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John Hall
Joined: 16 Mar 2004
Posts: 452
Location: San Jose, Costa Rica
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 Posted: Fri Mar 23, 2007 7:55 pm Post subject: |
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| guty wrote: |
| Why would anyone be offended that other cultures have different views? |
How about if you are the object of the offence?
Go see the movie "Borat." The whole movie is an example of this. |
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dmb
Joined: 12 Feb 2003
Posts: 8397
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| Posted: Fri Mar 23, 2007 8:40 pm Post subject: |
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^( I know I will be slated for this post)
Borat is hilarious.
It takes the pi$$ out of Americans.
Americans have the inability to laugh at themselves.
I am Scottish, people(usually the English) have been taking the pi$$ for years. Do we care? nope. Why? We have a sense of humour.
Right, whose round is it? |
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mondrian
Joined: 20 Mar 2005
Posts: 658
Location: "was that beautiful coastal city in the NE of China"
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| Posted: Fri Mar 23, 2007 11:35 pm Post subject: |
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| guty wrote: |
| Quote: |
| they can make jokes about women being mechanics or managers, but if they do that in the presence of a person from an English-speaking country, they are quite likely going to offend that person |
Why would anyone be offended that other cultures have different views? |
| dmb wrote: |
^( I know I will be slated for this post)
Borat is hilarious.
It takes the pi$$ out of Americans.
Americans have the inability to laugh at themselves.
I am Scottish, people(usually the English) have been taking the pi$$ for years. Do we care? nope. Why? We have a sense of humour.
Right, whose round is it? |
Developing this a bit further:
If you have this "inability" then are you not unable to forgive the views or actions of others? You are polarised by your beliefs.
As an example I cite the world-wide reaction to the Mohammed "turban" cartoon; and what is acceptible as cartoons (ie. published) in the mainstream US newspapers |
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rusmeister
Joined: 15 Jun 2006
Posts: 867
Location: Russia
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| Posted: Sat Mar 24, 2007 4:10 am Post subject: |
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| dmb wrote: |
Americans have the inability to laugh at themselves.
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Hey! I represent that remark!  |
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rusmeister
Joined: 15 Jun 2006
Posts: 867
Location: Russia
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| Posted: Sat Mar 24, 2007 4:24 am Post subject: |
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| John Hall wrote: |
| rusmeister wrote: |
| This seems to assume that they represent our culture. I disagree. |
If you are referring to what I have written above, then you are completely wrong.
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| Perhaps these textbooks are not aiming to show us the reality, but instead, what is possible in English-speaking countries. There is a North Star book that shows a woman fixing her car. Is this realistic? No. (I believe I read somewhere that only 1.4 % of mechanics in the United States are women.) Is it possible? Yes. Is it ridiculous? No. |
After writing the above passage, I decided to check out where I got that information about the 1.4% of mechanics in the U.S. being female. In turns out that it was from the same unit of the same North Star textbook, just a couple of pages later. Clearly, this picture was not included in the textbook to portray a typical situation in an English-speaking country. It was on the very first page of the unit, where pictures and photos are frequently located for the purpose of generating discussion among students. I cannot see this as an attempt by a radical minority to impose its values on the rest of the world.
Rusmeister, the texts you refer to may be a different case. I am not familiar with them so I can not comment on them. However, I would still maintain that just because a picture is included in a textbook does not necessarily mean that it is meant to portray how things really are in English-speaking countries. |
It is true that my text (Round-Up) is an extreme example. Such changes are less systematic in the other texts I work with. But RU was acquired by Longman several years ago, and it was evidently the new publisher that ordered the change. In that text it is purely ideological and systematic. I mean pretty much EVERY picture that depicted a woman working in the kitchen or holding a baby, or a male boss with a female assistant, etc, not just a few. But again, it was a big-time publisher (even the artists are different) that ordered this.
I didn't say it is meant to portray how things really are. I also didn't say 'attempt'. |
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rusmeister
Joined: 15 Jun 2006
Posts: 867
Location: Russia
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| Posted: Sat Mar 24, 2007 4:56 am Post subject: |
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| SueH wrote: |
I'm by no means anti tradition: I'm a traditional musician for one thing, but I do have a slight problem with those old traditions of foot-binding, suttee, and more current ones such as female infanticide and infibullation.
I haven't really got time for a long and detailed post: firstly I can't be ar**d, and secondly I've got to go to football training any moment, but I still wonder why you are so concerned now with these changes. Were you concerned before about textbooks when they were quite the opposite. I'd also dispute your hints about women's freedoms before the 20th century, certainly from the viewpoint of the laws in my own country. As for the views about women in employment, you obviously didn't do much on the British Industrial revolution.
So I take it you don't like this 'deliberate reversal of stereotypes' - as you put it. I never get any sense in any of your posts (this thread and others) that you actually object to the opposite situation. I wouldn't be surprised if you argued otherwise, but that's the _impression_ I get.
I'm off to kick balls.  |
Hi Sue!
Actually, just to clarify. I don't really believe in 'the opposite situation' as you put it. I don't believe in any natural opposition of men and women. I believe that teachings that establish this (through modern interpretations of history, esp. revisionism) artificially cast men and women as some kind of historical foes, which is silly, but has been swallowed by an awful lot of people. It relies heavily on casting everything in terms of power. We need each other, plain and simple.
I'm totally with you on the traditions you describe. Of course, we are big on this monstrous tradition:
| Quote: |
On Reproductive Rights
"Let all the babies be born. Then let us drown those we do not like." - Babies and Distributism, GK Chesterton, 11/12/32 |
(Please note that this is a facetious comment on abortion, aka western infanticide.
The question "Why wasn't I concerned 'before'?" presupposes that I hold a worldview that accepts this opposition and the idea that equality means identicality (that men's definitions of power and success have always been more correct than women's, and that women throughout history have been wrong and blind until Emily Pankhurst came and 'woke them up'). But that is precisely what most folk are taught in school today.
(Why can't I bring a baby to term or feed him from my own breast? It's not fair!)
Yes, there is injustice in the world. But a natural situation can be wrongly perceived as injustice, and in any event, I am not addressing that here. Only a specific situation in specific textbooks.
As to why now, it has only been over the past year or so that I have learned about these changes, and have found time to mention them now. |
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11:59
Joined: 31 Aug 2006
Posts: 632
Location: Hong Kong: The 'Pearl of the Orient'
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| Posted: Sat Mar 24, 2007 1:37 pm Post subject: |
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| rusmeister wrote: |
| Has anyone else noticed the changes between earlier editions and the later ones? Specifically, the pictures that support the grammar concepts (and sometimes the text as well). The changes are clearly ideologically based on feminist thinking and systematically removed all depictions of women working in the kitchen, with babies, as nurses or secretaries and replaced them with men, even to the point of eliminating male manual laborers and replacing them with women. |
I have been doing part-time editing, copy-editing, and proof reading work for a major publisher for many years now and some of that work involves dealing with textbooks, often ESL products. There has been no end of new guidelines introduced in this period, many resulting in some of the changes you cite, particularly when it comes to the accompanying artwork.
In my view this is simply one of the (fairly predictable) results of globalisation. With an ever-increasing international market there often comes some quite dramatic cultural, social, and political divergences, and no publishers, producers, or whoever want (or can afford) to risk offending and thereby alienating themselves from any portions of that expanding market. This is one of the very real paradoxes of globalisation: The process itself does not increase or enhance cultural diversity, but in fact merely serves to reduce everything to a lower intellectual level, that is, down to an inert, colourless, flavourless, culture-less stock which is inherently free of any potential controversy (such as outrageously sexist images of women holding babies or men not being depicted in a traditionally female role). Indeed, I would say that these days more effort goes into such aspects of political correctness than gets put into any pedagogical elements the text may have originally sought to possess. This can be seen in the international news media, too, where facts and issues are often no longer even mentioned, let alone analysed and debated. It seems that they believe (and expect the viewer to believe) that having a reported and a cameraman in a riot explains why the stones are being thrown. |
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ilaria
Joined: 26 Jan 2007
Posts: 88
Location: Sicily
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| Posted: Sat Mar 24, 2007 2:40 pm Post subject: |
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11:59 wrote:
| Quote: |
| With an ever-increasing international market there often comes some quite dramatic cultural, social, and political divergences, and no publishers, producers, or whoever want (or can afford) to risk offending and thereby alienating themselves from any portions of that expanding market. This is one of the very real paradoxes of globalisation: The process itself does not increase or enhance cultural diversity, but in fact merely serves to reduce everything to a lower intellectual level, that is, down to an inert, colourless, flavourless, culture-less stock which is inherently free of any potential controversy (such as outrageously sexist images of women holding babies or men not being depicted in a traditionally female role). |
To the publisher, the blander the coursebook, the more copies they can sell in repressive and intolerant countries.
In Italian, there is a word, squ�llido, meaning dreary, bleak, without heart, soul or passion, and this is the feeling these books often produce in me. Another lesson about shopping... blah... 'Which book do you like best, the pink one or the blue one?'
Going back to the OP's point about the representation of gender roles, I think these images are trying not to reinforce stereotypes that many see as outdated. However, human life is much more diverse and interesting than the pictures in our coursebooks suggest.
In the brave new world inhabited by 'coursebook people', women are construction workers, men change nappies and mop floors, and proportionately more people in authority are black and Asian than in reality. I don't have any serious objection to this. What I really really dislike is that in this utopian coursebook society, everyone is genetically altered at birth to be more physically attractive than average. There is something in the water that keeps them permanently happy. And most people over about fifty seem to have been euthanised. In the 150 pages of my elementary coursebook there are only 11 images of older people, and these include illustrations of 'grandparents' and 'the oldest woman in the world'. It appears that old people are only useful for illustrating grammar and vocabulary points related to their age.
The rest are shiny, happy people doing shiny, happy and (most importantly) uncontroversial things. |
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rusmeister
Joined: 15 Jun 2006
Posts: 867
Location: Russia
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| Posted: Sat Mar 24, 2007 6:27 pm Post subject: |
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| Those are a couple of good posts (11:59 and Ilaria)! Thanks for the perspectives! |
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guty
Joined: 10 Apr 2003
Posts: 365
Location: on holiday
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| Posted: Mon Mar 26, 2007 7:32 am Post subject: |
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John Hall,
I'm a bit lost here. Who do you think Borat is laughing at? Are you saying that you took offence because it was laughing at Americans?
SueH,
the huge majority of EFL learners neither want nor need preparation for living in an English speaking country, so why should they need to know appropriate behaviour in an English work environment?
For those who teach EFL abroad, isn't going to live and work in another culture, and 'taking offence' at some of their customs or beliefs an example of the just the kind intolerance that they take offence to? |
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Mike_2003
Joined: 27 Mar 2003
Posts: 344
Location: Bucharest, Romania
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| Posted: Mon Mar 26, 2007 12:00 pm Post subject: |
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In fact, sometimes the unrealistic reflection of reality that these books present to the user/reader could possibly result in that person having an incorrect perception of the country or culture in question. We all know how easily people's perceptions are affected by the media, and this is just another branch of it.
If most mechanics are men, what's wrong with them using a picture of a man? If most medical assistants are women, what's wrong with showing a picture of a woman? In a really egalitarian world we should be able to use a picture of a man or a woman without accusation of reinforcing stereotypes. Should a textbook about Africa only have pictures of the white minorities in it? Of course not, that'd be stupid.
We are paid to improve the students' level of English, not to dictate our morals or ethics to them to make them 'better people'. I say we should focus on teaching the language and leave the students to make up their own minds about the world based on their own experiences.
Mike |
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zorro (3)
Joined: 19 Dec 2006
Posts: 202
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| Posted: Mon Mar 26, 2007 12:24 pm Post subject: |
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From a humanistic perspective, we are also paid to educate the person as a whole, which includes morals and ethics. I think it's a matter of where to draw the line. Making simple observations about political correctness may not be too damaging to the students - it could be seen as raising their awareness about the ways in which the media (including print media) influence people.
Of course, it's all a matter of perspective. I'm not sure that we live in an egalitarian world. But that's just my perspective. |
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John Hall
Joined: 16 Mar 2004
Posts: 452
Location: San Jose, Costa Rica
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| Posted: Mon Mar 26, 2007 3:26 pm Post subject: |
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| guty wrote: |
John Hall,
I'm a bit lost here. Who do you think Borat is laughing at? Are you saying that you took offence because it was laughing at Americans? |
The character Borat does not laugh at anybody. We laugh at Borat.
| guty wrote: |
| the huge majority of EFL learners neither want nor need preparation for living in an English speaking country, so why should they need to know appropriate behaviour in an English work environment? |
It all depends on where you are teaching. I teach students who hope to either work for multinational companies or who hope to be able to work in the future with English-speaking clients, so professional behavior and ethics is something quite important for all of them to learn. Obviously none of my students are that extreme, but in one respect part of what I do could be thought of as teaching my students not to be a Borat. |
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Justin Trullinger
Joined: 28 Jan 2005
Posts: 3110
Location: Seoul, South Korea and Myanmar for a bit
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| Posted: Mon Mar 26, 2007 4:25 pm Post subject: |
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DMB- COnsider yourself slated.  I am an American. And I have a sense of humour. (Translated for your benefit. I would usually write "humor." )
I enjoyed the film Borat, though there were some elements of it that I was uncomfortable with. (Setting people up to laugh at them for their sincere religious beliefs strikes me as perhaps over the line.)
That said, "Kazakstan supports your war of terror" is one of the best lines about our current situation that I've heard in ages.
But back to the nominal point of this thread: Why is it a problem that textbooks present pictures that may not reflect reality? I don't use textbooks to teach reality- there is no need. There's too much real reality out there.
But I truly enjoy textbooks that may provoke thought. And where I'm living, a man who is a nurse may in fact provoke thought. Whether or not it reflects reality. And having worked with a number or nurses in my life, many of whom were men, I don't see anything too unrealistic about it. But even if it were...
Best,
Justin |
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rusmeister
Joined: 15 Jun 2006
Posts: 867
Location: Russia
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| Posted: Mon Mar 26, 2007 5:27 pm Post subject: |
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| Justin Trullinger wrote: |
DMB-
But back to the nominal point of this thread: Why is it a problem that textbooks present pictures that may not reflect reality? I don't use textbooks to teach reality- there is no need. There's too much real reality out there.
But I truly enjoy textbooks that may provoke thought. And where I'm living, a man who is a nurse may in fact provoke thought. Whether or not it reflects reality. And having worked with a number or nurses in my life, many of whom were men, I don't see anything too unrealistic about it. But even if it were...
Best,
Justin |
I thought the point of the thread was obvious. It's not that there's anything wrong with male nurses or even female mechanics. Read at least my earlier posts if not everyone's - not into repeating myself at the moment.
That said, thought could be provoked by a lot of things. Depicting pregnant men might be fun. Or 4-year-old children defeating ageism by voting in national elections would also provoke thought. Perhaps to keep the analogy closer, by having pictures of skinny nerds kicking sand in Charles Atlas's face. It is, after all, not beyond the realm of possibility.
Like I said, if you approve of deliberate and systematic stereotype reversal, good for you. Note 11:59's post - he (she) works in the industry that produces this.
Ilaria's point also touches on what's been bothering me. Care to respond to their posts? |
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