Introducing Wonders of Culture Boxes

Plain Dealer, Tuesday August 19, 2003

When two Japanese students from John Carroll University visited Maria Stallard’s fourth grade class at McKinley Elementary School this spring, her students were enthralled by more than just the young women’s presentation about their culture. “Not one child in my room had ever even met a Japanese person,” Stallard says. “ So to be able to speak to these wonderful girls was a remarkable experience for my students.”

The in-classroom visit by international students was just one component of the Culture Box program, which offered to the Cleveland Municipal Schools by the Cleveland Council on World Affairs (CCWA). Intended to introduce students to a variety of international cultures and global issues to prepare them for their roles as good citizens, the new educational effort evolved out of previous programs developed under the Council’s Global Classroom division. In addition to Japan, countries studied this year in 18 classes, grades 3 through 10 included India, Egypt, Kenya, Ghana, South Africa, China and Malaysia. This school year, more than 35 classes are expected to participate in the program, according to Paula Cohen, director of education for the CCWA.

Cohen adds that while there are approximately 10 councils on world affairs around the U.S., only about four or five offer a Culture Box program. However, those programs are typically developed in-house as collections of artifacts from the particular nation, which are then leased to the schools studying that country, rather than an interactive program that includes research and participation by the students to create their own Culture Box.

“We thought it was much more effective to so something interactive that would engage the students,” Cohen says. “ We also wanted toe combine that with visits from international students to enrich and solidify the students’ understanding of a foreign country, which has proven to be a less passive experience.”

The key to the program, which runs from February through June, lies in furnishing students with a hands-on opportunity to explore and discover a foreign country’s culture by using the library and the Internet to research a nation’s history. The students separate into teams, with each focusing on various aspects of that country such as economic, political, environmental and educational systems, as well as social, cultural and religious practices and traditions. Students also collect cultural artifacts unique to that country, cataloguing and preserving them in a traditional banker’s box.

These items later serve as the foundation for a presentation that often features arts and crafts, clothing, folktales, food and recipes, toys and games, and musical instruments. For the presentation, students often dress up in traditional garb, and the presentations are broadcast to other schools via teleconferencing.

Of course, the program also emphasizes field trips and first-hand experiences wherever possible. CCWA engages the services of appropriate cultural institutions to enhance the experiences for the students, such as the Cleveland Museum of Art, the African-American Cultural Center or various local ethnic restaurants or stores such as the Cleland African Market. For her class’s Japanese Culture Box, for example, Stallard’s students visited the Cleveland Buddhist Temple, attended the Japanese community’s Cherry Blossom Festival and dined at the Sakura Japanese Restaurant in Lakewood.

Another distinctive feature of the Culture Box program is the involvement of “foreign” advisors,” who are international students from Case Western Reserve, John Carroll and Cleveland State universities and Baldwin-Wallace College. The students give a face to the country, while they guide their students through their cultures via classroom presentations. For Stallard’s class, two Japanese students introduced the children to the traditional tea ceremony, gave them cards with their names written in Japanese, helped them write letters to Japanese children, and taught them how to make origami cranes, which have become a symbol pf peace.

Ultimately, Stallard believes, in addition to introducing students to new cultures, the program may have another extended benefit. “These days, the U.S. needs all the friends we can get, and our kids love Japan now, and the Japanese girls who have g one back to teach in Japan loved my children,” she says. “So even though the program lasted a few months, the impact will last over a lifetime.”