Teaching and Learning Culture: Negotiating the Context

From the Forword
…Going back to Henri Bergson’s quote, what the philosopher suggests is that we, as thinkers, intellectuals, researchers, and practitioners , start concentrating on the “warmth and mobility of life” instead of freezing it. The article by Mads Jacok Kirkebæk in this book is quite telling in this sense as it problematizes the central issues of this volume on learning and teaching culture. Asked to create a “China -box ” filled with Chinese artifacts for language and culture education in Denmark , the author is puzzled: “How is culture to be defined? Is culture something that can be fitted into a box? If not, how do we teach culture, and how do we fill up that box?”
The excellent book edited by Mads Jakob Kirkebæk, Xiangyun Du, and Annie Aarup Jensen on the power of context in teaching and learning culture offers many answers to these questions. The rich and exciting chapters that they have collected propose a Task-Based approach to these issues in order to infuse instability, mélanges, intersubjectivity, and individuality at the centre of culture learning and teaching. Many of the chapters deal with Chinese “culture” and how to teach-learn it from a complex perspective.
The editors and authors are, in this sense, very close to the current criticisms that have appeared in sinology and anthropology, for example. In what follows, I will take up some of these ideas to summarize and add to the arguments presented in the book..