Teaching "Culture" in the Foreign Language Classroom

(from question #1 of my annual report this year)
Question #1:
Please look over the list of your departmental goals (above). Choosing from goals 1, 2 or 3:
2. understand and appreciate the cultures, people and societies of the language(s) they study.

• discuss one goal which in your experience is particularly challenging or hard to achieve, and what makes it so.

This goal, to foster an understanding and appreciation of the the cultures, peoples and societies of the the Spanish language is one that has always daunted me as a Spanish teacher.

I know that universal understanding and tolerance of all cultures (or even just Spanish speaking ones) is a big task for any Spanish class. I know and am confident in my ability to teach kids how to speak and write Spanish. But I find myself feeling like I don't have the background to teach about ALL of the people and cultures. I can talk for hours about the people of Spain, or Costa Rica and Nicaragua, but since I have not spent much time in other Spanish speaking countries, I feel like I can't do as good a job speaking about about the people of those places. But, of course that is just goofy-- because, of course, it is not supposed to be about ME.

One thing I did a few times, which I wish I had done more often was have a round table table homework assignment when we decided to look at a new country (as it came up in the textbook). The homework would be: Find out something interesting or noteworthy about [insert country name/region]. A couple of times I just gave the kids 3 minutes in class to look something up with their laptops. Then we would go around the room and everyone would share. Some kids came up with interesting things, but others just read some bullet points off wikipedia. The depth of their contribution was pretty much directly related to their internet searching literacy. The vast majority of the things that kids share are things that I had not known previously.

I can learn just as much as the students can about these people and places. And with the resources out there I need to work to increase my comfort level in exposing to them that I have so much to learn too. (I worked on this a great deal as a nervous Biology teacher, but for some reason it is harder for me in Spanish classes.)

I think that I missed some opportunities to do more with this in my Spanish 5 class. We had an ongoing collaborative project with a group of students in Malaga, Spain in which we all posted to a common blog. We could have done much more with this than we did but as it was we learned a lot about Spanish culture (as it is NOW-- which was cool).

So in conclusion, a willingness to create more student centered inquiry in language classes to teach culture is something I wish I had spent more time creating space for throughout this year. It seems that this may be a challenge across our department. We teach what we know, and we are reticent to allow space in our courses for students to explore things we don't know which for me anyway, are many.