02/12 - Athenaeum at 2pm - Living the Land Ethics through Restorative Teaching and Learning by Bruno Borsari

This Wednesday, February 12 at 2:00pm Bruno Borsari, WSU Biology Professor will speak about Living the Land Ethics through Restorative Teaching and Learning.

The Winona State University campus offers many acres of open space, which are topographically and biologically diverse. Our land asset can become a powerful tool for transformative education for all students and this presentation will illustrate a few, effective examples. The Land Stewardship & Arboretum Committee is leading this effort.

 

The Athenaeum is located on the second floor of the Kruger Library, bluff side. For more information about the Athenaeum please visit our website.  

 

The last Athenaeum for the semester is on Wednesday, April 9th at 2:00pm.  WSU Students from Professor James Armstrong's Advanced Poetry Writing class will read their poetry to showcase their year-long education in the art of writing poems.

 

3/12 Athenaeum at 1pm - Culture Shock and Political Correctness by Juan Fernandez Iglesias

On Wednesday, March 12, 2008 at 1:00pm Juan Fernandez Iglesias, WSU Professor of Foreign Languages, will present Culture Shock and Political Correctness: The Challenge of Teaching Foreign Cultures in America.

Culture is often perceived as something that, well, other cultures have. Think, for example, of the French, with their “peculiar” culinary and social eccentricities. We, on the other hand, (whomever that “we” may be in any particular instance) tend to behave and interact with each other and interpret the world around us following the sometimes vague but generally accepted rules of what could be described as “common sense.” This stance makes us look at other cultures as literally eccentric, that is, out of center, not normal. Since they behave differently than us, and our behavior is determined by common sense, then their behavior has to be motivated by something else, something strange. When two cultures interact, this clashing of two different systems of “common sense” results in what has come to be known as “culture shock,” the seed of stereotypes and ultimately of ethnic and cultural chauvinism.