Australia, the movie

This past weekend I rented the movie Australia from the offices in the basement of our dorm. Starring Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman, all I really knew about the movie was that I remembered liking it after my grandparents took me to see it before Christmas. I was amazed after I read the introductory statements, because this entire movie dealt with issues that pertain not only to the topics of this course, but to my final research project as well.
The movie begins with an introduction into the territory of Australia in 1939, with a mix of the white British and settlers and the Aboriginals who were native to the territory. One product of the mixed cultures in the same area was mixed race children, dubbed 'creamies' by many. This biracial plotline is mixed in with a race to drive cattle across the desert, a war, and a love story, but it is interwoven into all of it. During the war, all of the biracial children that the government could find were sent to Mission Island, the first target of the Japanese upon their invasion, while all of the white children were sent to the safety of southern Australia. Not to mention that the white father of the biracial boy we come to know, called Nullah, tries to kill him several times.
The first time I saw this movie it represented a piece of history to not be proud of, but much more of it hit home now that I have begun my research and participated in this course with readings and discussions. This is a piece of real life and real history for many. I can only imagine the kind of identity issues these children had to deal with, especially if they had murderous fathers and were yanked from their families by the police simply because they were not white. They're parents may or may not have loved each other and tried to help their children to accept who they are (depending on the situation), but no relationships of that nature would have been widely accepted by the culture of cities and towns. Therefore the children had a hard time finding acceptace from most places, sometimes even from within their own families.

Stereotypes in Ballet

I was getting nostalgic this weekend and I started thinking about the 15 years I spent dancing ballet. For nine of those years I performed in our local production of the Nutcracker. As I was remembering all the fun we had backstage listening to the music and trying to sneak upstairs to see the older company members in their costumes and performing, it hit me. I had a TE 448 lightbulb moment. I remembered that in the second half of the ballet dancers that are supposed to represent countries from all over the world come to the court of the Sugar Plum Faerie to dance for Clara who had saved the Nutcracker from the giant king mouse. While some of those dances are more authentic than others (to the best of my knowledge seeing as I am not extremely familiar with all of the cultures represented), some that I can recal are relatively ridiculous.

The one that sticks out the most in my memory is that of the Chinese dance. They are coming and bringing the gift of tea to Clara, and the dance that the company performing these parts of the show had been choreographed around a giant teapot. The dancers entered behind the teapot, wore a costume that many Americans would automatically link with China or Japan (brightly colored, embroidered shirts with tighter black pants, and those hats that look like flattened cones). The part that bothers me the most though is that I remember they had put makeup on their eyes to try and give them a slanted appearance and throughout the dance they squinted their eyes and scrunched up their faces a little bit, to make them 'look more Chinese.' And I remember copying their example starting from when I was about 6 years old. I had no idea that doing that might be wrong, or that some people might be offended (or as I would have thought of it then that some people might not like that I was doing that). I simply wanted to be as good a dancer as those dancers were. And I thought that by mimicking them I was doing something needed to become better.

I did not look at it as making fun of another culture, but it can easily be construed that way. I am not saying that these cultural dances should be cut out of the program, but perhaps the companies should look into a more authentic representation. It is possible to represent other culture's styles of dance without squinting your eyes. And many companies have done this well, because I searched for a youtube.com video that would show you what I'm talking about, and I could not find one that was similar to my memories. The ones I found were, in my opinion, much less offensive. I would be very interested to hear what an insider's perspecitive would be on this issue.

Disability on TV

The other night I was flipping channels before I went to bed, and I stumbled on an episode of House. House was having an argument with a very sick Foreman about a brain biopsy that could leave Foreman permanently disabled. Foreman's argument is that House handles being disabled just fine, but House retorts with something along the lines of, "do I make this look glamorous?"

This got me thinking about the portrayal of disabled people on TV. House becomes addicted to vicoden because of the pain in his leg, Joe from Family Guy functions in his wheel chair, but as soon as he has the chance to walk again he becomes a jerk to all of his friends and only returns to himself after his friends and wife injure him to the extent of lower body paralysis again, and so on. There are not many deptictions of people with disabilities on TV, but those characters are sometimes the only exposure some people have. Talk about stereotypes.

If these are the images that the general public is getting, then the general view of those with disabilities is probably not as positive as is might be otherwise. I guess that this reverts to a question that has come up repeatedly in our discussions. Is it better to expose people/students to a stereotyped version of real life, or to not expose them at all? Should we use these characters as a discussion starting point and try to dispel misconceptions? Or should we avoid potentially creating more misconceptions by not bringing it up, since there are not many good examples? This is one of those questions that I would love an actual answer to, although the chances of getting one when the answers can be so subjective may or may not really help.

What is Multicultural?

So the other day in class when we were discussing our topics for the final research areas, I tried to use the word 'multicultural' to describe people of different religions, cultural backgrounds, as well as races or ethnicities, etc. Every person I used this term with automatically assumed I meant race specifically, and I had to clarify my usage of this term.
Am I really using this term that incorrectly? I see it as two words, multi and cultural. Multi, of course, meaning multiple, many or just plain more than one. Cultural being a reference to the word culture, which I use to mean religions, traditions, races, ethnicities, whether you live in a city or in the country, etc. I do not see race as the only defining factor of a culture, although it certainly is one factor. I use the term with this meaning behind it, but it seems that not everybody has the same definition. Am I being too politically correct because of how I have been taught to be aware of my language use (as we all have in the TE program)? Am I over analyzing this? I suppose I would just like to know when and how the meaning inferred from the use of this word started to change so profoundly? Or am I the one who is confused, and race has always been the primary meaning of 'multicultural'?

Dilbert

So I was reading the comics this morning, and when I reached Dilbert, I knew that I wanted to share this strip.

I have loved this comic strip for almost as long as I can remember, and I have always thought it was a funny strip. My mother loves this strip enough that my younger brother is required to have the daily calendar be his Christmas gift for her each year. We have always loved the Elbonians because they make the situations more amusing.

But would we laugh more if it was Indians, as mentioned earlier in the strip? Or American Indians? Or African, Chinese, Swede? Why is it OK to laugh and make fun of a race that does not actually exist when if it had been a real race it could be considered racist and completely politically incorrect?

Also, the reference to "Educated Indians who speak perfect English" being more expensive, and therefore better than the "illiterate Elbonian with poor attendance and an anger management problem" shows an unofficial ranking of races. One is better than the other. One can be literate and important while the other is completely undesirable. If the Elbonians were a real race, this would be a big social issue, but because they are not it's funny. The comment on the Indians also represents a sort of running joke that many Americans have regarding the fact that a lot of companies have outsourced some of their customer service jobs to India and they are difficult to understand at times, which would account for the "speak perfect English" part of the description.

'A Shift Is Taking Place'

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-8DRPCJ86U&feature=related

So we watched this youtube video in my TE 402 class last week and it really got me thinking about a lot of different things. It also got me thinking globally as opposed to just inside the US, which is sometimes harder to accomplish, and much harder to keep in perspective, at least for me.

One of the first questions this video asks is what will the world be like for children born today? Some of the facts brought up in this video were mind blowing for me. Like, the number one speaking English country will be China? And that 100% of college graduates in India speak English? But then how many college graduates in the US speak another language fluently? I looked it up on google and I could not find a statistic, but from my own experience here at MSU I know that not 100% of us are fluent in another language. Does that make us ignorant? I know that high schoolers in most European schools are required to take classes in at least two non-native languages. My high school required two credits of one foreign language. Are Americans that egotistical? Perhaps some of these facts are reasons why American tourists are not perfectly welcome in all countries around the world.

I realize that this video does not directly relate to underrepresented populations, but it does discuss some misconceptions about populations that exsist in our society, which is just as important. Americans are often perceived as being less informed than citizens of other countries, and I wonder just how true that statement is. I do not pretend to be someone who knows about all different races, religions, ethnicities, or other cultural groups, but I would like to be someone who is willing to learn about and experience all those differences. It also made me think about the average effort level of Americans to force themselves out of their comfort zones to learn about them. This video presented information about other cultures that I did not know, and probably would not have known had my professor not shown this video in class. I suppose the question is how can we as future teachers help our students to know and want to know this kind of information?

The Bronx Masquerades Again

I have spent a good chunk of the last week pondering the book Bronx Masquerade and our class discussion of the format. One question that I have been wrestling with the most is why this book was able to make me enjoy the poetry when that is an aspect of Language Arts that I have truly disliked for most of my school career. The last time that I can remember even quasi liking poetry is when my high school freshman English class read Romeo and Juliet. In that case I loved the story and I was familiar enough with it that the poetry format of the writing was secondary to the romance. However, with the Bronx Masquerade the story is in a very different format and the poems were more traditional in style, but I looked forward to reading the poems. This did not change the fact that I still hate William Carlos William's Red Wheelbarrow poem with a passion, but I really enjoyed this set of work.
At first I thought it might be because I was able to connect with the characters when they gave their synopses about the thought processes and events leading up to the creation of the poem, but then I wondered how I was able to connect so strongly in just two to three pages of text. It seems like a contradiction that both of these were able to happen at the same time.
I want to figure out some answer to this question because I want to be able to help my future students to enjoy poetry in a way that I have rarely had the opportunity to. My teacher's taught me to hate poetry by forcing me to analyze it for every poetry unit I can remember. Maybe it's because I did not have the chance to make a connection with the author the way this book gave me a chance to (in the sense that the author of the book creates the authors of the individual poems that I so enjoyed). I want to give my future students the chance to love this form of literature, and to do this most effectively I think it would help to know how this book helped me to like it after so many years of dislike.