The golden age of education

The essay I’m writing is based on the movie “Elizabeth: the golden age”. This is a movie that tells the story of Queen Elizabeth and the political, economical, religious and social situations in the XVI century. The most important issue in this movie is not only how entertaining or well done the movie is, but to see the context in which the story develops and understand the importance of these situations in the evolution of England as a country. For the same reason, I consider this movie as a relevant tool for teachers (or future teachers) of English, because language is always linked to culture, and if an educator wants to teach a language, he/she needs to start by giving at least a general context of the culture that express itself trough that particular language.
Now I’ll give you the arguments that reinforce my thesis that this movie is a useful tool for teachers.

First of all, language represents the identity of a group of people. As I said before, language is the representation and expression of people’s traditions, beliefs, costumes, social relationships and so forth, in other words their culture. This movie in particular, gives us an idea of what the foundations of the English culture were, how the identity of the British people began to take form, and with it, we can start understanding what the English language truly represents; not only a language , but a whole culture.

The second argument as relation to the first one about the relationship between culture and language, but goes a little bit beyond. Brown(1994) says that language is context bound. It means that language should not be taught as an isolated issue, but to relate it to the context from where it comes from, in order to make it closer to the students, more meaningful and to assure a better understanding. There are aspects of language (spoken or written) that are closely linked to the culture, for example idioms that represent a specific political issue, or distance between speakers that vary between one culture and another. This is why it is important that students of English know the context and the culture of the language they are learning. It makes their understanding of the language more complete and not only a thing of learning grammar rules.

The third argument has to do with stereotypes and attitudes. Brown (1994) says that people always have stereotypes or make generalizations about people from another culture, and according to these they will have a certain attitude towards the culture and as a consequence, to their language. If teachers made their students watch a movie that represents the culture (or in the case of Elizabeth, the foundations of the country’s culture) of the country where the target language comes from, it will make the process of accepting a different culture or way of seeing easier. It can erase some mistaken beliefs abut a culture and possibly a bad attitude which provokes rejection to learning a certain language.

Finally, when students learn a second or foreign language, a feeling of culture shock comes with it. They feel inhibitions towards the “alien” language, and teachers need to be sensitive in front of this situation and be the guide and facilitator between the language (and culture) of the students and the target language (and its culture). You might wonder how you, teacher, can do this, but do not worry because it’s no that hard. Brown (1994) proposes some ideas like readings, role-plays, simulation games, movies and many more. So here you can see that making students watch a movie about their foreign language’ culture it is useful to make the distance between the students culture and the target one, shorter. Use as many facilitators as you can, any activity related to take your students closer to the foreign culture.

As a conclusion I can say that the relationship between culture and language is very strong. For a teacher (or future teacher) of a language that is not the students native language, it is important to bring the foreign culture to the classroom, because as I have said, it helps the students to understand the target language better, to feel it closer and more meaningful and also to help them deal with their inhibitions and misconceptions about that language and it’s culture. Thus, this movie is a useful tool for teachers because it gives a context to the country and culture of the target language and as I have explained, to know the culture of a language is absolutely relevant at the moment of teaching a foreign or second language.

Modern Times

The Industrial Revolution was a significant moment in human history. It changed people’s way of living, became the reason way people start believing in better opportunities but also the reason of their disappointment, machines became more important and productive than men, everyone was replaceable and life became unsure.

We could see in the movie how important was for employers to produce, that employees used all their time in working because they had the chance to earn much more money than before the industrialization. Everything was production, and the ones that weren’t productive had to leave. That’s how millions of people ended up in the streets, looking for the opportunities they dreamed about.

But modernity and industrialization not only changed people’s life in that epoch, it also changed ours. Since that period of time until our days, people are worried about production. Workers are abused, bosses there is people who believed that thanks to the creation of more industries in the cities they’ll all have a job, and now they live in miserable conditions working for a few bucks. So nothing has really changed since then.

Queen Elizabeth I

Elizabeth I was, to my eyes, the most important women for Britain of all times. There is history before Elizabeth and after her. She had the country just “starting” to be formed, in terms of language, culture, territory and also defending itself from other countries, but she also made the choices that became Britain in the world power we all know about.

What happened after Elizabeth reign? We could see in the movie many factors that were relevant to answer this question. First of all, Elizabeth was a protestant which broke the relationship that Britain had with Spain during Mary’s reign. I’ll explain this a little bit more. Elizabeth was Henry VIII daughter, and he was the man that actually kicked the church out of Britain because nobody accepted that he wanted to divorce of Catalina de Aragon. So the fight with Spain started there, when Henry declared himself kinds and pope of Britain. After he died, his other daughter became queen, Mary I. she was a catholic and she married a Spanish prince to rebuild the bonds with Spain. And finally Elizabeth comes to the power and she kick the church out again because they didn’t want her to rule alone (not to marry anyone) so she became protestant. This is the context to understand the fight between Spain and Britain and also its consequence: because the Catholics and they’re rules were not longer in Britain, people actually had some freedom related to the religion they followed (because Elizabeth didn’t kill Catholics for their credo).

Other important factor to understand the importance of Elizabeth’s reign is the expansion. When Sir Walter Raleigh arrived in Britain bringing “treasures” from the New World, Elizabeth realizes who important is that Britain spread its wings and knows the world outside. Before this, Britain was a country which still was looking for an identity and defending itself from outsiders, but after this episode, the country started looking for more territory, more places to trade with, and at the end, the conquer of places to make them colonies.

Finally, the last concept I’ll refer to is the queen Elizabeth itself. She was a strong women but with a big heart. She would defend her people to death because she loved them and believed in her mission, to rule the country but for the best of people.

She never got married because she didn’t need so, she was married to God, as she said, and her kids were her people. Maybe she didn’t want to get married because she knew that men want to fight and want more and more power, but only a woman can understand what it is to love the people under your command and protection more than anything. And this made the difference between her reign and all the others that had pass and the ones that would come after.

My definitions

Here I’ll try to define the 3 main concepts we have studied in classes, I found it quite difficult but I’ll do my best:

Civilization is a group of people in a certain time and place that share ideals, beliefs, costumes, a political and economical system, language and common manners that make it different from other groups of people. And the set of characteristics I just mentioned are what we call the culture of these groups of people.

And these 2 concepts are important to know in order to understand any group of people. Specially the one we’ll see later on in class: the British civilization.

And the third but not less important is the concept of critical thinking. Critical thinking is the ability to analyze, reflect and go over things in a thorough way, not just take everything for granted or just criticize. Finally and the most important part is that people should act, do something about the reflections about the world they do. This concept is fundamental when we want to analyze and understand everything we see in class, not to believe exactly what others tell us about the reality, specially about history, because we have to take all the evidence and create our own perspective.

Natives&Immigrants

Today I’ll talk about natives and immigrants, whose relationship brought the birth of what we know as England.

As in all places around the globe, Britain was built by the mixture of natives and immigrants. People went to live to England looking for more lands or an appropriate place to live, but as in most places it became a problem because nobody like to share their lands and less to be forced to accept someone else’s culture. For this reason there are wars and fights between natives and immigrants, but once the 2 parts start trying to live in peace, they start mixing their cultures, their traditions and ways of living.

This is not an isolated fact, it happened in the whole world like in our country, the integration of two cultures (Spanish and natives) not always peaceful, but even during many years of war the people learn to leave together, to share their lands and resources in exchange of knowledge, help, trading, peace and so forth.

Culture Questionnaire

This experience was one of the most scaring and interesting thing I've done in the university. it was scaring because I'm not used to talk to strangers in the street and less to ask them questions about how much they know about something or what they like.
But it was also interesting. The answers I got gave a new perspective about Chilean citizens. I used to see people from my country as very shallow and misinformed about the world, but I found out that it was not exactly as I thought. I found that I had wrong images or prejudice on people but they proved me wrong. Not all of them are misinformed, not all of them watch TV all day long, not all of them do not read. But on the other hand I got some very clear examples of my prejudices. People who did not know much about the place they live in or that their answer what they think I wanted to hear instead of saying their real opinion.

I also think that this questionnaire represented quite well what people in general think culture is. it included questions about their likes or their knowledge which is a part of culture anyway, but I couldn't see like real opinions or honest answers because people was to worried about what the "correct information" was, what they learnt at school or what the books say it is necessary to know.
Thus, for me a pretty important impression it is that culture in some way it is not always representing people believes, costumes, ideals, thoughts, and so forth, but it is also a generalization of what some people thought it was correct to know or do. Not what they are, it is what they pretend to be.

My expectations for “Culture and Civilization” class

What I really hope to get from this class is a lot of new information about a topic which I love: history, especially about England (I just don’t like Chilean history, and I’m not a huge fan of U.S history either) I hope the books we’re supposed to read were not too tedious, because I think this is a topic which can be very motivating and interesting especially if we are motivated enough. I have a very good feeling about the teacher, I think she’s pretty cool and I hope we can get along very well. I don’t like too many expositive classes, so I which we could have more interactive classes and that this topic doesn’t become a regular history class were we only have to write and listen lots and lots of information. The movie idea is great, I’m a movie fan so everything related to it is awesome for me, and I think is a very good way to catch people attention. Well I think that’s it, oh I forgot, my biggest expectation about this class is to pass the course. Thanks and good by.