Chapter 35: Activating Critical Cultural Awareness Through Outside of Class Cultural Activities

I teach mostly novice and intermediate Spanish courses at Milwaukee Area Technical College, an urban two-year college. My courses place great importance on what my colleagues and I call outside of class cultural activities (OCCAs). These are opportunities for students to extend beyond their comfort zone by exploring cultural perspectives outside of their own. OCCAs are driven by the need to help students develop critical cultural awareness (CCA) that is described by Byram (1997) as the ability to critically reflect on one’s own culture as well as those being studied.

In Spanish I, our students begin with two prescribed OCCAs. The first is watching a talk that explores concepts from intercultural communicative competence (ICC) to differences between low- and high-context cultures. The second is an opportunity to recognize one’s own unconscious bias by taking at least two of the Harvard Hidden Bias Tests. These first two OCCAs lay the framework for the following competencies we want our students to develop: