mission Statement says so clearly, Awty “seeks to maximize the potential in all of our students as they grow to become responsible world citizens”.
The centrally important challenge for Awty International School today and in the years ahead is to ensure that the explicit rhetoric of this globally-focussed Mission Statement is matched to a supreme level of excellence by the School’s organizational structures and its everyday practices, both in and out of the classroom. The success of all our other priorities such as building projects, capital fundraising, entry to great colleges and universities, academic success, and so on, derive from implementing our Mission with gold-standard excellence. If the school fails in this task in the years ahead, nothing else can compensate.
The key to achieving the lofty goal of our Mission Statement is actually fairly straightforward – we have a daily obligation to advance international-mindedness, thus instilling an appreciation of deep culture.
It sounds quite simple, doesn’t it!