Beyond a Shared Theme: Intercultural Living and Learning

From Learning To Teaching

Colombo to the Classroom. In the fall of 1999, I (Jayton) landed at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, Illinois. I arrived in the United States as an international student from Sri Lanka. The cold late afternoon breeze that day felt much colder during my first fall in the United States when 40 degrees was cause for alarm. I remember being glad about the winter jacket that was tightly rolled up in one of my two large suitcases. It was a dark brown full-length winter jacket that I had purchased in my hometown of Colombo. It didn’t have any brand names and didn’t come with a tag detailing washing instructions. Street vendors in Sri Lanka often pick up slightly defective goods that are manufactured in the several Free Trade Zones (FTZs) for foreign markets and sell them at ridiculously low prices. They can do that because the cost of labor in Sri Lanka was minuscule compared to those in many parts of the world. Despite labor conditions being subpar in these FTZs by Western standards, there was always those willing ready to do the work. My winter jacket cost me 450 Sri Lankan Rupees (the equivalent of around 9 U.S. dollars at the time) after some bartering with a particularly persistent vendor.

Two decades later, I retell the story of my winter jacket in a classroom full of eager students looking to understand their role in a global consumer market. I asked them if they had the opportunity to buy a brand-name quality jacket at a cheap price, would they. And what considerations would they take in making that decision? This prompt resulted in a spirited dialogue on the impact of fast fashion and responsible consumerism. Students teased out the tensions of living in a culture that encouraged quick turnover in fashion with the values of justice and human rights for workers who lived a world away. The result was a more nuanced idea of culturally responsible consumerism, that considered the ethics of adorning oneself in cultural artifacts; the responsibilities we owe to people, not in our immediate physical or psychological networks; and the process whereby we disincentivize fast fashion in favor of more sustainable fashion.

Connecting the Dots. The very same season my co-author left for the US, I (Dinger) arrived in Oslo Norway. Coming from a working-class family in a small suburban town in the Upper Midwest of the United States, I had little direct experience with a global mindset. We were deeply rooted locally and then nationally. No one in my family held a passport and engagement outside of our borders wasn’t a priority or even a possibility. Even though I would be a first-generation student, I had strong support to attend college for economic mobility and stumbled upon Scandinavian studies because of my family heritage. Ultimately, I was convinced by a persistent advisor to study abroad to improve my language and cultural skills. Norway was my first time outside of the country and my first significant immersion in cultural differences as, even while available, I was rarely exposed to this within my political borders.