When I started as an honors student, I assumed that most of my intercultural engagement experiences would come from my language classes. This assumption was not wrong, but it only scratched the surface. Rather, my language classes helped me to mentally elaborate on and connect intercultural ideas. Although language served as the main infrastructure for my intercultural engagement experiences, it was certainly not the only factor. 

 

I started taking German courses my first year of college. I had taken German for four years in high school, and I enjoyed it enough that I wanted to continue. Throughout the introductory courses, German language skills were taught while using cultural context as a reference to guide our understanding. One project that exemplified this was an essay I wrote for GER 102. For this essay, my goal was to write two emails – one written informally and one written formally. This wasn’t an easy task. Even when I believed my German writing was on the formal side, my instructor revealed that there were ways to sound even more polite. After reflecting on this, I realized just how informal language and attitudes can seem in The United States. As an American born English speaker, my standards of politeness were very different from what may be expected in other cultures. This assignment was one of many moments that helped me understand how fundamentally linked language and culture are with each other. 

 

Ideas such as these become even more complex in the context of multiculturalism. This is something I learned in my course LC 445 Service-Learning Project. In this course, my classmates and I translated several historical German documents into English for Dr. Kimberly Contag. Although the documents were in German, the people who wrote them primarily grew up in Ecuador and frequently spoke Spanish. They even spoke of an identity crisis – they didn’t quite feel like they completely belonged to either culture. This was one of many obstacles in translating, as there were numerous cultural and historical references important to the documents’ content that I couldn’t fully grasp as someone from the U.S. The process of translation was a lengthy one, full of deliberation, reconsideration, and editing. In the end, I was able to present the results of this project at the Panlingua conference in 2022. This was an extremely valuable application-level opportunity, and it helped me comprehend the importance of translation work, and why translators make certain decisions. 

 

As mentioned earlier, language was not the only way in which I gained more intercultural knowledge. In the course GWS 220 Sex and Gender Worldwide, I learned about topics such as intersectional feminism, and various world views of sex and gender. Through this class, I was able to critically examine and analyze women’s issues in different cultures. As a result, I reflected on my own views, taking the time to truly think about how the culture I was born in shaped my ideas about sex and gender. For this course, I completed an informational pamphlet about the topic of parentification, which occurs around the globe and may affect various groups in different ways. Although my experience here was more culture based than language based, I have been able to apply these ideas to my German classes as well. For example, in my German literature course, we are studying literature written by Jewish women and Afro-German women, voices that are often ignored in Germany. Thanks to the different courses I’ve taken, I’m able to see how the experiences of these women are complex when considering their intersectional identities.  

 

GER 102 was only the start of my language and culture journey. Since beginning college, I've also taken GER 201, GER 202, GER 340, LC 445, GWS 220, WLC 280W, GER 460, and GER 442. Outside of world languages and cultures courses, I've learned beneficial information from my psychology courses as well. Many of these psychology classes emphasized cultural biases in research and how they influence researcher behavior, what is chosen to be researched in the first place, and how data are interpreted. One example that comes to mind is in my child psychology course, where I learned about the cultural biases in intelligence testing. Intelligence tests tend to measure knowledge that is often more familiar to white and middle-class people, and so there are issues with claiming that IQ tests are a valid means of measuring how intelligent someone is. Exploring ideas like these in my courses has allowed me to think more critically about issues of racism and classism within the field of psychology. My psychology education in combination with my language and culture courses have helped me to form a holistic framework for intercultural engagement in which language and culture are mutually inclusive in all facets of life, from personal values to scientific research. 

 

Going forward, I hope to continue elaborating on the knowledge I’ve gained and be open minded when interacting with groups that I perceive as different from myself. As a Psychology and German major, I’m likely to encounter many kinds of people, and I want to communicate effectively and empathetically, whether the interactions are personal or academic.