Cross-Cultural Education in the Classroom: Now and Then
One topic that has interested me ever since I taught English at a high school in Korea is the intersection between education and culture. In my blog about my time in Korea, I discussed the problems with creating a student-centered classroom in Korean culture. This notion seems like it stems from Confucian ideas that view the nature of education as transactional and teachers as the gatekeepers of knowledge. When I tried to flip the classroom from what the students were used to (teacher-centered lectures) to what I thought would be advantageous for developing English speaking fluency (a student-centered, communicative and task-based approach), there was often a lot of confusion. Additionally, it was often difficult to get the students to speak any English at all for a variety of reasons. Teacher-centered classrooms were deeply embedded in the cross-section of education and culture in Korea, and that seems to be the case here in Japan as well. Generally speaking, most university classes