What follows is the Introduction to the Teachers’ Book of a British Cultural Studies textbook for 12th grade Romanian students in bilingual schools whose first edition came out in 1998: Crossing Cultures: British Cultural Studies for Romanian Students (Cavallioti Publishing & The British Council, Bucharest, Romania). ISBN 9739840094.
The Teachers Book as well as the Students’ Book were subsequently revised and reprinted several times, and formally adopted by the Romanian Ministry of Education as its official British Studies textbook for a decade.
I was commissioned to produce it by the British Council with the help of a wonderful team of Romanian teachers and academics from across Romania (in alphabetic order: Cornelia Bursuc, Adriana Cichirdan, Liminita Ganea, Zoe Ghita, Prof. Roxana Marinescu, Tunde Minulescu, Mirela Nasaudean), but the Introduction, together with the design and execution of the research project that underlay the textbook, were entirely mine.
A version of the Introduction was published as “Crossing cultures into the Reformă de Ĭnvăţământ Preuniversitar în România: autoritarism socio-politic into capacititaţi intelectuale superioare.” in Dascăl, Reghina, (ed.) Proceedings of the IATEFL-East 98 Conference, Constanţa, Romania, August 1998. Editura Eurobit Timişoara, pp. 257-266. ISBN 9789739441704. This is what is reproduced here. Many thanks to Reghina for allowing its reproduction.
I was supposed to produce a British Studies textbook for use in English-language ‘bilingual schools’ in which subjects were taught in Romanian + another language like English, French, German or Hungarian. But I redirected the project towards cross-cultural studies where Britain was treated as a mirror or Other that could be used by students to help think about their own socially constructed selves.
Crossing Cultures was actually the first textbook in Romania to introduce into Romanian schools the study of class, gender, race and sexuality at a time when homosexuality was still a prisonable offence and ethnic stereotyping was a state-sanctioned norm. It was – for Romanian schools – a very early exponent of critical thinking rather than rote learning.
Both of the places where it was originally published are now very hard to find (they aren’t digitised and the last reprint of Crossing Cultures was 2005). This is why I am posting this here, for reading it again after over 25 years – it was written before I’d even finished my PhD – I still stand by both its rigour and its pretty uncompromising ethical stance (fortunately the Ministry was open to both its stance and its rigour).
The topical references may be very dated, but the commitment to crossing cultures, whatever those cultures may be, remain fast.
Introduction Part 1: Crossing Cultures into the Reforma de Învăţământ Preuniversitar în România
The title of Part 1 of this Introduction may seem a little strange: Crossing Cultures into the Reforma de Învăţământ Preuniversitar în România. The title of a book on British Cultural Studies is transformed into a verb of motion, complete with object, by the simple addition of a preposition and a phrase. What does this mean? How does one “cross cultures into pre-university education reform in Romania”? Who is doing the crossing? How is the crossing to be done? What relation has the book to the Reforma de Învăţământ Preuniversitar în România [“Reform of Pre-University Education in Romania”]?
The following part of the Introduction will seek to answer these questions. It will do so by moving in three stages. First by linking a political with an educational system, then by looking at the idea of cognitive skills, and finally by looking at the implications for evaluation.
1. Autoritarism socio-politic into capacitaţi intelectuale superioare
The title of this first sub-section is perhaps as unexpected as the general heading to Part 1. Firstly, it is almost entirely in Romanian, when one would expect the Notes to a book on British Cultural Studies for Romanian teachers to be in English. Secondly, it sets up a dichotomy from two apparently unconnected fields: a term from political theory (autoritarism socio-politic) is opposed to a term from educational cognitive psychology (capacitaţi intelectuale superioare). Thirdly, one wonders what it has to do with the subject at hand, British Cultural Studies .
In using such phrases Crossing Cultures is declaring at the outset that it is trying to live up to its name, crossing the linguistic border which separates English from Romanian. Immediately, it declares that the language which makes it is not a “pure”, but macaronic, impure, hybrid, a cross. It declares its double perspective, Romanian and non, both insider and outsider.
As for the dichotomy itself, it is only the context that may have caused surprised since you will have read of it before in the Plan-cadru [ master plan] drawn up by the Comisia Naţională de Reformă a Planurilor de Învăţământ. Under the rubric Disfuncţiile actualului plan we find the very first sentence:
Din punctul de vedere al filozofie educaţiei, planul actual de învăţămănt exprimă, în esenţă, un univers de valori şi de mentalităţi caracteristice unei culturi dominate de industrialism economic şi de autoritarism socio-politic.
The Plan-cadru goes on further to define the effects of autoritarism socio-politic on the present education system in Romania. Most of what it proposes concerns structural reform – the number of hours each subject is allotted and so forth, but it also stresses the need to reform the practice of teaching itself. There needs to be a move la placarea elevilor în centrul actului educativ, for example, and part of this transition towards student-centred teaching involves progressing beyond the inculcation of facts through memorisation. Instead of simply getting students to memorise and repeat knowledge, teachers need to ask students to do things with knowledge, thus developing what the Plan-cadru calls the “higher intellectual capacities” – capacitati intelectuale superioare.
Yet Crossing Cultures does not simply bow to the authority of the Plan-cadru. That would mean that it remained within what it is trying to get out of, the univers de valori şi de mentalităţi caracteristice unei culturi dominate de industrialism economic şi de autoritarism socio-politic. For the rest of this sub-section we shall compare first what a few other “authorities” say and then compare all this with our own research, thus following standard research practice of finding out what has been written before and then evaluating it against our own evidence.
I shall turn first to a non-Romanian academic visitor to this country. In a paper delivered at Iaşi in 1996 , the chair of ESSE (Professor Bonheim of the University of Cologne), pointed out that
the research referred to [by Romanian academics] was almost without exception cited as authoritative rather than questionable; there was as good as no pitting of one scholar against another; and what is written is left unquestioned. He thought such treatment of sources was a “hangover” from the days of dictatorship when “ventilating opinions against the prevailing trend” was dangerous. The problem with such processes is that they leave Romania outside the West. As Bonheim says, such attitudes “might be said to … betray[ ] some elements of marginality”.
So far I have referred to comments from the Ministry of Education and from a foreign academic, and as a final type of “authority” before commenting on what our own research found, I shall refer to the work of a well-known Romanian academic, Prof. Lazăr Vlăsceanu. His chapter on education in the volume Social Policy: Romania in the European Context focuses on what he calls a “chronic quality crisis” in Romanian education. One of the aspects of this crisis is, again, how memorisation of facts are prioritised over what he terms “skills”. He observes, that from the point of view of injecting its pupils with information, the Romanian system is highly effective:
An illustration of this reality is the fact that an average Romanian pupil or student is highly competitive with his or her peers from any developed educational system, very often surpassing them. However, this same positive assertion cannot be made with regard to their abilities to be creative and to solve problems, particularly innovative ones. The Romanian pupil or student can reproduce a great deal but is less able to innovate. Educational policy and practice have required him or her to do nothing more than reproduce knowledge.
In the short term, such a student may achieve very good results, but in the long term, he or she will lag behind because his or her skills or abilities for lifelong and innovative education, for acquiring specific learning modalities, will remain undeveloped (pp.302-3).
What all these “authorities” do is set up a dichotomy or binarism between what the ministry calls the “lower” and “higher intellectual capacities” with all the weight of respective values that “lower” and “higher” carry in the west. All connect the “lower” with dictatorial government and the latter, at the very least by strong implication, with democracy. All urge a cultural transition (which is after all the Latin word for “crossing”) from the first to the second, arguing that it is imperative for the Romanian education system to concentrate on the “higher intellectual capacities”. Otherwise Romania will become marginalised through the inability of its inhabitants to adapt to constant change, when such change is the essence of democratic capitalism.
What has this to do with Crossing Cultures, supposedly a book concerned with Britain and things British? The second part of this sub-section will seek to answer this in two ways. Initially, it will give an account of our research into both the teaching and learning of BCS in Romanian bilingual classes of English, then explain the dramatic effect of this research on the material that was piloted and what the book is now.
At the outset, we must say that our micro-research on both the teaching and learning of British Cultural Studies seems to confirm the diagnosis of the education system that we outlined above. In April and May 1998 we conducted a piloting of British Cultural Studies materials amongst 16 teachers of BCS and their students from all over Romania. We asked both teachers and students to fill in three different questionnaires each over this period, making a total of six different questionnaires, three for students and three for teachers. We got a very good response of 14 teachers and an average of about 50% of the estimated number of students in the teachers’ classes (380 replies for the first questionnaire down to 160 for the final one). We asked a large variety of questions, including what they associated with Britain, what their sources of information about Britain were, what they valued in those they considered their most important sources, what their priorities were in learning, and so on.
We found that school textbooks were the overwhelming formers of the image of Britain for these students, followed, at a distance, by British films on Romanian TV, Euronews, MTV and cinema. Of the 29% who said they listened to the World Service, more than 1 in 3 felt it to be key to their understanding of modern Britain. Their use of the media notwithstanding, students’ image-repertoire of Britain was resolutely conservative, “heritage” / historical (in fact, most students who thought they had studied BCS before 12th grade equated it with history). This implied strongly either that the media had little influence, or that the students were decoding cinema and TV along very different lines from how a British person would. Their knowledge was also that of a tourist, almost exclusively of London. Scotland and Scottish stereotypes comprised just 1% of total mentions, and Stonehenge achieved just over that. Northern Ireland was referred to by less than 0.5%, while Wales was mentioned (in passing) once in all of the 380 questionnaires that asked about this.
Stereotypes of the most banal kind overwhelmed any kind of critical awareness, forestalling any form of cultural crossing. Britain was associated with the monarchy and especially with Princess Diana who is thought of in connection with the UK as much as pop music (a recognisable trace of MTV!). But just as often the conventions of British weather recurred: fog and rain or a generalised “bad weather”. None of these were mentioned as often as Shakespeare, while other literary figures achieved just over half Shakespeare’s fame en masse. Most individual authors were referred to just once. The only twentieth-century authors mentioned were James Joyce and Dylan Thomas (one mention each).
Again despite MTV, the Queen and Diana, the gender-image of Britain was predominantly masculine: the historical, literary and musical figures connected with Britain were almost exclusively male (and dead and white).
It rapidly became clear that the vast majority of students, although all from the élite cadre, had an almost entirely non-scientific knowledge of Britain. Exactly as described in general terms above, we found in practice that students depended upon auctoritates (authoritative models) rather than on learning how to judge for themselves. This was particularly clear in students’ statements of what they thought constituted the value of sources. They were particularly concerned with the criterion of “completeness” (textbooks which they said were most important as sources were often cited as “complete”). Logically, this was connected to their model of how textbooks, the media and literature worked. This model offered connections between the sign and referent either in a simple transparent way – the sign was regarded as a window through which one saw an unproblematic and unproblematised reality – or it was idealist – that is, that the media and textbooks were revelatory of a supposed essence of “Britishness”. Only those students who had been to Britain gave any evidence at all of pragmatic learner autonomy: they alone stressed the importance of “seeing with [their] own eyes”.
What was even more surprising was the students’ cognitive dependence upon the Limba engleza textbooks for 11th and 12th grades: the opening of Bleak House for fog; Big Ben; Westminster Bridge and the Houses of Parliament on the cover; Francis Bacon; Keats; Byron; Shakespeare, of course; cathedrals… Students mentioned all these not once but many times. It is therefore no surprise that no British women writers were mentioned by the students (apart from a solitary mention of Jane Austen), since none appear in Limba engleza. There is no reference to women at all: the chronicle of events in Limba engleza (p.169) does not even mention the female franchise in 1918, the single biggest change in voting in British history . Likewise, there is no reference to the ethnic diversity which make up Britain’s most important urban areas.
At the same time we found virtually total confusion about anything to do with the capacitaţi intelectuale superioare. We checked and cross-checked students’ understanding of these in a variety of ways and found almost universal incoherence. It became clear, for example, that students did not understand what it means to decide whether evidence is relevant to the argument, or whether it is true or false (let alone to decide whether it is somewhere in between). Most said they wanted to learn how to do that, but they did not know what it meant. We found too that teachers stressed quite heavily the necessity for students to evaluate data, but at the same time they did not feel they had had much training in doing it themselves. But amongst teachers too there reigned some confusion over what capacitaţi intelectuale superioare comprised and how they could be taught.
It should not have been surprising then if teachers and students did not know what BCS actually was.
We already knew from previous reports that “Britain” had usually been taught to Romanian 12th graders in a mode which is often called “British Life and Institutions” (BLI). Sometimes this mode has been called British Cultural Studies and it is this, we feel, which has led to a great deal of the confusion. BLI is concerned with informing students of what institutions there are in Britain, and frequently with how they developed over the centuries (“institution” may be the monarchy, parliament, universities, the processes of law, family life, and many other things). It was not surprising therefore that students thought “British Cultural Studies” meant history of a certain sort. But more important than that, BLI assumes that its object of study is fixed and knowable: it’s enough to know for BLI the number of MPs in Parliament at any given time, for instance. If any “meaning” is attributed to that number at all, it will be formulated in terms of something vague and magical such as “the growth of democracy”. In other words, if institutions are given “meanings”, they are often freighted with an implicit fetishisation or abstract glorification: “Oxford and Cambridge are the best or most important universities”, or, to quote Limba engleza, “St Paul’s is a masterpiece in the foremost rank of the world’s buildings” (p.21).
While some people may well agree with or voice these opinions, they are after all opinions, not scripture. We are not saying that they are wrong, but that many people will disagree or be indifferent to such statements. BLI does not usually take differing views into account, preferring to assume a “purity of the object”. Accordingly, students can learn “simple truths” by heart – or simply copy them into their atestat papers.
Since we already knew this, our piloted materials tried to get away from BLI’s factory-like reproduction of the Gradgrindean fact . Instead they set up structures which enabled students to discuss issues we thought might interest them, all the while studiously avoiding giving much data input in order to keep Gradgrind out of the classroom. What we found, however, was that these materials did not encourage serious enquiry but rather a form of unstructured “chat” which was little more than EFL fluency practice. These materials did not seem to develop the higher intellectual capacities but rather promote facile anecdotes, not fertilise rational debate but give more life to the déjà connu.
Students and teachers were generous but at the same guarded in their welcome of these materials. They said they enjoyed using them, but…
This “but”, almost always politely hinted at rather than explicit, together with the inferred results of the piloting we mentioned above, caused an entire rethink of the project. We recognised we had taken a path that led only backwards. As a result, anyone involved in the piloting will recognise hardly a single activity that has remained the same. While certainly not BLI, the piloting materials encouraged too great an intellectual freedom. If we are justly harsh and honest with ourselves, we were encouraging a freedom without responsibility, or, in more colourful terms, we were promoting the freedom to be a couch-potato watching well-known cartoon images of Britain flutter unanalysed through semi-consciousness. Our approach did not, as we found, promote British Cultural Studies as a serious educational discipline. Our materials would not enable Romanian students to cross from the margins to the centre, but confine them on the outside with bonds of fatuity.
The methodology and discipline of British Cultural Studies which we hope is that of Crossing Cultures, fits into what the Comisia Naţională proposes, but at the same time is closely matched to the chalk-face reality we discovered pragmatically through our own research. Crossing Cultures thus combines the general imperatives of the ministry with an awareness of the concrete specifics of the subject as it is taught in Romanian bilingual classes today.
The rest of this sub-section is devoted to describing some specific ways our research has affected the book.
- Knowing that 86% teachers and 48% students have access to British magazines, several optional activities and one obligatory one make use of them .
- Since 43% of teachers and 19% of students claim to have access to the internet, and of these 18% and 21% respectively already make use of it to find out about Britain, we sometimes suggest obtaining information from it (though never for obligatory activities). We provide a list of useful internet addresses at the end of the students’ book.
- Given the students’ ignorance of British women writers, we include a class on gendering the Canon that takes as an example Christina Rossetti. Such practice of course also takes into account the Plan-cadru’s insistence on the principiu egalitaţii şanselor in giving women students the knowledge that people like them have made a contribution in a field outside the domestic sphere.
- Since Diana and the monarchy are popular subjects we give students the opportunity to study them – but from unexpected angles.
- Since students know a lot about London tourist sights, we offer no class on London, and approach England tangentially, beginning with the component of the UK that was mentioned least, Wales. Later there will be a class that takes Scotland as a case study for the analysis of national stereotypes and the notion of “founding myths” which have recently created a stir in Romania with the publication of Lucian Boia’s books. Northern Ireland, which was hardly mentioned at all in our survey, gets two classes and offers the opportunity to explore the importance of names and the concept of the “Other”. As for tourism, we do not confirm what students already know by offering a visit to the Tower of London, but we challenge their preconceptions by offering them the chance to study a rather well-known British tourist coming to Cluj and to Bistriţa.
- We seek to counter the simplistic assumption that students must obtain a totalising encyclopaedic knowledge of a subject by breaking classes up into groups that study different and often contradictory aspects of the same thing.
- Both students and teachers said they were keen on developing ethical skills, and we have given ample opportunity to do this in a profound way, taking ethics to mean not a series of behavioural imperatives and prohibitions, but as a process of relating to and constructing the world. Thus we devote a third of the core-course explicitly to the notion of what it means justly to represent the world.
Unlike the piloted materials, which were designed to allow teachers to create their own syllabus from material undifferentiated in level of difficulty, Crossing Cultures has become structurally developmental, starting from first principles and each class building on what has gone before, until at the end of the year students are in a position to combine and apply concepts in a freer way. Crossing Cultures thus places the emphasis on developing cognitive skills in what the Plan-cadru calls a coherent way.
It also fulfils the Plan-cadru by making inter- and trans-disciplinarity a feature: besides having classes on literature, it has classes on science as well, and even in one case on science and literature. It has been careful find out what students will have studied in earlier grades and to make reference to textbooks students may well possess at home and have used. Furthermore we refer to what they study in 12th grade philosophy and science and call on students to make active use of what they have learnt in those classes.
Crossing Cultures places students at the centre of the learning process by getting them actively to “discover” and debate knowledge, arrive at their own definitions, evaluate the validity of different points of view.
Like the earlier piloted materials, Crossing Cultures is primarily concerned with teaching the higher cognitive skills –the capacitaţi intelectuale superioare and not teaching facts to be replicated. But unlike the piloted materials, it starts at the base of the cognitive pyramid by offering a large amount of up-to-date “knowledge” for students to learn to manipulate. Note that when we write “a large amount of up-to-date knowledge” we do not mean that students need memorise huge amounts of material. On the contrary, knowledge can be given to the students so that they know it only for a short amount of time, or can see it in front of them to refer to. This is the purpose of the often long readings that we offer: they act as temporary banks of knowledge that students can draw on for the purposes of the class only.
Crossing Cultures is opposed to autoritarism socio-politic and the marginalisation that that has caused. Refusing to derive its existence merely from the negative virtue of opposition, however, and thereby fall into the pit of unstructured “chat”, it offers a third way: a positive and disciplined training intended to enable Romanian students confidently to move themselves not only to the centre, but to wherever they wish to go.
As we said at the beginning, Crossing Cultures is a verbal phrase, not just a static title. As such, Crossing Cultures translates the Reforma into the classroom.
Prof Andrew King 
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