Let’s
start from Canada and meet the Inuit people. The Inuits live in the northern
part of North America and Siberia. They’re often called Eskimos, but they
dislike this name and actually regard it as offensive. Anyway, this is
something that actually happened some time ago during a report-card meeting
between teachers and parents at a local school. There was this Inuit parent
talking to her child’s Canadian teacher. At a certain point, the teacher
said: “Your son is talking well in class. He is speaking up a lot.”. And,
much to her surprise, the Inuit parent replied: “I am sorry” (quoted in Atkinson
1997).
Clearly,
there was a clash of expectations here. The teacher was praising the child’s
active participation in class, on the assumption that children at school
should be taking part in lessons by asking questions, discussing things with
the teacher and classmates, reacting to what is said and done by the teacher.
But the Inuit parent had quite a different idea of what going to school and
learning mean, of what teachers and students should be doing in class. For
her, the role of the student was basically to listen, observe and learn. Now,
we can’t appreciate this position unless we know that silence is very much
valued in the Inuit culture: if adults don’t know each other very well, they
often remain silent while they’re in close contact. On the other hand, for
the Inuit parent the role of the teacher was to explain, ask questions and
transmit knowledge - so she was sorry that her child had broken what she took
for granted as the appropriate school norms.
