research sources: January 2007 Archives

Linked from UMass' Social and Behavioral Sciences newsletter is an article that quotes one of the people who interviewed me for the STPEC writing teacher position. The article involves the German language program at UMass plus links to other articles on language education in the US, its point being the need for small humanities programs to collaborate in innovative ways with each other.

According to Diane M. Hoffman (working for the American Institutes for Research, Iranians conceive of an "inner self" and an "outer self" which "does not presuppose any necessary conformity between inside and outside; the two can, and in fact often do, coexist in mutually contradictory fashion, without leading to what many Westerners might experience as an uncomfortable dissonance" (1989, p. 36, Ethos).

The article, "Self and Culture Revisited: Culture Acquisition among Iranians in the United States," piqued my imagination regarding the "culture acquisition" of delegates, staff, and interpreters at the European Parliament (EP). Hoffman describes "a dual learning process, involving, on the one hand, knowledge acquisition - a learning about culture - and, on the other, a 'deeper' sort of learning that involves the internalization of another cultural set of values and meanings. This second form of learning involves the inner self and affects the individual's sense of cultural being; it is identity-impacting" (38-39).