Intercultural Conversation on the Topic of Limits

On Thursday, September 25, the Advanced Reading class of the Loyola Intensive English Program (LIEP) enjoyed our first Intercultural Conversation of Fall 2014.

An Intercultural Conversation is an opportunity for our LIEP students to engage with other members of the Loyola University community and with interested New Orleanians, who are invited to join us in discussing topics that our LIEP students have read and talked about in class. We meet in the Library Living Room of the Monroe Library at Loyola University New Orleans, where we are served cookies with coffee or tea. We begin with a time of informal chatting to get acquainted in small groups.

New Orleanian Dee Smith, Loyola University student Mary Beth Brungardt of Atlanta USA, and LIEP students Ana Pereira of Brazil, Ryota Kojima of Japan, and Sister Theresa Le of Vietnam are getting acquainted.

The whole group then comes together to discuss our Intercultural Conversation topic.

The whole group has gathered for our Intercultural Conversation.

Last Thursday's Intercultural Conversation topic was limits, a prominent topic in our September class readings and discussions. During this Intercultural Conversation, we talked about outer-imposed limits, such as traffic speed limits; inner-imposed limits, such as limits on amounts and kinds of food we eat; and limits that we discover, such as how much alcohol our bodies can handle. We talked about how we respond to other- and self-imposed limits and to discovered limits, as well as how and when we strive to stretch our limits. We talked about how it felt to learn society's limits as children, how it feels to be faced with a different set of social limits in a new culture, and how it feels to return home and re-adjust to one's own culture's social limits after becoming accustomed to different limits in another culture.

Dr. David O'Donaghue

We are very fortunate to have Dr. David O'Donaghue lead our Intercultural Conversations. Dr. David O'Donaghue is a philosopher, a psychologist, and an artist. As the founder and director of two life-long learning initiatives, the New Orleans Lyceum and Chautauqua New Orleans, he has organized many such discussion groups in New Orleans coffeehouses, libraries, and homes.

Thank you to Dr. David O'Donaghue, to our New Orleans and Loyola friends, and to our LIEP students and faculty for making our Intercultural Conversation such a rich time of sharing ideas!

LIEP Students Learning About Crisis

By Felix Garmendia

           

Crisis: House on Fire

Earlier this semester, my classmates from the Loyola Intensive English Program (LIEP) and I had the opportunity to learn about crisis and how people react to it.  As part of the Advanced Reading class, my classmates and I started gathering ideas about the characteristics people have when confronting a crisis. Some of the ideas provided by the students included activeness, determination, intelligence, and positive and critical thinking.  The majority of us knew how people behave during a crisis; however, we concluded that we wouldn’t know how we would react in a crisis or the possible effects of it in our life. Some of the doubts were clarified when we read and discussed the follow articles in class.

• "States of Emergency" in Newsweek of 15 May 2011
• "Crash Course" by Jay Dixit in Psychology Today of 1 July 2009
• "What It Takes to Survive" by Ben Sherwood in Newsweek of 23 January 2009
• "Working Through Fear" by Judith Sills in Psychology Today of 1 July 2009

Crisis: Head-On Car Crash

After reading and analyzing the experiences described by the authors in the different articles, we were very interested to learn more about this topic. Why do some people freeze during a crisis? Why do others become more active and try to help?

The students had many questions before they learned the concepts of active passiveness, normalcy bias, and incredulity response, described in the articles.

With a little bit of understanding about the concept of crisis, we were ready for our first Intercultural Conversation. This is a meeting where the students have the opportunity to express their ideas about a specific topic. In this meeting, we mix international students, native English speaking members of the Loyola community, and some New Orleanians who come to the Loyola campus to share with us. 

Dr. David O'Donaghue

Dr. David O'Donaghue, who is a philosopher, psychologist, and artist and who founded and directs the New Orleans Lyceum and Chautauqua New Orleans for life-long learning, was in charge to conduct the participants through a discussion of crisis and ways to respond. He began talking about crisis and perceptions that people have about crisis. The students were fascinated hearing the experienced opinion of Dr. David O'Donaghue. The people from the New Orleans community provided many interesting stories about the reaction that people had when Hurricane Katrina destroyed many places in the city. In the same way, people from the New Orleans community had a good time learning about the different stories that students told. We were all impressed by the fact that people act differently depending on their culture, beliefs and previous experiences. For instance, the students from Japan talked about the crisis they experienced in Tohoku with the tsunami in 2011. Also, a student from Brazil talked about how the economic crisis was affecting poor people in his country.

Crisis: Earthquake

We had an unforgettable experience learning about crisis and the effects it causes in people. We had the opportunity to clarify our ideas with interesting articles we read, discussed and analyzed in class. Finally, we learned a lot when we had the Intercultural Conversation. In this meeting, we discussed people´s reactions, experiences and learnings when confronting a crisis. My classmates and I are anxious to know what will the topic be for the next Intercultural Conversation.

* * *

Felix Garmendia of Venezuela

A huge thank-you to LIEP student Felix Garmendia for this post about the work of our Advanced Reading class with the topic of crisis and response to crisis. Felix is a corporate lawyer in Venezuela. This Fall 2013 semester, he is beginning his course work for the LL.M. degree in the College of Law at Loyola University New Orleans while also perfecting his English writing and reading skills in the Loyola Intensive English Program. In addition, Felix is an artist, with paintings on display at Garmendia Art Gallery on Magazine Street in New Orleans. Thank you, Felix!

The Philo Café

This semester our advanced LIEP students have a wonderful opportunity to carry our class discussions into the wider forum of a monthly Philo Café, or Philosophy Café. At a Philo Café, people gather to discuss a philosophical question informally over coffee or tea.

The Philo Café at Loyola is facilitated by Dr. David O'Donaghue and co-sponsored by the Loyola Intensive English Program, by Loyola's Philosophy Department, and by the New Orleans Lyceum, a center for participatory adult education of which David is founder and director. As part of his Lyceum offerings, David -- a philosopher, psychologist, and artist -- facilitates Philo Cafés in various coffeehouses of New Orleans. 
  
“The Philo Café is a way of helping people realize that they’re thinking philosophically about a lot of things without realizing it,” David says. “It brings philosophy out of the academy and makes us aware that we are all philosophers.”

The questions for the Philo Café at Loyola come from the material in the Advanced LIEP Writing & Reading class. LIEP students become familiar with a topic by reading, writing, and talking about it in class; they then discuss that topic with native speakers of English in a Philo Café. These are the questions we have been working with in the Philo Café this semester.

• OCTOBER—RIGHTS AND EQUALITY. Are there basic rights that all humans possess? If so, what are these rights? From whence do they spring?
• NOVEMBER—SERVICE. What is service? What motivates us to service? Is there a dark side, or negative aspect, to service?
• DECEMBER—CONSCIENCE AND CHOICE. What is conscience? What do we do when our conscience says one thing and the law says another?

The Philo Café at Loyola is attended by LIEP students, Loyola’s Philosophy Club members, other interested members of the Loyola community, and interested New Orleanians. For LIEP students, the Philo Café is an opportunity to discuss a familiar topic in a real-life situation with native speakers of English. As David O’Donaghue puts it, “Our challenge is to help the international students go beyond the specific and concrete and to articulate abstract ideas.” For others in the Loyola and New Orleans communities, it is an opportunity to exchange ideas with people from different cultures.

The Philo Café at Loyola is a rich exchange among people of very different ages and backgrounds. Our facilitator, David O'Donaghue, especially enjoys hearing the perspective of Loyola students. “The Loyola students are delightful,” he says. “They give me hope that the world is going to be in good hands with this next generation.”

Our next post will describe our Class Observation Project, where LIEP students spend two days observing Loyola University classes.

Photo Credit: Photos by Wadner Pierre
You can find more of Wadner's work on his photo website at http://www.loyno.edu/%7Ewpierre/photovoice.html or on his blog at http://wadnerpierre.blogspot.com