As I sit and recover from a most productive fall semester (and not a bad Christmas haul, I don't mind adding), I find myself making plans and adjustments for the upcoming spring semester. This is in clear violation of one of the rules I had set for myself when I began teaching college – The week between Christmas and New Years was to be completely free of business; the week was to be for me and me alone. In hindsight, I'm actually glad I've chosen to break this rule.
I had originally gotten the idea for this week off when I did some research into the Roman holiday of Saturnalia – a week at the end of the end of the year which was reserved for wild parties, overturning of social norms, and general raucousness. During this Roman festival, masters served servants, courthouses were closed, and Roman youth were immune to arrest for minor crimes such as vandalism or being a public nuisance. While I have no plans for any such debauchery this New Year's Eve, it should come as no surprise that I found the “no work gets done this week” aspect of it particularly appealing -- so appealing, in fact, that I freely admit that it was probably more of my own tradition than the holiday's.
I discovered Saturnalia quite by accident, as I, for my own curiosity, did some research into Christmas. I found that one of the reasons that The Catholic Church chose December 25 to celebrate Christmas was to change the general mood of the time away from generalized debauchery and towards more... spiritual thoughts.This got me thinking about holidays across cultures. How much do we as teachers know about the holidays and traditions in our multicultural classrooms? I know of many teachers who encourage their classes to participate or reenact certain holiday traditions (which, due to the religious nature of some of them, occasionally causes them to run afoul of the Establishment Clause of the Constitution), but rather than merely celebrate them, do we give our students opportunities to explore them? I'm not just referring to American holidays and traditions, but to their own – how often do we give students the chance to explain not only what they do, but why they do it?
I've seen (and given) plenty of holiday-themed assignments in which the history of certain traditions and customs associated with a holiday are researched and explained – such assignments are interesting and insightful to the students, who often don't know the history behind the traditions (which happens to be something of a hobby of mine). But what I've noticed is that these assignments are almost universally geared towards researching the traditions of the dominant (that is to say, our own) culture. Over the course of the last couple of semesters, however, I've learned about many ways that my students have incorporated their own traditions into mainstream holidays. This shouldn't come as any kind of surprise – most countries and cultures have traditions for various holidays, such as birthdays, New Years celebrations, and the Christmas season (whether they actually celebrate Christmas or not), but the actual traditions vary from culture to culture. We who have been raised in Western/American culture sometimes take our traditions for granted, and don't always know why we celebrate the way we do. I've therefore become curious as to whether students from other cultures have done so with their own traditions.
Of course, all educators should be mindful of the customs and traditions that are important parts of their students' backgrounds, but what I plan to do in the coming semester (my New Year's resolution, as it were), is to have the students themselves be the source of the important information: why? We should always strive to encourage higher-level thinking in our students, and what better place to begin than with those things which are intimately familiar with, yet at the same time, might not know much about?
An additional benefit is that it gives students the chance to showcase their own cultures in front of a diverse class – not only do they get to teach others about their own rich history, but they get to reaffirm it for themselves. Holidays traditions exist, I believe, as all traditions do, to give us a vital connection with our past, and to serve as reminders that we are not alone; we are part of something greater and more enduring than ourselves. Our students, no matter where they are from, should be afforded every opportunity to both remember and express that truth.
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