If you become multilingual and explore the world and develop interculturality, you aren’t losing your original identity, you’re only making it stronger.
Christopher Gwin
Language is the pathway not to losing yourself, but to finding yourself and being grateful for your life experiences. Language learning makes you less competitive, because you have seen other practices and perspectives and can approach them without judgment. What freedom! What calm of spirit and mind!
Language is additive.
Language adds perspectives across generations, and allows us to share our stories with an ever-widening human family.
Language learning opens pathways to new relationships, new understanding, new experiences and opportunities.
Language opens pathways for leadership for educators who are dedicated to opening doors such as were opened for them: doors to careers, travel, and positive impact in lives both of learners and those they meet.
(Take a look at the Northeast Conference. See if you can join us for professionalism and joy, sessions and fellowship, and a wonderful setting and experience in midtown Manhattan.)
Language opens pathways for understanding how the human mind and spirit work. The more we know, the more we give all people, no matter their language, the “inner voice” that declares them worthy of “taking up space in the world,” worthy of receiving and giving love, capable and needed in the world, and making a difference, making an impact. Each person believes this once their interior voice tells them it’s true – through language.
(Check out the studies and research that show the critical role of language in human life. Take a look at the work of the NFMLTA and the research available from ACTFL)
What’s your language pathway? Where has language taken you?
Where could language take you that you might not yet have gone?
Enjoy the podcast.
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Christopher Gwin’s Bio and Resource links
Christopher Gwin is a teacher of German language and culture courses, for 28 years at Haddonfield Memorial High School, NJ in suburban Philadelphia and most recently as a part-time lecturer in the Department of Francophone, Italian and Germanic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He now coordinates professional development for all teachers in the 5 public schools in Haddonfield, NJ. He is also the Northeast regional coordinator for the SPARK program of the American Association of Teachers of German (AATG) and the Goethe-Institut, which supports the sustenance of German language programs by guiding after school youth learning clubs and programs taught by university students. He is also the secretary of the Southern NJ chapter of the AATG.
Mr Gwin is also the executive director of the National Federation of Modern Language Teachers Associations (NFMLTA) which oversees the publication of the Modern Language Journal, a scholarly journal in applied linguistics, and language learning, and uses its revenue to provide varied grant programs from graduate students through career researchers to sustain our field. The NFMLTA is a sustaining benefactor of the Joint National Committee for Languages and the National Council for International Studies (JNCL-NCLIS). He represents the NFMLTA on that board of directors.
He is also the executive director of The Northeast Conference (NECTFL) which supports language learning and teaching in the states of the Northeast region from Maine through West Virginia and partners with ACTFL, the national language organization. NECTFL also publishes an open-access academic journal Review which highlights innovations by current practitioners in world languages, offers a strong complement of leadership programs, an innovation fellowship, mentorships to new professionals, a teacher of the year program, and endeavors to partner and support each of the state language organizations in the region.
In his leisure time, Mr Gwin volunteers at the Raab/Goodwin Holocaust Education Center at the Jewish Community Center in Cherry Hill, NJ, volunteering as a docent in the Holocaust Museum there and offering his German language skills to translate legal documents from the Austrian and German governments for survivors in the area.
His greatest passion is nature and farms about an acre of vegetables and flowers in the summer on his family’s land, continuing the legacy established by his great uncle and using the same bright red McCormick Farmall Cub tractor that his grandfather and father used in tilling the land.
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Transcript
0:00:13.9 Norah Jones: In a wonderful conversation, opening up doors and windows to possibilities for individuals and communities worldwide. With my guest this week, Christopher Gwin is the executive director of the Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages and the executive director of the National Federation of Modern Language Teachers Associations and a human being that wants the best for each individual he comes across. Listening to his stories helps us all to understand how we use language and cultural understanding to enhance our own lives and the lives of all that are around us. Enjoy this podcast with my guest, Christopher Gwin.
0:01:01.9 Speaker 2: Welcome to episode 119 of It’s About Language. Join us, as Norah Jones explores the dynamic connection between language and leadership paths in a conversation with the insightful Christopher Gwin. Get ready for a thought provoking journey into the world of language skills and successful leadership. Let’s dive in.
0:01:24.0 Norah Jones: Well dear listeners I feel as if I have snagged the whirlwind, a hurricane. I’ve actually got as a guest today my colleague, friend and the executive director of basically everything I can think of that has to do with world language education. Christopher Gwin while he’s in the midst of preparing for one of the conferences that he is the executive director for the organization that’s having the conference. Welcome Christopher Gwin to It’s About Language.
0:01:54.0 Christopher Gwin: Good morning. Thank you for welcoming me.
0:01:55.6 Norah Jones: I’m so excited to hear the stories that you tell. There are so many things that you do in a leadership position. I’d like you to make sure that those that are listening to this podcast know what kinds of educational and other leadership positions you have because the stories that you’re about to tell relate to the commitments that you have made. Can you tell people about yourself, your background and what you do? The various positions that you do hold?
0:02:29.7 Christopher Gwin: Sure of course I’d be happy to. The important note I would make at the beginning is how it started. So the first year that I taught and I teach German that’s my language that I’m involved in and I’m very proud that this is my 34th year of teaching. I’m proud to say that. I feel like I’ve accomplished something.
0:02:52.6 Norah Jones: Congratulations.
0:02:53.1 Christopher Gwin: Thank you. But the first year I taught I was offered a part-time position in a school district and I was asked to teach a gifted and talented elementary school program, a middle school introduction to language program and a full high school program. And that was a part-time position. And I look back on that and chuckle that I was really naive at 22 years old and didn’t understand that I was doing full-time work. But all of those opportunities led to other things. I moved after the first year to another school district and my single and only reason for changing school districts was because I wanted to live in the city and not drive a car. And the first school district I taught in was rural. The schools closed on the first day of hunting season. That’s an example of how rural the community was. It was a wonderful, wonderful place. Parents in the community worked in the kitchen and offered teachers snacks and extra things all the time and it was just a hearty homey welcoming environment. But my youth wanted to be in the city where I thought things were happening. And so I switched school districts where I could live in the city and take just a short train ride to the school. And the supervisor at that time said to me I think I can quote this from over 30 years ago, said to me, “We’ll hire you but you have to increase the enrollment or we’ll fire you.”
0:04:17.0 Christopher Gwin: Sort of something along those lines. And when I started teaching at that school in suburban Philadelphia, I should say that I’m from the Philadelphia area in case folks don’t know there were five courses of German at this public school and there were 35 children total in enrollment. That was the total enrollment and the message was increase enrollment or we won’t have a program. I took that directive seriously and I worked very very hard. I will say that I worked very hard and currently at that school there are 150 children learning German. I am not currently teaching the full-time program. A new person is and she has taken this forward and through that experience of building a program I really think I learned about leadership and I don’t know that I would call myself a leader but I think about the qualities that I look for in other people that I would describe as leaders. And I think that quietly doing the work being consistent determined and passionately dedicated can lead to success. And some number of years ago I was involved in a project where we were writing a manual, sort of a teacher advocacy manual for teachers of German.
0:05:33.5 Christopher Gwin: And I always remember chapter seven in that manual and we called it basically good instruction is good advocacy. And the idea was that if you have a high level, a high quality, rigorous immersion, intensive program in language you will attract students to this program. It may take some years to build it but that has more durability, sustainability than being the fun, easy, everything goes, you don’t have to work hard here teacher because we want you to be here and have fun. And I remember that being a very strong lesson for me about how to build a quality program and because I decided that was the right way to do it to offer the students a high quality globally connected intense immersive experience that I needed good professional development. And in my first year of teaching a colleague, I was teaching German and there was one colleague teaching French and one colleague teaching Spanish and we became friendly with each other and the person teaching French was older than I was. She had raised her family and then gone into teaching. So she was a wise adult and I was this naive kid and she said to me one day in March, you need $45 you have to get dressed up and we’re taking a bus to New York City. And I said okay. And she had the plan to take us to the Northeast Conference.
0:07:06.9 Christopher Gwin: I was a kid from the countryside and I was overwhelmed by… I’m always overwhelmed by New York City but the whole conference experience was overwhelming and it’s an interesting leadership journey or path for me to think about. I now sit in the role of the executive director of the Northeast Conference and I remember writing to her, Sue, my friend’s name is Sue and telling her that I felt like I was in the position I was in because of the direction she had given me in my first year of teaching. I kind of am a little bit fascinated how you go from that beginning to being in a position of leadership and people with whom I work in various capacities I respect. And so there’s this sort of inner circle of leaders who respect each other and I think that helps to make the work possible. It’s very difficult to work in the humanities. There seems to be an assault in our culture on the humanities from many fronts. And I look at the most recent congressional hearings about the increase in antisemitism on college campuses and what we see in programs at the university level. So it feels that the work to promote humanities and language instruction and everything that we do seems much more crucial today than it did before. And so the role becomes more significant I guess in some way.
0:08:42.2 Christopher Gwin: So I will say that in leadership positions I am the executive director of the Northeast Conference on the teaching of Foreign Languages. The Northeast Conference is a vibrantly successful organization because of the dedicated volunteers on the board of directors. It’s a group of 15 people. They are particularly extraordinary in their passion about making programs stronger for teachers and for students. I admire their work tremendously. I will say that prior to being on the board of directors I was on the executive committee for the Foreign Language Educators of New Jersey which is now called the Fellowship of Language Educators of New Jersey. They did change their name FLENJ, people know it as FLENJ. And I sat on that board of directors executive committee for a number of years and had a presidency. And I think that led to the opportunity to come to the Northeast Conference. Prior to being on the FLENJ board, I participated in a training and leadership opportunity from the AATG. If people are familiar with the American Association of Teachers of German, we have many AATs. I’m a proud career long member of the AATG. There was an opportunity, this was the year 2001 for mid-career folks or early leaders to learn about leadership and advocacy. The program was called TrainDaF. It’s a long name and the acronym was TrainDaF.
0:10:18.2 Christopher Gwin: And I participated in that, met all kinds of fantastic people and really started to understand what it meant to be a practicing classroom teacher who could take a leadership role. And I often discuss with colleagues on the Northeast Conference board of directors this idea that in our culture in the United States teacher education is set up for an initial teacher license and then a 25-year career. There’s nothing built in for growth and leadership and being on a path. Teachers have to create that for themselves. And I think organizations like the Northeast Conference and the state organizations and the AATs can play a role in helping teachers who choose a path of leadership. I always admire teachers who remain full-time practicing classroom teachers but also take on leadership roles. I think that duality is very challenging but is what sustains us. And I really admire when people do that.
0:11:19.4 Norah Jones: The pathways, you discerned early on that quiet work, durability, quiet commitment, keeping on a pathway using intelligence on that way. You just talked about the fact about systemic or lack thereof potentially pathways for teachers once they have their licensure to continue to grow. And you also have students that are standing in front of us in this particular case the young adults that are in middle school and high school I think is our focus for the moment anyway. Pathways, how have you helped the professionals, the teachers, how have you helped the young adults under your care as a classroom teacher and as a person within a school to find the pathways taking on the understanding that along with what they’re doing right now they too can develop the leadership qualities in their lives however that gets expressed. How do you show people pathways?
0:12:20.8 Christopher Gwin: I love that question. Thank you. And I think for the students early on I decided they needed to go to Europe. I taught in the suburbs so a suburban average. If you watch any TV sitcom about school you would see the school in which I worked. I think it fits that model and I decided that these suburban monolingual speakers of English, that was my population, needed to experience the world. They’re learning German with me so we have to go to Germany. So I started that. I actually took a group of students to Germany in my first year of teaching. I took the first group I had taught at the public school for four years. So they had been my students freshmen through when they were seniors. I took them on a classic, I won’t name the company, but a classic company trip where you pay them and they take you and there’s a bus. And it was an indescribably wonderful moment to watch them use their second language in a real world context. We are outside of the classroom, you’re thirsty, there’s a counter in this cafe. You can solve your thirst problem using your second language or you can collapse and ask me to do it for you. We developed that into an exchange program and we started, this is just crazy, but we took our first year of the exchange with the German school, goodness gracious, in the year 2001 which no one was traveling at that time as you know what happened in the world.
0:14:02.3 Christopher Gwin: But that was the way it was scheduled. And so we had a small group whose parents were willing to let them travel internationally and we started this exchange with the school. The beauty of the exchange for me is the lifelong friendships I’ve made with the teachers. That’s the beauty. But for the students, they have real connections to people their own age who look like them, sound like them, live like them but are different and showing them… I’ve always said to students you’re on a journey, I’m just one of the little ports of call along the way. This language course is your language course and I’m the guide or the facilitator. It’s not about my course and you meeting my expectations. It’s about where are you headed and how can being bilingual or multilingual be part of your journey. I have regular communication with alumni from years and years and years who use their second languages on a regular basis as a part of their being humans that have nothing to do with their careers. People always say learn another language it enhances your career opportunities. I’m sure it does, but it also enhances your humanity. You’re just more deeply connected to the world through language and it doesn’t have to have an economic direct benefit.
0:15:27.4 Christopher Gwin: It just can enhance. I often say to people you’ve learned to play the piano since you were four years old. You’re doing your concerts now. Oh, you must be, going to be a professional pianist the rest of your life. Or this is just another part of your unfolding humanity. It’s just part of who you are. And seeing young people in the exchange experience navigate the host family, find their way around in the school and really integrate be a part, lean in to those experiences. That’s really part of helping the students have a wider path, a longer path any way that you want to configure it. For educators, I’m really inspired in my role at the Northeast Conference by our dear, dear friend John Carlino.
0:16:11.1 Speaker 2: I have stepped into this role after his passing. One of the key things that John did was to recognize people’s individual skills and to promote their leadership in the frame of those skill sets. And I have tried to adopt that myself and help think about always be the person in this role to have the bigger view of what’s going on, sort of like the macro view and then encourage or support directors in their individual roles at the micro level. And I think that’s another path to leadership is to say to someone I noticed that you’re particularly good at this, I wonder if you would be interested in chairing that committee or working on that initiative. And sometimes folks will say oh, wow! You noticed a skill that I have. How great. And then it helps to build the whole ship with all of the moving parts.
0:17:16.9 Norah Jones: There’s so many empowering concepts there. You noticed me, you noticed something I can do well and training or helping the folks to experience that and know that they can then do that for someone else. You have some stories where and especially you’ve opened the eyes of students to the unfolding humanity of people that are in other cultures that they have experienced using their language for being able to understand more deeply the humanity of others. The travel you have alluded to, you have a project as well that you have done with students, correct? Or projects that have helped to open their eyes to the humanity of individuals. Can you share some of those stories please?
0:18:10.4 Christopher Gwin: Sure. I would think of two. If it’s okay I’ll tell two.
0:18:16.2 Norah Jones: Please.
0:18:17.9 Christopher Gwin: I don’t know how long it will go but I’ll try to be concise. But your questions make me excited to share these stories. So again back to my suburban public school teaching experience, it seemed to me as the years rolled along that there was always a focus on raising money for some group somewhere in the world that was suffering. And it’s a community where people can raise money very quickly. It’s an affluent community where I’ve been working and that’s a great thing but it made me feel this odd sense of us versus them. It didn’t feel clean to me. In addition to teaching German I’ve also taught for a number of years a semester long social studies course on the Holocaust and other genocides and that’s my second area of study.
0:19:04.4 Christopher Gwin: I’ve done advanced degree work in a program in Holocaust and genocide education. And I often say to people it’s not the lighter side of the work that I do and I’ve been committed to it for a very long time. It came from when I was a university student. I remember seeing all the TVs in the student lounge and it seemed to me, this was in the ’80s, it seemed to me that there was always in the news somebody between Israel and Gaza in the West Bank somebody throwing a rock at somebody. It always seemed like there was a skirmish and I didn’t understand that. And I remember thinking I didn’t learn anything about it in school and I didn’t know what it was and so I wanted to know why was this an ongoing, seemed like an endless conflict.
0:19:48.0 Christopher Gwin: I’ve also been always fascinated with Israel from when I was a little kid growing up. I was raised Christian, Methodist and we went to Sunday school and we always learned reading the Bible, learning these stories, I’ve always been fascinated. So I took it upon myself to do a little bit more study. And long story for another time, we developed a course at the school. I worked in conjunction with a history teacher and it became wildly popular immediately. We had over a hundred students enrolled for the first time we offered it. So we had to manage this very big interest. And that was a semester long course. And at the end of one of those semesters, a student came to me who was a junior taking the course, and he said, what do I do now?
0:20:28.3 Christopher Gwin: And I said, what do you mean what do you do now? The course is over. He said, yeah, but I’m not finished. And I said, oh, okay. Independent study. So we began to work together. He, well, along with other students, led to a program from that independent study, on how to embrace diversity in public schools and how to be more inclusive. And from that developed into a week at school, which is was then called Africa Week, where people focused on not raising money for solving someone else’s problem, but empowering people to know all of the rich cultural manifestations, cultural production, what’s happening today among the myriad cultures across the African continent and how we can be enriched by learning about what is happening there. And also geography, history, the whole thing, brought in speakers to talk to students during lunch opportunities.
0:21:25.2 Christopher Gwin: It just grew into this really large program. And from that, we met a young man who was an undergraduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, which is close to where we are in the school. And this led to, for me, a lifelong friendship and for several of the students as well, knowing his story, having come from South Sudan, escaped the conflict over to Uganda, living in a UN refugee camp to his having a doctoral degree from Drexel University in Philadelphia, now working for Alphabet, the parent company of Google. So that long path from one place to another to another was… It’s very inspiring to me as an adult person, but also to the students. And so it was interest from a student, what’s the world beyond this? What’s the next thing in my learning, leading to all these opportunities? And I feel that bringing George’s mother to his university graduation from her village in South Sudan to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, probably was the greatest thing I’ve ever done.
0:22:29.3 Christopher Gwin: And just seeing that moment of seeing her son with that level of achievement, it’s just very, very special. But I will say for language instruction, I’ll tell a second story very quickly. For language teaching from day one, I’ve taught in an immersion style of teaching. I believe I understand the 90% and 10% in all of those structures that people build. And I support all of that. But for my own teaching, I made the decision that we were going to be 100% immersion from day one. And I did it because I wanted there to be a presence about the language in the school culture, because I was trying to save this program early in my teaching. So from from then forward, I have always taught 100% immersion. I’ve taught at community college, private university, public school, middle school, high school, etcetera. The only place I haven’t done this is last year when I taught elementary school classes. There, I did not teach immersion.
0:23:23.6 Christopher Gwin: But for regular high school programs I believe in this. I accept all variations of how people teach. I’m not trying to be orthodox, but I do see it having value and I see that it works. So I’ve done that forever. Along came an opportunity, when I was still teaching full-time a couple of years ago through some volunteer work I do at my local JCC, at the Jewish Community Center, which is nearby to where the school is. I chose that as my volunteer opportunity because I have a full schedule. I can’t do a lot of volunteering, but I wanted to have something that was just completely giving of my time for a good purpose. And I do several things at the JCC. I’m a docent in the small Holocaust museum. They have there helping to build programs and always kind of updating how people can interact with the artifacts that are there.
0:24:20.6 Christopher Gwin: I also volunteer, I think a lot of time to translate legal documents that come from Germany and Austria for survivors who live in the New Jersey area, who can’t read German, who are either receiving pensions because they’re considered victims of the war or seeking to receive a pension. And often I’m asked to translate documents and I do it very happily. But anyway, through that connection, I work with a lady there whose name is Helen, and she coordinates for survivors to go to schools to talk to children. And she contacted me and she had a survivor couple, who lived in the Philadelphia region for a very long time after the end of the war, making their way to New York and then to that area. And they both had passed in their later years. And it was their granddaughter who was then telling the story of her grandparents.
0:25:16.6 Christopher Gwin: And that’s a whole phenomenon now of third generation, continuing to tell the story of people who survived the Holocaust. But what she had was a collection of letters. They actually were love letters that the grandparents had written to each other when they were teens and they had been saved. Somehow these letters were saved by the family and they made their way here and their granddaughter didn’t read German, so she couldn’t read them. And I think the most powerful moment of this story is that German was the language of these two people who were very much in love with each other as a young couple who were Jewish. I think people who don’t know the history well often separate those things, but for this family, German was their language of communication. They considered themselves to be German and then victimized as Jews.
0:26:08.4 Christopher Gwin: And I think a lot of times when people think about this history, they separate out Germans from Jews, and that’s just not accurate. So anyway she asked if my students would translate the letters, and that really was the project. And we did it, we did it with a tremendous amount of effort, and it broke all my rules about immersion teaching, because here we were translating, but it meant, I think two really big things. One, the students said to me, we feel a little bit inappropriate to be reading someone else’s romantic correspondence.
0:26:49.0 Christopher Gwin: And what if we get it wrong? What if we don’t communicate to the granddaughter and the family exactly what was being expressed? And they’re paying attention to the level of accuracy was surprising to me. And we made the decision that we couldn’t put the letters up on the screen in the classroom as a digital version, that it wasn’t appropriate to broadcast them and that they should never take them home. That it was only in the classroom that we’d work on these and that they were really sacred. Worked on them for several weeks away from the curriculum. This was not a curricular theme. No one received, my fingers are up, credit for doing this work. They just did it as a volunteer opportunity. And in the end, we put them all together, put them into a binder and we invited the family and presented, we read them and then presented them to them. And I would be unable to describe to you, Norah, the feeling, the emotion in that room at that moment when the high school students read aloud to the granddaughter, the stories of her grandparents.
0:28:02.6 Norah Jones: Wow.
0:28:03.1 Christopher Gwin: It was quite magical.
0:28:06.6 Norah Jones: Oh my goodness. Magical indeed. We almost want to just stay with that magic because language as a magical moment, connecting generations in this case, connecting experiences in itself is enough. I want to though, based on that amazing story and really asking my listeners to bask in the understanding of what language does then for the heart to tap on a couple of things that you had said during that wonderful story. And thank you for the background and how you have been engaged in these and how you continue to be engaged in these things to bring them about. One is the fact, go back to the linguistic and cultural identity. You provided a moment there where you tapped on frequent misunderstanding of the divisions among peoples linguistically and culturally. And here it was an experience of these German speaking Jews, help me to understand what you and your students learned and were able to share with others about how identity of language and culture works.
0:29:37.8 Christopher Gwin: Yeah. It’s such a complex thing in Europe because where you live, it changes… Your physical place of living doesn’t change, but your identity about where you live changes by who has taken over the borders across the last 2000 years of history. So you often meet someone who will say, well, I’m from Transnistria and from this year to this year, it was this territory. And then from this year to this year, it was this territory. It’s ever in flux until probably the end of the Soviet period, I would say. And even the whole what I call the Stan countries, that section of Asia that was under the Soviet Union, that all more or less gained their independence in the early ’90s. What are the identities there? How do people frame their own identity based on what was the political reality?
0:30:26.7 Christopher Gwin: But for people who speak German, it’s generally the people who live in Lux, some people in Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Austria, Switzerland, Germany. We identify that. I think we think that those people are not anything other than atheist or Christian. But that’s just absolutely not true. There are people who live there who are Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, the list goes on. You’re also seeing an increase in young people from Israel relocating to Berlin. Berlin is becoming a hub for young Jewish people to start their careers or study or find their own paths. It’s no longer a place Jews leave from, but rather go to currently. So that’s a kind of an interesting phenomenon in the change. But I think during the lead up to the second World War, so the Nazi period, there was political anti… So I would frame antisemitism as being, religious, cultural or political.
0:31:32.7 Christopher Gwin: And I think that the goal of national socialism was political antisemitism, or not the goal, but one of the tenets of national socialism is political antisemitism. And my definition of that would be that your identity cannot have any nationhood or any political status. You can’t live in the world as a Jew would’ve been a national socialist dictate. And the idea would be to remove people’s identity by removing their status as citizens. And of course there was also a campaign to murder people. It led to a murder campaign, but initially it was revoking people’s rights. And you had two strong general reactions in the German Jewish community. One was Zionism. So this is a call to reverse the diaspora. In the year ’70 at the destruction of the second temple was the main diaspora. People who identified as Jewish took the call that the destruction of the second temple meant go into the world.
0:32:41.3 Christopher Gwin: And you have the first major diaspora. That’s how a lot of people who are Jewish who live in Europe, that was their ancestry. Now it’s a coming back. Israel is our ancestral home. So we will come and live there and build a nation state. So that was one view. The second view was we’re Germans. Why would we leave our country? This was a view that many people had. This crazy, wacky government won’t last. We will outlast this. We’ve been here for centuries. We just have to hold forth. So I think generally you had those two responses and in the second group, the identity was, we are German and we practice Judaism. And so speaking German was quite normal. And I think what we did for those students was empower them to understand that what I just said to you, but also that their language skills mattered to someone else. The family, the third generation had access to life in Berlin, life before the war, rich German cultural history that was also Jewish that they wouldn’t have had as much access to without the details or the content of the letters.
0:33:57.3 Norah Jones: Such important insights. Thank you very much for sharing all of those, Chris. And here’s, we’re taking a look at the various cultural phenomena in the globe, the United States being among the places where some of this phenomena is taking place, you’ve continued to use in every possible way as we’ve been talking, the enhancement of humanity, the unfolding of humanity, one’s own through learning and experiencing and others by applying the language. When you take a look at the cultural phenomena right now in the United States and beyond, since you’re connected to so many places, what direction do you see the role of understanding language and culture in the education system? Yes, but beyond in businesses, in communities, in families and what we say to each other in media, what are the pathways that you can help people to understand of language and culture, to find our way to enhancing humanity?
0:35:19.6 Christopher Gwin: Yeah. I think that’s the only way. We can’t build a global village. We can’t be interconnected if we can’t understand each other. And we have got to get away from this American exceptionalist notion that everybody will just speak our language because we have the credit cards. I just think that that has, I think it’s changing, but I’ve long felt that it must change. And it’s a deficit to be monolingual in my view, if you want to participate in the global world. My mother was monolingual her entire life. She also was not interested in participating in the global world. She came from a time and a space where that wasn’t a consideration. It’s different for young people today. The young people we are teaching in our classrooms are already connected to the world through their mobile devices that many of them hold in their hands on the regular basis.
0:36:17.0 Christopher Gwin: They just don’t understand how they’re connected. And it’s a deeper connection through language. An example I would make for my own family growing up. Well, it’s a another fascinating story for another time. But when my father was a sophomore in high school in the 1950s, this was just after the end of the second World War, his English teacher came and said, students in Britain are suffering in the post-war period. It’s very difficult. We need people to write them letters to cheer them up. Would anybody be interested in a pen pal? And my father, of course, raised his hand and got a pen pal in London. Her name is Norma. And they wrote to each other their entire lives from that moment forward until my father’s passing, they remained pen pals for over 65, 70, maybe more than 70 years. And we knew them growing up.
0:37:06.4 Christopher Gwin: My father took it upon himself to take us there when we were children and meet them, brought them to us. We’ve, back and forth if there’s been a big family event, we’ve been there for each other across the pond as we call it. But what that means for me is anytime there was a world event, we always heard from them. We got their perspective on what was happening. And an example when the September 11th terror attacks happened, they contacted us immediately, of course to see what we knew, how we were affected, etcetera. But they also shared what was being talked about in the media there about this, and also connections to Germany. I have many friends in Germany, and anytime a world event happens, I read in the German media about it and I contact friends to find out what their perspective is, because I want to have another global perspective on something happening, that I understand, but how can I understand differently by hearing about someone else’s perspective on it? That’s what language offers our young people who are learning it. Just a wider focus multiple perspectives and a deeper way to understand the world.
0:38:18.0 Christopher Gwin: I think that I can process comprehend and understand things better because I have access to at least one other language. I wish I were multilingual. I have learned some French. I dove a little bit into Mandarin Chinese, at one point Czech Polish, et cetera, but not at the level at which I committed to my second language. So I just have really access through two. But think about a multilingual person, and that means that they’re multi literate and they have more access. And because we have technology that allows for this, I often think of my grandmother who was a telephone operator for over 50 years, and when she was a young person working in the suburban area of Philadelphia, if you wanted to call New York City, you had to call the operator two days ahead and arrange to make the call. Okay? That’s how it worked.
0:39:13.9 Christopher Gwin: You had to arrange two days ahead for a long distance call. This was in the 1930s. She, before she passed, sent a text message to a friend of ours in Tokyo and got a message back in two and a half seconds. So to see that change in technology, I always use that example to talk about the speed with which we communicate, but it affords young people who have access. Let’s make that very clear. Not all people have access. We want to be very clear about that. But our young people we’re teaching generally do in most places in our region. And so what does it mean to be connected and how can language and cultural understanding deepen those connections and make them them better? I’m hoping we’re heading toward a more peaceful future through deeper connection.
0:40:04.2 Christopher Gwin: I don’t see a lot of evidence of it yet, but I remain hopeful and I think doing professional work for teachers continues that path or makes that possible. I often, if I could just make a side comment, I just think of young people today in the public schools in West Virginia and being told by their flagship research one university that learning a language doesn’t have any value. And that comes from the leadership of that university, not the professoriate. That’s important to make that distinction. And my view is my personal view on that is that that’s wrong. Every child everywhere deserves equal access to language learning.
0:40:51.6 Norah Jones: Amen. We definitely will be in agreement on that as we send out this podcast. One of the aspects of working in the language education field and in language education leadership and language leadership in general, is there is a sense that multiple perspectives provides for deeper understanding and is something that is positive, something that is healthy. What do you do, Christopher, personally, when you have an experience of coming across an individual or even groups for whom gaining different perspectives is not only not an imperative, but is actually considered to be threatening. What do you say to reassure people, not to make them feel bad, but to reassure them or to try to entice them in the direction of that global or multiple perspectives. Strengthen not weaken.
0:42:07.0 Christopher Gwin: Yes, you’re only going to be enhanced by becoming multilingual. We don’t have any evidence that this removes or erases your original identity. We often say to students after they do the exchange, they’ll come back and say, well, we check in with them every morning while we’re on the exchange just to make sure everything’s okay in the host family and that they’re doing okay, et cetera. And it’s a moment for them to share what happened when they were with the family we weren’t together. And they’ll often say they do this and I don’t understand why. Whatever the practice is in the family, they do X and I don’t understand it. And then we talk about that. But what it leads to is the students will often then say, but we do Y. They do X, we do Y and I’m really curious about why we do that. They develop a self-reflection about their own cultural practices. They don’t lose them through that process. They understand them more deeply because they have the opportunity to reflect on somebody else’s.
0:43:07.9 Christopher Gwin: I wish I had a concrete example in this moment. Let’s say the family ritual around breakfast. Let’s use that as an example. I’m speaking in generalizations, but generally in German families, our experience has been that they eat breakfast together before the day starts. Generally speaking, German teens will tell us that their experience in American families is no one sees anyone and they’re out the door in the morning before anybody’s greeted anybody. And that came across as a stark difference. Rather than saying what you do is wrong, they just saw the difference and explored it, but it made each young person understand their own phenomenological experience of the world for themselves more deeply, rather than just being critical of something else. So if you become multilingual and explore the world and develop interculturality, as you’re developing your sense of interculturality, you aren’t losing your original identity, you’re only making it stronger.
0:44:09.8 Norah Jones: That is a powerful positive statement. Thanks Chris. Chris, as we draw this podcast to a close and when we review what we’ve said and we’re like and there’s another topic for another podcast, I look forward to seeing how we can make those stories continue to unfold. But for the moment, before we finish today, what else would you like to make sure that you share, that you feel like maybe you haven’t said yet, or reiterate or exhort or invite? What else would you like to make sure that people hear from you Christopher Gwin, before we finish this podcast?
0:44:47.9 Christopher Gwin: Well, I would take a moment to talk about the NFMLTA if I could. So we’ve talked about my taking on the responsibilities of the role of executive director at the Northeast Conference about which I’m very enthusiastic and we’ve talked a lot about that today. And I think we focused on my role as a classroom teacher, but I also took on the role of executive director of the National Federation of Modern Language Teachers Association. Let’s all repeat that together very quickly.
[laughter]
0:45:14.9 Christopher Gwin: Aha. The NFMLTA has been around since 1916 and publishes the Modern Language Journal. The Modern Language Journal is a scholarly journal. It has a very high subscription rate. The subscriptions provide revenue and the NFMLTA uses the revenue to generate six grant programs. The key of those grant programs, I think is two parts. There’s a grant line for graduate students who are working toward their dissertations to do research and this is available to people working in less commonly taught languages.
0:45:48.7 Christopher Gwin: We define less commonly taught languages as every language except English, French, German, and Spanish. There’s many ways to define that. And the second grant line is for graduate students to complete the writing of their dissertations in second language acquisition, applied linguistics or language teaching. And I think this work is very important because this helps to sustain the field. I mentioned earlier in this conversation about what I call the attack on the humanities in our culture especially in higher ED currently. And these grant programs work to support graduate students to complete their dissertations, then move into the teaching phase in higher ED, and that allows for stronger, sustainable, more rigorous or robust language programs. And I think it’s an active way to work against the problem. And so I’d like to mention the work of the NFMLTA because I also enjoy doing that.
0:46:53.3 Christopher Gwin: It’s a different phase or sphere or aspect of the language community, but for many students that can also be a path. There is something in the humanities and it’s of value to continue that through to the graduate level. So I would want folks listening to us to know about that work. Every year there’s a new president at the NFMLTA and they come in and they will often say, “My goal is to get more awareness of the grant programs.” I say, “This is a wonderful goal. It’s been the goal for a number of years, it’s very difficult to get that into the language space. So I’m sharing it here, hopefully people will take that forward and let graduate students, PhD candidates know that these opportunities are available for them. But I think it speaks to our topic today because it is about sustaining the field.
0:47:45.0 Norah Jones: Sustaining the field, sustaining those pathways in helping humanity unfold. Thank you so much, Christopher. I appreciate that. And we’ll make sure that everybody has a quiz about how to do the acronym of the National Federation of Modern Language Teachers Association. And thank you for all the leadership that you’ve provided in making sure that that was mentioned along with all of the other opportunities that are out there. Chris, it’s been fun to have you as a guest. Thank you so much for sharing everything that brings you joy or as much as we could fit in in 50 minutes.
0:48:22.6 Christopher Gwin: Thank you for your time. I appreciate this opportunity.
0:48:26.5 Norah Jones: Thank you for listening to this podcast with my guest, Christopher Gwin. Learn more about Christopher. Take a look at the various organizations and resources to which he referred and check out the upcoming conferences and opportunities that he referred to too at my website, fluency.consulting. Until next time, thank you for your pathways to enhancing humanity.
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