BETWEEN LANGUAGES AND CULTURES: THE TRIAD OF SYMBOLS IN THE WORLD OF AN IMMIGRANT CHILD

Multicultural Education, Fall 2004 by Nowak-Fabrykowski, Krystyna, Shkandrij, Myroslav

According to Halliday (1994), "Cultures are by no means mutually exclusive. They overlap, contain, and are contained by other cultures" (p. 28). While we go through life's changes we can travel between those circles. Sometime this process is conscious or even unconscious.

The space between the two worlds suggests that there is an area where an easy acceptance (the ability to relax and look at both cultures with some degree of distance and irony) exists, a centered, perhaps ambivalent space. People are able to take from both cultures what they think is best and most valuable to them. Some individuals might reach or feel comfortable with this sense of balance, and may be pulled from one direction to another.

Others find a place somewhere to the left or right that harmonizes with their personal symbolic universe.

THE TRIAD OF SYMBOLS

The creation of a "symbolic triad" marks the beginning of life in a new culture. This triad emerges from children's experiences of acting and interacting in the new world and his/her struggle to survive.

According to Erikson (1963), a child develops by overcoming crises of trust versus mistrust, autonomy versus shame and doubt, initiative versus guilt, industry versus inferiority, identity versus role confusion, intimacy versus isolation, generativity versus stagnation, and ego integrity versus despair. For an immigrant child, such crises are faced almost every day.

Building the "symbolic triad" is a mechanism of defense and survival. Each day, an immigrant child makes choices as to which situations are acceptable and can be assimilated into the internal symbolic worlds and which ones hurt, which the child prefers to avoid and leave in the external symbolic world.

Coping with new situations is a part of a child's development, even in "homogenous" cultures, but in the multicultural society children must learn to "participate in the other people's conceptual schemes by bringing their own references'^ Lampert in Gadamer, 1997).

In this regard, when a child 'is struggling to establish his/her own validity in the new world, he/she must (applying Lampert's 1997 term) perform cross-cultural interpretation permitting conversation in the foreign language. For example children will illustrate 'Dovbush"in Ukrainian culture as being like RobinHood.

Sometimes this cross-cultural interpretation is impossible when a hegemonic culture is not "open" or "ready" to accept new values and new ways of behavior.

In this situation the conflict between the internal and external symbolic worlds is more painful for a child searching for harmony.

THE IMPLICATIONS FORTEACHING

The "symbolic triad" helps living and interacting in the new world of symbols. The eacher as a cross-cultural interprator may help children learn to converse and "participate in other children's conceptual schemes" (see Lampert 1997, p. 355)

Considering different approaches to teach an immigrant child, we should attempt first to reach his/her "internal symbolic world," slowly shifting it toward the external one. Blackledge (1993), working as a teacher of bilingual children, found that the work of bilingual children would sometimes improve dramatically when they used their home language. Especially helpful were stories told in their mother tongue.