Photo courtesy of Biola University.
By Michael Longinow
Pedagogy is a journey. We don’t get anywhere until we gas it up, merge into traffic and get it on. So this semester I stopped talking about the interplay of faith, culture and media. I set up a series of projects whereby all students in my class would have to interact with a person of another culture and another faith. I couldn’t require that this encounter be in a language other than English, but this was strongly encouraged.
Last time I tried this, I required students to visit a place of worship that was not Christian. It didn’t work — mostly because I don’t teach in a department of religion and I wasn’t preparing students well enough to understand what they were encountering in those places of worship.
This time it was about food (or nails, or hair, or dresses.) Students had to write a series of business-related stories. The angle was the cross-cultural and faith-interactive aspects of business in the Los Angeles area. There’s a whole world to choose from. Complaints of no place were muted; I don’t say silenced because there is an amazing resilience to the undergraduate ability to find creative cross-cultural experience impossible. But the conversations about impossible are shorter.
Students started the class with a self-reflective paper about their own faith journey. It was, by design, a probe into why they believe what they believe. If they believe little or nothing, they still had to write it about and tell why. The only real requirement on this paper was honesty and detail.
Story 1 was about business run by someone from another country. Students were required to do research on the trends in businesses of that kind, of that description, in the business press, in sociology journals, in journals of anthropology. The more they complied with this requirement, the better went their interviews. Religion wasn’t supposed to be part of this story unless it came up. The point was culture: how internationals navigated majority culture to do business, whether they catered mostly to those of their own culture or not, how they dealt with transition to majority culture themselves and those they hired or worked alongside in what are often multicultural collections of businesses in plazas and malls. All students had to
Story 2 was about faith, religious experience, and these business owners’ sense of the spiritual as they did business. The results were an interesting study. Some were quite open about their faith, with icons and religious artifacts spread throughout the business: Buddhas big and small, wall-hangings showing religious scenes, incense by the cash register.
But what was a surprise was the response to questions. Most of my students are white and look and act like majority culture folks. For them to ask a person of another culture about their faith, in the workplace, was for some business owners an affront or a threat. Some clammed up. The young owners, in particular, said the faith artifacts were just culture — stuff they put up to make customers happy. The extreme case was a young Muslim woman who did eyebrow threading in her home. It was helping paying the bills for her family and was going strong, even though it wasn’t advertised other than word of mouth. When the question of faith came up, the woman told the student’s Arabic interpreter that she couldn’t answer any questions about religion because she’d been told by legal counsel never to bring it up. She was an asylee.
The project was a massive wake-up call in this Christian university where students opt into an environment where their faith in Christ is nurtured regularly in optional chapel services, dorm Bible studies and student-led social action efforts driven by commitment to Christ-driven compassion for the poor, the alienated, the enslaved.
The key, students learned, was persistence in the journalistic pursuit. Cross-cultural journalism is hard because it’s personal. It can’t be done (with any success) unless one is bought in. And to buy in, students need to confront their own faith and what it means in culture around them.
Books I used for this project were Judith Buddenbaum’s “Reporting News About Religion” (note: hard to find — for me and students), Harris-Schaupp’s “Being White: Finding our Place in a MultiEthnic World,” and generous helpings of YouTube insights from cross-cultural journalists in the U.S., Britain and other parts of the developed world.
Video clips about cross-cultural encounter that kept them all breathing were from “The Terminal,” “Blood Diamond,” and “Hidalgo.”