Bridging the Cultural Gap Online

Spanish students at Bel Air’s Milken Community High School of Stephen S. Wise Temple are learning more than just a foreign language in a classroom project that has paired them with cyber pen pals in Mexico City; they are also learning that despite the large number of Latinos in and around Los Angeles, they knew little about Latino cultures.

ERICA ZEITLIN spoke with their Spanish teacher, Jenny Kopelioff, an Argentine native living in Granada Hills. Kopelioff designed the online cultural exchange program that matched her students with counterparts learning English at a Jewish school in Mexico.

My goal was to put my Spanish classes in a situation where they could talk with students in a Latin country--in Uruguay, Argentina, Spain or anywhere else--and use the technology I wanted to bring into the classroom.

In our school, we teach Judaism, so I thought it would be interesting for them to connect to a Jewish school. We found a good match with the English students at the Colegio Israelita de Mexico in Mexico City.

Their teacher and I paired up all of the students, and they wrote to each other on e-mail. We allowed them to write about whatever they wanted; the only requirement was that my students had to write in Spanish and the Mexican students had to write in English. Then the students in Mexico would correct my students’ Spanish and my students corrected their English.

My students also had to go to sites in an online scavenger hunt. They had to investigate topics including Mexican cultural values, dance, celebrations of the Days of the Dead and all about the Jewish communities in Mexico. The students in Mexico did research on the Jewish communities in Los Angeles.

All of the kids wrote summaries on what they learned and then we made (digital) presentations for each others’ classes, including animation and their personal opinions about what they found out.

My students were invited to visit their partners in Mexico in April. Students from the Colegio Israelita recently visited their local counterparts on a tour of Los Angeles.

American kids are limited in what they see. They don’t know there are different nationalities and Latino cultures. They talk about Argentina and are thinking of Brazil. Every time they hear “Latino,” they think “Mexican.”

My students couldn’t believe that the Mexican students look the same as they do and wear the same clothes and go to the synagogue on Shabbat. The school in Mexico also has many families who are financially comfortable. My students were surprised to learn that their pen pals’ families have maids who prepare their breakfast every morning and fold their clothes every night. I think they envisioned that everyone in Mexico would be low-income or working class.

The students in Mexico also learned a lot from their partners. The Mexican students noted that the relationship in the U.S. between teacher and students is very “cold.” They call their teachers by their first names there and are more familiar.

The project has been very successful. Even the students who are not in my Spanish classes want to participate in this program.