Benjamin Fisher-Rodriguez
2024名人堂 Nominee
十分佤邦
2024年决赛选手 PNCFL
德语和西班牙语
研究 suggests that traveling to new places helps us gain mental distance from our daily lives and approach any problem areas with greater flexibility and creativity. It is my belief that every day, language teachers give young people these same benefits of travel without ever requiring any of them to physically leave the classroom space, creating better communicators, 合作者, and critical thinkers. 我深信这一点, for it has been my own experience and journey as both a learner and an educator.
Language learning allows us to travel within and without, inspiring us to see ourselves with greater clarity while exploring unfamiliar cultures and places. 这样做的时候, we must constantly interrogate how we go about meeting our most basic human need for connection with others through communication. 我们看到, as if for the first time, the cultural products that we interact with regularly, the practices of our community life, and glimpses of the underlying perspectives that we take for granted. This can be somewhat disorienting, but also blessedly refreshing. We travel away from ourselves and are able to see the forest for the trees, as it were.
As we undergo this journey through language learning, this journey to see ourselves from another angle, we move ourselves toward others and feel their warmth, see them in finer detail versus broad strokes. 我们分享我们的观点, 我们的需求, 我们的希望, 我们的幽默, and that which appeared to be too distant to understand becomes more familiar. I often wonder: if we do this work of inner and outer travel through language learning, and gain the intercultural communicative competence to speak to unfamiliar faces in their hearts’ languages, could we create greater peace in the world? 我想是的.
I was very young when I sensed that there might be something different about me, though I didn’t have a word for it then, 在任何语言中. It was my language teachers who protected and nurtured me, sent me on the journey of discovery to find who I was and am. They prompted me to reflect on how I related to the many cultures I came in contact with, 通过语言. When we invest time into language and intercultural learning, we invest in helping young people find themselves. Knowing who they are, they have greater security to face an ambiguous world with wonder.
也许 our students will go on to work in fields that require their language skills, or maybe not. 也许, 而不是, their language learning will have delivered them to thought-provoking news sources, 他们喜欢的音乐, oft-rewatched series or films, or bookshelves evidencing sprawling discussions and interpretations. 也许 their language learning will have gifted them friends for a lifetime, an identity as a citizen of a greatly interconnected world, or the empathy to approach difference with curiosity and warmth. Language is and should be part of the core curriculum, for it is at the core of what makes us human, and the vehicle that sends us on the journey of worldly discovery.