Eating Bread and Chocolate on the Tip of the Cultural Iceberg

My most vivid memory from 3 years of high school French is the day Madame handed out hunks of crusty white bread topped with squares of chocolate. breadandchocoate_yoppy

As we munched on our French snack, Madame explained that French kids often ate bread and chocolate after school.

I thought this was an excellent after-school food choice and wondered why it had never occurred to me to pair chocolate with bread. I also thought it was cool to try something French. I decided I wanted to visit France. photo by yoppy

Diving into the cultural water.

A few years later, while studying at a Germany university, I traveled to Paris with two friends. I spoke a little French and ate my weight in bread-and-chocolate snacks.

I also had several, uh, let’s call them intercultural learning opportunities – at restaurants, the train station, the market – that I didn’t learn much from. Until years later when I discovered intercultural theory. At the time, I didn’t think of those intercultural encounters with the French as learning opportunities. Rather, they served as examples that supported my increasingly negative opinion of the French as snobby and rude.

The thing is, back then I thought I understood culture. So I didn’t really question my opinion that the French were snobby and rude people who made delicious bread and chocolate (note: I was only 19 and thought I was right about a lot of things). After all, I’d learned about French culture in high school and was living in Germany. But I didn’t. I mean, I had experienced culture but to be honest, I didn’t understand it.

iceberg

Sure, I could talk about what French kids ate after school (BTW, does anyone know if bread and chocolate is still the after-school-snack of choice?). I knew that a closed German door didn’t necessarily mean “keep out.” And I used du/Sie (the formal and informal forms of “you”) with 95% accuracy.

But I didn’t really understand culture — German culture, French culture, U.S. culture, any specific culture — because I didn’t understand culture in general.

Here’s the point.

I’ve been thinking about my early intercultural experiences because I’ve been thinking about tip of the cultural iceberg activities. A lot. Strengths, weaknesses, how they contribute to developing intercultural competence.

Tip of the cultural iceberg activities engage our senses and focus on the visible, tangible elements of culture. They’re concrete and often experiential. They’re eating bread and chocolate, dancing cumbia, learning how to wear a sari.

Tip of the cultural iceberg activities are typically quite fun. And there are definite strengths to these types of activities. For example, they can:

Draw attention to similarities across cultures (French kids also eat a snack after school!)
Highlight differences (But French kids eat different foods than we do.)
Spark cultural curiosity (I wonder what else French kids do?)
Promote cultural risk-taking (The chocolate and bread was tasty. Maybe I’ll try eating at a French restaurant.)

For young students, those who haven’t had much experience with a specific culture, or for international festivals, these are really appropriate activities and quite powerful experiences.

Furthermore, tip of the cultural iceberg activities promote cultural awareness and can help students develop the requisite attitudes necessary to grow their intercultural competence – attitudes such as respect, openness to difference, and curiosity. This is definitely positive.

But – tip of the cultural iceberg activities are just that: The tip of the cultural iceberg.

These activities don’t touch on the 90% of culture that is mostly invisible to us but strongly influences our attitudes, behavior, and perceptions.

And there’s no guarantee that eating bread and chocolate, dancing cumbia or learning how to wear a sari will help students develop those requisite attitudes on which intercultural competence is built.

As a teacher, I loved tip of the cultural iceberg activities and incorporated them into my German teaching all the time. At the same time, I always felt like I wasn’t sharing the entire cultural picture with my students. I wanted them to not just learn some things about German culture, I wanted them to be able to travel abroad and learn from their intercultural learning opportunities - in Germany or elsewhere – more effectively than I had.

What I realized, when I started learning intercultural theory, is that I’d only been sharing the top 10% of the cultural iceberg with my students. Something was indeed missing – the 90% of culture that’s invisible, the part that is often at the root of intercultural conflicts. And a language to talk about all those invisible elements of culture. And tools to learn about and from all those intercultural learning opportunities.