Dignifying Education: The Emergence of Teachers as Transcultural Messengers
| Pages | 131-149 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-78973-821-620191014 |
| Date | 18 November 2019 |
| Published date | 18 November 2019 |
| Author | Barbara Finkelstein |
Chapter 8
Dignifying Education: The Emergence of
Teachers as Transcultural Messengers
Barbara Finkelstein
Introduction
In the increasingly communicative, interconnected, and interdependent world of
the twenty-rst century, young people across the planet are growing up with an
unprecedented awareness of their connections to one another. They are able to
observe immense disparities of wealth and poverty, privilege, and power. With
few exceptions, they are increasingly aware that they speak different languages,
inhabit different nations, worship at different altars, respect different kinds of
authority, live-in relative states of conict and/or cooperation, and conceive of
their identities in complex ways. They are awash in worlds where encounters
between total strangers from around the globe are the stuff of daily life; the con-
tours of community life and bonds of afliation are trans-local, poly-vocal, and
subject to negotiation; where time-honored habits of heart, mind, and associa-
tion are multitudinous and deeply challenged; where the languages of instruction,
communication, and daily discourse are continually shifting and fusing; where
designations of insiders and outsiders are manifold and uid; and where access to
information and social media sites have expanded their networks of communica-
tion in profound and transformative ways.
What is to become of this new world of unrelenting pluralisms, complex bor-
der crossings, and de-territorialized networks of association? Will young people
in possession of alternative habits of heart, mind, and association learn to honor
rather than demean one another? Will they learn to trust their differences or cele-
brate them; to approach one another with respect rather than suspicion? Will they
regard conict as inevitable or preventable? Will they learn to celebrate rather
than fear and eradicate diversity? Will they use the interconnected and virtual
worlds of Facebook, Tumbler, Twitter, YouTube, and Vimeo to strengthen con-
nections among and between them or exacerbate their differences and continue
cycles of violence and hatred? Will they learn to live as inhabitants of a dystopian
world of chaos, brutality, contest, and humiliation, or as members of a more
Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Human Dignity and Human Rights, 131–149
Copyright © 2020 by Emerald Publishing Limited
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doi:10.1108/978-1-78973-821-620191014
132 Barbara Finkelstein
peaceable global kingdom where dignication informs the social and cultural
practices of everyday life, and each person, has somehow learned to become an
“agent of dignity?”1
This chapter is about the dignifying potential of an array of transcultural educa-
tion practices that suffuse in the cracks and crevices of daily life where young peo-
ple might learn to imagine and reimagine who they are, what they hope to become,
what might be available for them in life, and where they t in the scheme of things.
It is about a million tiny moments of human interaction, transcultural encounter,
and message sending that give form and shape to the meaning of dignity in sites of
teaching and learning. Specically, the chapter centers on the cultural, social, and
educational practices of four individuals who, in the conduct of their daily lives as
educators, have labored to mute the force of adverse circumstances for generations
of dispossessed, status degraded, impoverished, and physically assaulted young
people whom they encounter in their professional lives each day.2
Each individual has grown up, lived, and worked in the company of strangers
in communities of unprecedented cultural congestion. Two are the children of
immigrants to the United States – one who grew up in a family of asylum seek-
ers from Congo; another as a cultural and linguistic double and the offspring of
an intercultural, interethnic marriage between her Irish father and Nicaraguan
mother. Two others, whom I have chosen to pair, are perpetual border crossers
and gradually evolving cultural hybrids who have, over the course of their lives,
acquired and cultivated a highly tutored and experiential understanding of the
world as a moving hub of transcultural connection. One grew up in possession of
a complex transcultural heritage as a Canadian-born Chinese, the daughter, and
granddaughter of Chinese Hakka, and a legatee of Asian-Indian cultural roots;
the other as a Japanese who has shuttled between Japan and the United States
all of her life. Both have inhabited and transgressed a multitude of cultural and
political worlds and, in the process, have acquired a vision of the world as a seed-
bed of opportunity for the construction of more inclusive global communities,
more permeable boundaries of nation-state, and more expansive and culturally
empowering transcultural educational worlds.
Each individual represents a distinct type of dignity worker. Sonia O’Connell is
one of an evolving generation of bilingual and bicultural classroom teachers, who
has spent a professional lifetime teaching English to speakers of other languages
1Nelson Mandela in Donna Hicks (2011).
2Each of these individuals has been a student at the University of Maryland, College
Park. Each has taken my courses in “Transcultural Education Policies and Practices”
and “The Art and Craft of Oral History.” Each has also taken “Independent Studies”
focusing on the contours of “Transcultural Education Theory” and the intersections
of context and voice as a narrative form. For two students – Tomoko Tokunaga and
Omékongo Dibinga – I have served as both PhD advisor and dissertation chair. Sonia
O’Connell is a participating oral historian for the University of Maryland Center for
New American History’s “Voices of Migrants” project, for which I served as senior
advisor. All are voluntary participants.
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