Teaching Canadian Culture: Teacher Preparation

Abstract

With the transformation of cultural content from an add-on to an integral part of the K-Adult ESL classroom, L2 specialists must come to grips with three separate but related issues in the Canadian context: What is Canadian culture? How do we prepare teachers to teach Canadian culture? How do we teach about culture in the classroom? After presenting a new vision of Canadian culture that is to serve as a framework for deciding what to teach in the L2 classroom, I discuss three important pedagogical issues: (a) consciousness raising-making both teachers and students more aware of the origins and role of culture; (b) teacher preparation- how adequately to prepare teachers to teach Canadian culture in a multicultural classroom; and (c) tolerance and conflicting visions-how to strike a balance between the dominant cultural paradigm and the new cultural knowledge and experience that arrives with each new Canadian.