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THE TITLE of this paper draws on an analogy between leadership style in government and leadership style in our profession. During his tenure as president, Jimmy Carter set an agenda in the National Security Council that distinctly challenged the Nixon model of realpolitik. Nixon's model was based on the realities of national interest and national empowerment. The Carter administration's agenda, by contrast, was one of action coordinated and in cooperation with other nations, using a task-force approach to problem solving. What especially distinguished Carter's multilateral approach from Nixon's loner route was its ethical and moral objectives, as represented by, for example, the Hunger Commission, the Environmental Quality Commission, and the Nuclear Nonproliferation Pact. During Carter's administration the Law of the Seas was negotiated, refugee aid programs for the Cambodian boat people were established, and human rights issues guided national and international policy. The contrast in leadership styles between Nixon and Carter—the one unilateral and bound to national self-interest, the other multilateral, cooperative, and wedded to world security—is relevant to a discussion of foreign language study because leadership style is central to the directions our profession will set for itself for the 1990s.
John W. Gardner, the former chief officer of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, offers some important insights on leadership and effective leadership styles. He makes the point that effective leaders are skilled in long-term thinking. The need for such thinking in foreign language education is apparent when we consider the glacial speed with which school systems and universities achieve change—whether in core curricula or in high school graduation requirements—and the fact that it can take a decade to effect even modest reform through federal legislation initiatives. Gardner goes on to say that successful leaders also have a broad view, seeing beyond their immediate organization to external relations and conditions (8). In other words, we need to consider our profession from a perspective that goes beyond the teaching of foreign languages.
With respect to these two characteristics, long-term thinking and the broad view, there has been a breakthrough within our profession, especially at the national level. Our new alliances, our lobbying and networking at all levels—from Capitol Hill to the private foundations and the nongovernmental education establishment—have been a true accomplishment. To build such commonality of purpose is a difficult political task.
But a third characteristic of successful leadership that Gardner cites merits our concern as well. It is the ability to think in terms of revision and rediscovery so that an organization can adapt to constantly changing realities (8). We must consider what our needs are today in foreign language education. Two conditions have profoundly changed those needs. First, in 1986 a half million documented immigrants and an estimated three to four million illegal immigrants arrived in this country. Their major points of origin have been Southeast Asia, Central America, and the Caribbean Basin. In other words, there are more people of different races and dissimilar cultures arriving today than in the past, when points of origin were mainly the British Isles and Western and Eastern Europe, regions with value systems relatively similar to our own. Second, like the Vietnamese or Haitian refugees, our native Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and Asians are having a farreaching impact on our society—with effects ranging from bilingual education and job training to bicultural programs in the arts.
History has thus provided us with a set of conditions nationally and internationally that will be with us throughout the next decade. We now have to learn to address issues and relations from several cultural perspectives. Dealing with this challenge will demand our best long-term thinking and vision as we set directions for the 1990s.
I would like to propose a three-part agenda that responds to these conditions: (1) to develop a pedagogy of cross-cultural literacy; (2) to reintroduce a discourse of Third World literatures and cultures into our curricula; and (3) to engage students in the major ethical and social issues of our time.
Let us consider each of these items separately, beginning with cross-cultural literacy. I understand cross-cultural literacy to refer to the ability to “read” other cultures, to recognize their cues and symbols and to decode them. The following examples demonstrate the barriers that can obstruct such a reading (for additional examples, see Stewart). All people are born into a specific cultural frame of reference. In the United States our families and communities unconsciously encourage us to prize our accomplishments, especially those that are personal, visible, and measurable. We Americans like to see things quantified—in the gross national product, grade-point averages, Louis Harris polls, spread sheets, and the like. Yet there are other cultures where people are motivated differently—by their deep commitment to personal relationships or by their status in the community.
In this country we also prize the individual: “May the best man or woman win.” We are future-oriented and feel we can improve on the present if we work hard enough. And we admire youth for its energy. Yet there are other cultures where people abhor competition, prizing group harmony instead; where the elderly, not youth, serve as role models; and where fatality, not personal initiative, is thought to determine one's future. We are also a nation that places great trust in words. We like to codify, to write constitutions, clauses, and contracts. We admire the adroit, persuasive speaker. Yet what of those cultures where words arouse suspicion and where silence is esteemed? where people are considered more trustworthy than documents?
From a culture's value clusters emerge certain behavior patterns: how people use time, how they define friendship and parenting, their tolerance for sensory exposure. Like values, these patterns differ from one society to another. Yet we often fail to recognize other values or behavior patterns because we try to interpret them through reference to what is meaningful to our society. Cross-cultural literacy helps us break through this barrier.
We might reasonably ask ourselves whether students need to examine their culturally conditioned perceptions of reality in order to appreciate another culture or literature. While such an examination is not necessary, it does offer a way of understanding peoples through their language and literature. Moreover, by encouraging self-reflection, it helps students understand, perhaps for the first time, what values, mostly unconscious and unstated, prevail in their own society.
An analogy may be useful here. Students of foreign language must abandon their phonological habits if they are to avoid a foreign accent in the target language. In learning new habits, they are becoming deprogrammed, as it were, from using the unconscious pronunciation patterns of their native language. But though we acknowledge the need to contrast speech patterns of English and a second language, literature and culture courses do not commonly alert students in a systematic way to the unconscious modes of perception and value assumptions readers bring to works of another culture. Nor do we usually suggest the need to adopt a new mode of seeing or at least to recognize that a Senegalese, an Argentine, and an American differ in the ways they select and structure reality.
A recent article in the Boston Globe discussed the Chinese practice of using medicinal herbs to lessen the harmful side effects of chemotherapy. According to the article, the American medical establishment views the treatment with, at best, skepticism. Kathy Dugan, a science historian working in China, explains that within the context of the philosophy of science, the two traditions of health and healing cannot be compared because “your theory determines what questions you need to ask and the way you look at what you see” (qtd. in Foreman 46). There is clearly no agreement between the Chinese and American medical establishments on what questions to ask or on what counts as evidence. The two sides represent two distinct cultural logics. And the problem becomes more complicated. Alterity, the otherness we confront when we move out of our cultural frame of reference, often brings both anxiety and resistance. Fredric Jameson suggests that because of our “noncoincidence” with other cultures, a comparative study of Third World literatures would begin not with “the individual texts, which are formally and culturally very different from each other,” but, rather, with an understanding of “the concrete situations from which such texts spring” (86).
This brings me to the second item on my agenda for the 1990s: to reintroduce a discourse of Third World cultures and literatures into our curriculum. Whatever happened to our hesitant beginnings in this direction in the early 1970s? Or, if there remains a discourse of, say, Third World francophone literatures in the university curriculum, what is its conceptual base—one of cultural exoticism or one of cultural pluralism and legitimation? An agenda for a better understanding of Third World cultures is certainly more critical today than it was a decade ago. As Jameson expresses it: “A study of third world cultures necessarily entails a new view of ourselves, from the outside, insofar as we ourselves are (perhaps without fully knowing it) constitutive forces powerfully at work on the remains of older cultures in our general world capitalist system” (68). Yet Third World literatures are seldom part of the junior and senior high school curriculum where they are so needed. Rarely are they part of our teacher education programs.
A curriculum of Third World cultures and literatures relates directly to the third item on my agenda: to to engage students in the major ethical and social issues of our time. Many of these issues—including neocolonialism, exile, hunger, human-rights abuses, and economic oppression—are linked to Third World cultures. Our responsibility is to examine these issues with our students and to awaken in them a sense of social concern. Curricular revision and rediscovery are called for if we are to meet this responsibility.
Let me return now to the notion of leadership. The agenda I propose for our profession is part of a larger dialogue occurring nationally—discussions by concerned organizations ranging from the Ford Foundation and the American Association of Higher Education to the American Council on Education. Most of us are already familiar with the study titled Integrity in the College Curriculum , prepared by the Association of American Colleges, and the Carnegie Foundation's report College: The Undergraduate Experience in America (Boyer). Most of these groups would agree with the view of John Gardner, the author of The Art of Fiction , who writes that “the business of education is to give students both useful information and life-enhancing experiences” (40). Yet these goals have frequently been pursued by the implementation of what my colleague Henry Giroux calls the Iacocca model and the William Bennett great books model. The Iacocca model (education for useful information) usually espouses “a logic of narrow individualism and private gain … to produce an education that is measured by its economic and corporate currency” (4). And while the William Bennett great books model engages the student in life-enhancing experiences, it is clearly a Eurocentric, Western civilization model.
Each of these models is viable within limits. Yet Ernest Boyer, the current executive director of the Carnegie Foundation, offers a broader vision of the goals of education. In an insightful comment, he suggests that “community and linkages in the curriculum will grow out of not just general education, but the academic major” (“Quest”). We are asked to put our specialization into a larger context, whereby our majors will see their field in “historical, social and ethical perspective.” Historically, how does our field fit into the development of ideas and the discovery of knowledge? How do social systems and cultural dynamics relate to our field? What are the ethical implications of what we teach? I believe my agenda is in the spirit of this larger context of liberal and general education.
Our best leadership for the 1990s will meet head-on the growing cultural pluralism of our society and the complex interdependence of the world. And we can do this at the level where we make the greatest impact: in the classroom and in the curriculum. Imagine what that classroom would be like: a place where students begin to understand and appreciate other voices and narratives. Alongside the canon of Western humanism would rest works of other traditions-oral, popular, written, or vernacular. The notion of differentiation would be legitimated. This postmodern view of education “confront[s] honestly the fact of fragmentation on a global scale,” instead of “clinging to [the] mirage of the ‘centered subject’ and the unified personal identity” (Jameson 67). When we also integrate the critical world and the national issues of our age into the curriculum, we are engaging our profession and our students in an agenda of ethical responsibility and civic praxis.
The author is Professor of French at Miami University. This article is based on a paper presented at the MLA convention, 27–30 December 1986, in New York.
Association of American Colleges. Integrity in the College Curriculum . Washington: AAC, 1985.
Boyer, Ernest. College: The Undergraduate Experience in America . New York: Harper, 1987.
———.“Quest for Common Learning.” Faculty meeting, Miami Univ. Oxford, 22 Aug. 1986.
Foreman, Judith. “Chinese Herbs Said to Curb Chemotherapy's Side Effects.” Boston Globe 15 Dec. 1986: 46.
Gardner, John. The Art of Fiction . New York: Vintage-Random, 1985.
Gardner, John W. The Nature of Leadership: Introductory Considerations . Washington: Independent Sector, 1986.
Giroux, Henry. “Liberal Arts, Public Policy and the Politics of Civic Courage.” Miami Report 13 Nov. 1986: 4–5.
Jameson, Fredric. “Third World Literature in an Era of Multinational Capitalism.” Social Text 15(1986): 65–88.
Stewart, Edward C. American Cultural Patterns: A Cross-Cultural Perspective . 1972. Chicago: Intercultural, 1981.
© 1988 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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