“When you step out of your community and start to learn about other ones, you feel like a stranger. But then by having conversations, and learning about somebody else’s life, and hearing how they feel like a stranger, you have a common experience. So by exploring different cultures and peoples and communities, you really become a common people. What divides us can ultimately unite us.”
We feel like strangers when we are out of our language and culture comfort zone. Our language and culture have formed our identity, and to walk out of that identity makes us wonder who we are in front of others. But then the magic can happen.
In this delightful and insightful conversation with Eavan Mages and Charlotte Peyton, we hear their stories of their origins in two in tight-knit cultures with multilingual social and educational viewpoints, and how that formed their identities as they experienced the world and moved to the United States.
Both Eavan and Charlotte have careers which are founded on their knowledge of various languages, and their reflection on their own cultural heritages and openness to learning about others’. They have thought a lot about how differences help to form our identities, and how they have felt moving out of their comfort zones and into the common space with others. They share with us through their experiences and stories how facing identity discomfort, acknowledging it, and understanding that others feel the same way as they face us, can open to us the possibility of kinship across linguistic and cultural groups.
Enjoy the podcast, and check out their biographies and the resources they each share.
What is your language and cultural identity? Have you stepped out of your identity comfort zone to connect with others? How?
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Guest Bio
Eavan Mages’s bio and contact information:
Eavan Mages hails from Galway, Ireland–a lively, ocean-side college town and Europe’s selected city for Capital of Culture 2020. She studied Irish (Gaelic) for 13 years and ultimately went on to learn German, Spanish and French at The National University of Ireland – Galway. It was during her study abroad year in Bamberg, Germany, that she met and married her husband, Mike. They eventually relocated to the United States and currently make their home in Austin, TX.
Eavan’s grandparents on her father’s side were both school principals and farmers in rural County Monaghan, Northern Ireland. Life in Ireland in the 1950s came with a high likelihood that one would need to emigrate to earn a living. Her parents lived in London and the United States in their 20s. When they began to have children, they returned to Ireland. Eavan’s father was very involved with civic affairs in Galway, and as President of the Chamber of Commerce and the local rugby club, it opened up doorways for the family to explore the continent, starting with Galway’s twin city of Lorient in Brittany. The family traveled the length and breadth of France and Spain in the 1970s, adding new areas of exploration each year–Croatia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, to name but a few.
This early introduction to a broader world fueled a strong interest in Eavan to be able to communicate with others in their own language. Her first study-abroad experience was as a ten-year-old when her parents sent her to a host family in Madrid for a month. This lifelong passion of travel, culture, language has now allowed Eavan to forge a career which has taken her around the world and with it the opportunity to explore everything from the hutongs of Beijing to the San Telmo markets of Buenos Aires and the wide-open beaches of Australia.
Connect up with Eavan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eavan-mages-9721003/
Charlotte Payton’s bio and contact information:
Charlotte Peyton was born in The Netherlands to Dutch parents. She emigrated as a child to Minnesota, USA, where her father took a position as professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Minnesota. Her earliest memories are of playing under her father’s desk in his office as he prepared for lectures or graded papers.
Charlotte comes from a long line of educators on both sides of her family. Her paternal grandmother taught German for 29 years in Leiden, The Netherlands. Her maternal grandfather and great grandfather were professors of biology. Both served as president of the University of Leiden. Charlotte grew up in a bilingual home, where Dutch was spoken as a family, and English only when there were visitors in the home or outside of the home. To Charlotte, Dutch means family, and she still feels an immediate affinity to anyone who speaks Dutch. When Charlotte attended school in the 70’s, educators did not yet realize the impact of learning more than one language at a time and placed her in remedial classes instead of supporting her as an ELL learner. It was also not until college that Charlotte discovered she was also dyslexic. Despite these obstacles, learning has been a life-long passion.
Charlotte followed in the family profession as an educator, and taught English and publishing at Battlefield High School in Haymarket, Virginia, where her three children also attended. Ironically, her first teaching assignment was teaching German. She went on to teach English, despite being a former ELL learner and having learning disabilities. Charlotte’s early experiences as a student helped form her as an educator and continue to impact her career as she works at Vista Higher Learning.
Connect up with Charlotte: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlottepeyton/
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