Culturally laden string cheese

As some of you may or may not know, my academic advisor/mentor is revered as almost a god (little 'g') in some circles. This has some advantages and disadvantages, and sometimes the two overlap. One of the advantages is that all sorts of people, from all over the world come to Madison, WI to study with the man. In our weekly meetings we occasionally have just as many visiting scholars as normal enrollees present, and there are often more countries than states represented. This has really brought to light how US-centric my views are, but that is a topic for another post. :)

Well, the class I am taking this semester, with said advisor, met for the first time last Monday. There was the normal representation of the US, and many Asian & South American countries as well. One of the students is a visiting scholar from China. She is, I have no doubt, brilliant, and already holds a faculty position at a University in China. The reason I introduce this woman to you is this: One of the items we had for snack (because EVERY good Curriculum & Instruction class has to involve food) was string cheese. Individually wrapped. After trying to determine how to open this delectable morsel, she leaned over to me and asked "How do I open this?", because as anyone who enjoys individually wrapped string cheese knows, you can't really rip the plastic, you have to peel the front and back pieces apart. Otherwise you end up with a mess. I showed her how to do it, and then we laughed over the simplicity, and dual complexity of it all.

One of the base tenets of my program at this point is the acknowledgment that there are many "real" experiences of a given event. Every person involved in an event has their own understanding and internalization of what is/has happened based on their background, past experiences, etc (for the sake of cool terms lets say this is part of "socio-cultural cognition" - just don't say it to a room of doctoral students, lol). This is why you get different historicizations (yes that is a word) of any given event. Feminist perspective would be one example of a well known historicizing lens. "White Men", "Native American", "European" would be other possible less inflammatory lenses. What history all comes down to is an expression of power through hidden exclusions... but maybe I digress. :) Regardless, here, in front of me, after I had just had the opportunity to sit in a 3 hour class beginning the discussion of this very thing, was the perfect example. To many people I am sure they would see this lack of experience opening string cheese as lack of intelligence; when in reality it is more an expression of such a dichotomous experience base that she did not have the translatable knowledge necessary to perform the task. Since I know she had the base "intelligence".

So, the "moral" to my rambling? (haha) Try to think about what you take for granted as being a "given", I guarantee for someone it would be a completely new thing... My advisor used an analogy I really like. "The last thing to recognize that there is water is a fish."

Happy headache free days!! (hmm, avoiding my posts might help that.. lol)