Advanced Coursed in U.S. Pluralism

World Cultural Studies CULTURAL ENCOUNTERS
CURRICULAR GUIDELINES
St. Lawrence University

As part of the Cultural Encounters Program, all courses will have certain common commitments. They will all include content from cultures commonly understood as "Western" and "non-Western," though part of the project may be to challenge or replace these categories. The assumption is that we can study other cultures most fairly if we simultaneously reflect on our own. Moreover, we should encounter other cultures in their own voices, and not soley through the lenses of Western scholarship, though again this is a distinction that can be critically engaged in the classroom. These courses will also place the political implications of "knowing the other" in the foreground for discussion.

We also intend to develop "writing-intensive" pedagogies through consultation with the University Writing Committee, and to explore ways in which journals can be used to connect the students' personal experiences with the academic content of the program, particularly in relation to study abroad.

LEVEL I-CONCEIVING THE WORLD

Level I: Goals

1. Students should learn to examine and interpret practices in particular cultures, one of which will be a Western culture.
2. Students should begin to examine their own culture as they explore others.
3. Students should begin to recognize and challenge ethnocentrism, denaturalize the West as the primary standard of culture normalcy, and explore how cultural practices are socially constructed.
4. Students should be introduced to a vocabulary of cultural relativism, examining its meaning, its implications, and its limitations.

Level I: Common Theoretical Questions

1. How can we begin to understand the cultural practices of ourselves and others? How do we interpret cultural practices? How does the role of the observer condition what is observed?
2. Can one understand cultural practices without judging their merits? Is this stance morally and politically adequate?
3. What does it mean to talk about the "social construction of culture"?
4. How have the practices under consideration been affected by politics and history?

Level I: Pedagogy

Level I courses will study three particular cultures, one from the West, focusing on an area or practice that can be considered in many cultures, such as beauty, work, family, nature. Every course should include cultural texts such as music, visual art, literature, medical treatises, development plans and/or ethnographies. Multiple perspectives of the cultures being studied should be examined, including voices from within the culture. The classes should be conducted in seminar format in order to encourage open discussion and exchange of ideas. Although these courses can be cross-listed with departments, the instructor(s) should approach the course from interdisciplinary perspectives. When possible, instructors should seek help from faculty in other disciplines to design and teach these courses. Considerations of questions for study abroad should begin at this level.

LEVEL II-CULTURAL ENCOUNTERS

Level II: Goals

1. Students should study of the evolution of cultures over time through the examination of specific cultural encounters between cultures, with emphasis on appropriations, cross- fertilizations, and resistance. At least one culture will be from a Euro-American tradition.
2. Students should examine the encounters, perceptions of those encounters from each culture, and the impact and consequences of the encounters on each culture.
3. The courses at this level should build on and reflect subject matter and theoretical debates introduced in the Level I courses. Students should continue to develop a theoretical sophistication in studying and talking about cultures. Important concepts include hegemony, colonialism, appropriation, diffusion and relativism. Also, the concept of culture should be examined as complex, contested, and historically evolving.
4. Students should refine their preparation for their study abroad.

Level II: Common Theoretical Questions

1. How do you trace cultural influences? How do you see through a cultural practice to its multiple origins? The emphasis here is on developing an understanding of the multi-directional transmission of culture. How are ideas, practices, artifacts mutually appropriated and absorbed.
2. What are the dynamics of power in cultural encounters? What forms do domination, subjugation and resistance take? Who are the groups involved in these encounters? What are the multiple positions of power held by these groups?
3. What are the immediate and long-term consequences--political, aesthetic, social, spiritual--of the encounters for each culture involved?
4. What are the theoretical debates concerning colonialism and post-colonialism? How are the legacies of colonialism played out in the subsequent histories of the colonized and the colonizers?

Level II: Pedagogy

The context of the study must allow voices from both cultures in the encounter to emerge; the study must also examine the multiple and conflicting voices from within each culture. These courses should pay explicit attention to preparing students for study abroad.

LEVEL III-PROGRAM SEMINAR

Level III: Goals

1. These seminars should provide a forum for students to reflect on and integrate their study abroad experiences with the coursework they have done over the preceding three years.
2. In these seminars students should reflect critically on the ways in which their studies and experiences have enlarged their perspectives and increased their capacities for appreciation of different ways of living, without losing sight of the nexus of power relations within which all cultural encounters transpire, and their own positions within that nexus.
3. In these seminars students should reflect critically on their own emerging ethical, political and aesthetic commitments. The point of this reflection is not to steer students towards any particular beliefs or values, but to help them understand the genealogies and implications of the commitments they espouse.

Level III: Common Theoretical Questions

Rather than share a range of common theoretical questions, each seminar may want to choose one or more from the following list and pursue it/them in depth.

1. Is it possible to articulate a responsible ethical position that is neither ethnocentric nor relativist? What would it look like?
2. What would a reasonable human rights position look like that is not ethnocentric?
3. Are there any universal elements across cultures?
4. How should we balance human needs and desires against the welfare of non-human elements of the earth?
5. What is the relationship between one's specific identities (gender, ethnicity, etc.) and one's participation in larger polities, whether regional, national, or global? (How do the issues of American pluralism relate to those of international or global interculturalism?)

Level III: Pedagogy

This will be run as a seminar, with little or no lecturing and substantial responsibility for the course given to students. They will do projects, using data from their study abroad as well as library research done during the course. The journals written on and about their study abroad should play a central role in their projects. Ideally their projects will be more than academic exercises; they will require students to use their experience and research to articulate a position on one of the theoretical questions listed above. In-class presentations which juxtapose a wide variety of experiences from abroad should enrich and complicate the individual's interpretation of her/his own experience, as should readings, films, etc.

Dr. Eve Stoddard, Center for International and Intercultural Studies, St. Lawrence University, Canton, New York 13617. (315) 379-5991 tel., (315) 379-5989 fax.