Cultural Autobiography:
A Tool to Multicultural Discovery of Self

Heewon Chang
Eastern College

This article describes how the author utilizes the genre of autobiography in her Multicultural Education class to help students discover cultural influences in their and others' lives through writing and sharing.   She believes this self-reflective process is an important step toward becoming effective multicultural educators.

Self-reflection is gaining popularity in multicultural education as a way of understanding self and others (Tiedt and Tiedt, 1999; Reed-Danahay, 1997).  I also incorporate self-reflection in the form of cultural autobiography into my undergraduate and graduate teaching of multicultural education at Eastern College.  The main goal of this writing assignment is twofold: to challenge students to reflect on events and life experiences that have shaped their cultural premises, and to have them share their reflections in class so that cultural diversity among them may be discovered in a natural way.  This assignment demands that students unravel their cultural assumptions critically.

WRITING

I advise students to be guided by Goodenough's definition of culture (1981) as they prepare for this cultural autobiography.  I provide for this assignment a guideline, which includes the definition, as follows:

Cultural autobiography is a reflective, self-analytic story of your past and present.  First, narrate your life experiences that you consider of significance in shaping your worldview.  You may include typical and/or exceptional events from your childhood, school years, religious life, family life, etc.; memorable encounters with individuals of various backgrounds; etc.  Second, analyze how these experiences have shaped your culture--standards for thinking, valuing, behaving and evaluating (Goodenough, 1981)--and interpret the cultural meanings of these experiences to you.  The narration and analytic interpretation may or may not be separated in your writing.  Lastly, reflect on the process of writing the cultural autobiography.  How has this process helped you discover your multiculturalness?

Submit the cultural autobiography in 5 to 10 double-space typed pages.   Since I am interested in seeing how you are able to reflect on and examine your own cultural assumptions, which is important in becoming an effective teacher in a multicultural environment, you will not get a good grade by simply narrating how your life has been.  To be able to do a meaningful interpretation of your past and present, you need to have a clear understanding of how one's culture is constituted and how one becomes multicultural.

Initially many students took this challenge of cultural self-reflection reluctantly for various reasons.  Some had never considered themselves as cultural; rather they associated "culture" with minorities, immigrants, and foreigners.  This view may have been influenced by the frequent usage of "multicultural" referring to something exotic and foreign.  Other students felt that their limited experiences with people of color or different cultures made them culturally handicapped, thus were doubtful that this assignment would be in any way fruitful.  Some students also implied that self-reflection was not scholarly enough for a graduate study; whereas, others felt threatened by this "foreign" process of self-revelation.  Unlike the relunctant beginning, many students conceded at the end of writing that the self-reflective process was indeed fruitful and revelational.  The most rewarding outcome of this assignment is their reflection on the writing process.  This assignment forces them to think of themselves as cultural as well as multicultural beings in an anthropological sense (Goodenough, 1976).  Cultural autobiographies by Allison (1999), Jantzi (1999), and Scott (1999), which are included in this issue, are results of this process.

SHARING

When students bring in their cultural autobiography, I ask them to choose a few consecutive or separate paragraphs from their writing to share in class.  Using the "author's chair" method, we take a turn to read excerpts from our cultural autobiography.

I have adopted the "author's chair" approach with a postmodern perspective that students have the ultimate authority over their voice, and their authentic voice needs to be heard first-person.  I set up a chair in front of the class.  I then give an instruction to the audience (the class), "After each reading, you're welcome to ask questions to learn more about the author but refrain from making comments."  My goal is to allow the author, only the author, to be at the center of attention.  One author (presenter) sits in the chair at a time and reads what she/he chose to share.  I usually volunteer first to share an excerpt from my cultural autobiography, which I wrote for this class to be equally participatory as my students.  My sense of fairness (again a postmodern perspective of shared hegemony between a teacher and students) would not have directed me otherwise.  This attempt seems to ease students' nervousness about self-revelation. 

I found myself choosing a different section from my autobiography for a different semester.  There is no strategy or system in my selection. The following is an except from my cultural autobiography, entitled "Reframing Marginality to Multiculturalism:"

I will begin with my sense of marginality in womanhood. "Heewon, you won’t be able to find a man who will take you as a wife," teased my male friends from college. This remark says a lot of the social ethos of gender in Korea where I grew up. These male friends, half scornful and half concerned, were quite convinced that my independent way of thinking would rob me of the opportunity to become a desirable wife-to-be. They implied I was too assertive, too independent, and too vocal--the opposite to the ideal type of a commendable Korean woman.

I must say it is rather an amazing irony.  I am a product of a female world--the world of Korean women.  I grew up in a family of six women of 3 generations--grandmother, mother, and 4 girls--and the lonely man.  My father certainly has lots to say about his minority status in our household.  I was also educated for 7th through 12th grades in single-sex schools, which was the norm when I was growing up.  My father was pretty much the only male soul around the house throughout those years except for rare occasions when my male cousins visited us.  My church school classes were segregated by sex during the middle and high school years.  So I wonder why these ample interactions with women had failed to socialize me properly into the "feminine" role.

Six women in my family spread over three generations, covered almost a century of the modern Korean history.  Most of us still live to stretch their collaborative legacy into the 21st century.  The oldest of the six is my paternal grandmother.  She, now deceased, was an extraordinary woman in my eyes.  However, she was definitely marginalized by her community for raising children as a single mother and career woman in the early 1900s, which was destined by unfortunate circumstances....  Another woman who has lived in a "margin" is my mother.  A female professor who had studied in the U. S. as an "old maid" and continued her career while caring for 4 children and a mother-in-law at home did not receive too many kind looks from both men and women in her community....

Let's go back to my male friends' remarks which were deeply contextualized in the male-dominant society.  I used to return their tease with a joke, "Don’t worry.  Who knows?  A man may be waiting for me from the other corner of the world."  Reflecting on this mindless joke, I wonder about my subconsciousness.   Was it meant to be a true prophecy or a self-fulfilling prophecy?  Was there a yearning for an escape from the expected role for women in the Korean society to a seemingly more accepting world?  Finding a husband from the other corner of the world was a remote--even incognizant--concern of mine when I began a graduate study in education and anthropology at the University Oregon.  During this study, however, I did run into a man "from the other corner of the world" called Germany, and eventually married him.

Did it solve my sense of marginality constantly reinforced by my people?  Not really.  This time I ceased to be not only an ordinary Korean woman but also an ordinary Korean because I married out of my own nationality.

So what does this all mean to my cultural membership?  This means now I am living in tri-cultural worlds.  Korean, U. S., and German cultures found their way into my daily existence in the form of language, food, religion, family gatherings, and many more invisible cultural assumptions.   My chosen connection with Germany and the U.S. has broadened the boundaries of my culture which will continue to expand.  Now I do not dwell on marginality.  I realize that this tri-cultural choice has sharpened my yearning for multiplicity.  Now I am reframing marginality into the blessing of multiculturalism within me.  It does not mean I stop enjoying my marginality; now I dare to celebrate it publicly.  No need to savor it secretly!       

MY REFLECTION ON THE ASSIGNMENT 

This assignment has been one of my favorites.  I learn about students' cultural assumptions.  They learn about mine as well as each other's.  I usually receive positive feedback from my students about this activity once it is completed.

Yet, I realize that the difficulty of writing and sharing a cultural autobiography should not be understated.  This self-reflective and revelational process is unfamiliar to many students, thus uncomfortable.   The sharing seems to be especially hard for some students.  A few students were overcome by emotion as they were sharing their stories; others tried to delay their turn to sit in the author's chair as long as possible.

My decision to participate in the process has helped me to examine my own cultural assumptions.  I have discovered that the value of self-reflection in writing and verbal sharing is culturally influenced.   Growing up in Korea, especially under the influence of spiritual and philosophical parents, I had been exposed to ample opportunities of self-reflection in writing, praying, and meditation.   Although the "self-centeredness" of autobiography seems a bit pompous to me, self-reflection has been woven into the natural course of my life.  Thus the postmodern push toward self-reflectivity in scholarship and teaching is a welcome development for me.  However, I have come to realize that this "natural" inclination of mine  is not natural to some of my students.  

When public sharing is the issue, however, my sense of privacy does not jive with that of some students.  I used to think self-reflection belonged to a private domain.  In contrast, many of my students did not mind sharing stories I would consider "private" and "personal."  I did not grow up with encouragement of talking about "self."   For several semesters following the initial introduction of cultural autobiography, I did not require sharing as part of this assignment, although I often wished that students could learn from each other's cultural stories.  Yet, sharing personal stories seemed too revealing, too raw, and too uncomfortable so that I was willing to let go of the educational value of learning through sharing.  Kathryn Au's inspirational presentation at one of the American Anthropological Association Annual Meetings turned me around.  The revelation to me was not that sharing has a great educational value.  I had known it all along.  Rather I realized that I had been trapped in my own cultural assumptions about the private domain.  To a person who grew up with discouragement of sharing stories of self, it was refreshing to hear that some people indeed like to share their stories.  In order to be culturally sensitive, I am still unwilling to demand that our students relinquish their definition of public and private domains.  Yet I now freely incorporate sharing into this educational process.

Writing a cultural autobiography has also given me a motivation to explore further my cultural assumptions.  As a person who grew up in a different land and is keeping a multicultural/multiethnic/multiracial household, this self-reflection seems to me a cultural imperative.  I desire to expand my cultural autobiography into the unexplored terrain of my identity as a Christian, professional Asian-American woman.  

References

Allison, J. (1999). Not at home on range. Electronic Magazine of Multicultural Education <http://www.eastern.edu/publications/emme/1999spring/allison.html> (1999, April 22).

Goodenough, W. (1976). Multiculturalism as the normal human experience.  Anthropology and Education Quarterly 7 (4), 4-6.

Goodenough, W. (1981).  Culture, language, and society. Menlo Park, CA: The Benjamin/Cummings Publishing Company.

Jantzi, J. (1999). Electronic Magazine of Multicultural Education <http://www.eastern.edu/publications/emme/1999spring/jantzi.html> (1999, April 22).

Reed-Danahay, D. E. (1997). Auto/Ethnography: Rewriting the self and the social. New York: Oxford.

Scott, N. (1999) My Inward Reflection. Electronic Magazine of Multicultural Education <http://www.eastern.edu/publications/emme/1999spring/scott.html> (1999, April 22).

Tiedt, P. L. & Tiedt, I. M. (1999). Multicultural teaching: A handbook of activities, information, and resources. Needham Heights: Allyn Bacon.

Heewon Chang, Ph. D., Assistant Professor of Multicultural Education at Eastern, has studied adolescents from the U.S., Korea and Germany.  Her Adolescent life and ethos (1992) is based on the U.S. study.

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Recommended Citation in the APA style:

Chang, H. (1999). Cultural autobiography: A tool to multicultural discovery of self. Electronic Magazine of Multicultural Education <http://www.eastern.edu/publications/emme/1999spring/chang.html> (your access year, month date).