Sara Ann (Sally) Beach
Angela Ward
Sapargul Mirseitova

By the end of 1991, the Soviet Union no longer existed, and democracy was sweeping through the republics of central and eastern Europe. (It needs to be noted that our conception of the meaning of democracy is that it is a myth, a kind of fantasy about what ought to be. But such fantasies, when shared by all, connect individuals to one another, providing a common language, a set of ideals, and a program for the future [Postman, 2001, p. 9]). Possibilities arose for communication across cultures, including communication about education, educational practices, and literacy. Opportunities to connect individuals, to negotiate a common language about literacy learning and teaching, and to create a program for the future became available as funding agencies recognized the importance of education to nurturing and sustaining democracy.

We met as part of one such opportunity, Reading and Writing for Critical Thinking (RWCT), an initiative of the Open Society Institute and the International Reading Association (publisher of this journal). The project brings English-speaking teacher educators from Canada, the United States, western Europe, and Australia together with educators in the former communist countries of eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (and, more recently, in east Asia and South America). The project’s major purpose is to support teachers in those countries as they seek to change their practice in response to new political realities and increased contact with democratic societies.

As part of this project, teachers in the participating countries attend a series of intensive workshops (a scene from one is shown at right) that not only introduce western theoretical perspectives on education, but engage the participants in classroom contexts and teaching methods from the perspective of a student. At a practical level, this involves introducing teaching strategies and practices that encourage making curricular choices. Participants in the workshops learn how to support opinions with evidence, listen to multiple perspectives, collaborate with others, and solve problems. During site visits, the workshop leaders observe teachers as they implement these ideas in their own classrooms.

We met in 1997 as leaders of RWCT in Kazakhstan, a central Asian republic and one of the newly independent states of the former Soviet Union. Over the next few years, our participation in the project affected us in ways we could not have imagined. The opportunity to work together in Kazakhstan, the United States, and Canada has brought a shared sense of purpose to our three different histories. This article presents each of our stories and conveys some of the crosscultural learnings that have characterized not only our experiences in this project but also in our personal and professional lives. We place our individual understandings of the RWCT experience in Kazakhstan within our own contexts, reflecting on how our professional assumptions and practices have changed through our collaboration.

The three of us have extensive and varied experience in teaching at the elementary, secondary, and university levels. Sapargul was the RWCT coordinator in Kazakhstan, and is currently executive director of the Soros Center for Democratic Education there. Sally and Angela were part of a team of four RWCT volunteers who delivered workshops and visited schools and universities throughout Kazakhstan to observe workshop participants as they implemented ideas and strategies in their own teaching contexts. Sally coordinates the reading program at the College of Education, University of Oklahoma, Norman, United States, and also teaches literacy courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels. More than a thousand miles north of Sally, Angela teaches language and literacy courses at the University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada.

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Angela’s Story

I am always impressed by airplane passengers who peer thoughtfully into their laptop computers as they type their way across oceans and continents. Someone watching me on an 8-hour plane journey would see a middle-aged white woman drifting in and out of consciousness. But there is some mental activity occurring; I have been reflecting recently on my crosscultural travels and sojourns. For my first 18 years, I lived in a working-class area of a British industrial city. I traveled only on double-decker city buses or, occasionally, by train. No one I knew, other than my teachers, had traveled outside of Britain, so I read about other countries and imagined myself in exotic locations.

I left home to study English at London University, where I met my husband. When he had an opportunity to apply for a teaching position in Canada, I was thrilled. We immigrated to British Columbia with two young children, and ended up in a very small aboriginal community there. At first, this long journey seemed to take us gently to our new home, leaving me puzzled by only a few communication difficulties. The village culture and the school system did not throw me into confusion. However, as I became part of this community, I saw the devastation wreaked on aboriginal peoples by colonization.

Though I no longer live alongside aboriginal friends, over the years I have made many journeys in Canada and have met many Dene, Inuit, Haida, Cree, and Shuswap peoples struggling to re-establish their identities through education and cultural renewal. These journeys have given me opportunities to visit communities as a coworker for education and social justice.

My latest journeys to Kazakhstan resonate with my earlier educational travels. In becoming part of the RWCT project, I hoped to be a traveler in the postcolonial landscape, rather than a purveyor of U.S. and Canadian panaceas. Educational journeys in a postcolonial world carry a heavy weight for travelers who recognize their complicity in colonial systems (Said, 1993). Journeys are undertaken for a variety of reasons: to satisfy curiosity about the world and its people, to escape from unpleasant situations at home and to begin again, to impress others with one’s substance, or to offer help. My motives were probably both selfish and altruistic.

Travelers also bring literal and metaphorical baggage along on their journeys. I certainly brought with me from Canada (and ultimately from Britain) assumptions about democracy, learning, and teaching. Some of these assumptions were challenged by my observations and conversations in Kazakhstan, while others were reinforced. Perhaps most of all I was struck by physical and political similarities between Kazakhstan and Canada. The connections and disconnections between places enabled me to make sense of the issues faced by Canada in its attempt to build a multicultural society through educational effort.

The reflections presented here are a series of snapshots, a sojourner’s musings.

Sitting in the train, I look out over vast stretches of scrubby grasslands, straining to catch a glimpse of the elusive wildlife I’ve been exhorted to admire. Farmers’ vehicles wait patiently at dusty crossroads, and children wave as we trundle by. The landscape seems to transform itself in slow motion from birch forest to grassland, from inland sea to hot desert. I have also traveled slowly across Canada -- not in a train, but in our family van on an extended camping trip. That journey of thousands of kilometers through mountains and grasslands, past lakes and deserted farming villages, helped me understand the challenge of uniting a country formed of diverse regions and peoples.

I have been in Kazakhstan for several weeks at a time over the past several years, learning how to deal politely with unexpected hospitality (two lunches within an hour of each other, both hearty) and how to look intelligent while waiting for our interpreter to catch up with the dinner host’s ebullient and vociferous greetings. Along with other U.S. and Canadian members of the volunteer team working in Kazakhstan, I have watched high school students engage in a debate about Pushkin, been regaled by Kazakh dombra players and traditional dancers, and listened to Kazakh-speaking children learning British flower names. My imagination has been caught by similarities and differences between Kazakhstan and Canada, both vast countries engaged in community building in a postcolonial era, both affected by neighbors who are major players on the world stage.

The Grade 2 children, in a village school in Kazakhstan, are wearing formal suits and large white bows in their hair (in honor of visitors, we think). The children talk earnestly to each other as they complete a cooperative drawing. During discussion time, they answer their teacher’s questions enthusiastically, waving their hands as hard as they can to get Zaure’s attention. There is no classroom equipment which would encourage play, and not enough room for students to move around. We see no classroom library.

My own beliefs about language and learning come from a constructivist perspective; I was ardently involved during the 1980s in attempts to reshape teachers’ practice to include whole language strategies. During my elementary teaching years I wholeheartedly embraced activity-based programs and language experience approaches. I could indeed be accused of holding a romantic view of child development. Open-ended and individualized teaching strategies worked successfully for the aboriginal children I taught. Their families valued autonomy, and appreciated my nondirective teaching style. But during my visits to Kazakh schools, I have had to revise my views somewhat. I recognize that democratic education does not have to look as busy and active as my own version of classroom life. In working with the RWCT program, and in watching Kazakh students quietly discussing ideas while sitting at their desks, I have broadened my view of the democratic classroom.

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Sapargul’s Story

We were always proud of our education in the former Soviet Union. We considered ourselves to be a literate society. In my early childhood, my mother often read traditional Kazakh narrative poems about earlier days to the whole family. I loved to recite children’s verses in Kazakh and Russian that my grandmother taught me. I know I just memorized the Russian verses without understanding a single word, but I loved them anyway.

When I was 7 years old, the time came to go to school. I decided to walk with my friends from next door. The school happened to be Kazakh speaking. When I was almost in the classroom, my father came up after me, saying, “I want you to be educated in Russian because then you’ll have a chance to continue your education and do doctoral studies in Moscow.” Probably in those days I was impressed only by one word: Moscow. My parents told me that I immediately agreed to change to the Russian school, leaving my next-door friends in the classroom.

In those days it was a double challenge for me because I did not speak Russian. But I loved to study, so I quickly caught up with my classmates. Many years later when I went to Moscow for my graduate studies, I was really grateful to my father -- and I still am.

While studying in Moscow, crazy ideas began to come to my mind from time to time. I decided that I needed to go somewhere else to continue my studies, and thought it would be great if it were to an English-speaking country. When I got that chance, I did not hesitate. In 1993 I went on an exchange program to a very small private school, Grand Canyon University in Phoenix, Arizona. I remember I kept repeating to myself that I had only 1 year to accomplish my master’s program. Everything was new, even the language -- for in the former Soviet Union, we used British English.

The way we were taught was also clearly quite different. Questions emerged for me about these differences. From the beginning I thought about applying the things I had learned in my own classes. I also studied the teaching methods of different professors. The main thing I learned at that time was to encourage students to integrate background knowledge of the subject matter and apply it to the content area under study. Very often it seemed impossible to accomplish this. But today in my own teaching, I still appreciate this approach and am quite sure about its value in learning.

It seemed to me in those days that the answer to my questions might be that in our Soviet education, we did not focus on psychological issues such as the peculiarities of perception, thought, and memory. Therefore, when I had the chance, I went to Boulder, Colorado, for 3 months to study cognitive science with Walter Kintsch. I was familiar with his work from the professional literature. What I found most amazing, however, was his teaching style and his attitude toward colleagues and students. In the classroom he always encouraged sharing of thoughts. His writing always shaped thoughts clearly, containing concrete examples about very complicated phenomena.

When I returned to Kazakhstan, I tried to bring some changes into my practical and theoretical courses. In theoretical grammar class, students began to make presentations as well as listen to my lectures. I replaced the oral exams in English with role-play activities in which groups of students worked cooperatively to integrate course topics into one scenario.

During my last visit to the United States, as a Fulbright scholar in 1999-2000, my advisor was Ken Goodman at the University of Arizona in Tucson. I also had the opportunity to take classes with Yetta Goodman. Ken’s class was interesting to me in two different ways. First, it was totally student centered -- the thing I most appreciate about American-style education. Each student presented an issue, and this was followed by discussion. Second, there were some days when he asked about our concerns and problems. One question was enough for him to give a whole lecture with reference to his own experience and different scholars’ approaches -- comparing different countries, cultures, and languages. This way of lecturing I had appreciated in Moscow scholars but had witnessed less often in American schools. In my own practice when I am asked such questions, the best answers unfortunately come to my mind after I close the door of the classroom behind me!

I have taken from American culture a number of understandings connected with education, teaching, and learning. One of these is the importance of diversity: diversity of schools, diversity of voices, and diversity of publications. In Tucson I visited different types of schools, each of which had its own philosophy of teaching. Diverse voices coexisted and there were multiple possibilities for everyone to write and publish, or to submit and present. I saw in the United States that the world is small, and includes broad connections with others.

The number, diversity, and availability of dictionaries also was something new for me. They were everywhere -- open and convenient for you to use in the library and the computer lab, in schools and people’s houses. In my country, dictionaries of foreign languages are considered necessary, but we do not have a big choice of updated dictionaries of our native language or languages. I was also impressed with the number and diversity of professional organizations, with their own publications and conferences. These organizations give educators a chance to communicate in different ways on national and international levels. Another difference concerns school, university, and government administration of education. We are still struggling with the habit of giving up responsibility to the will and decision of administrators. Our administrators are sure that decision making is only their priority.

Another big issue that American educators are concerned with today is bringing together schools and universities. During my last visit I saw many good examples of that cooperation. I saw a primary school in Tucson where preservice teachers were attending classes before their student teaching. Children watched during a whole semester as university students studied next to them. I met an elementary classroom teacher in Tucson who was the author of a book for teachers. She wrote it with a university professor who had done doctoral research in her classroom. I witnessed the College of Education faculty at the University of Arizona at an “open door” Saturday, when an idea is shared by one scholar in a direct conversation with classroom instructors. I know it benefits both sides.

We are deprived of this sort of cooperation in Kazakhstan. But when I think about my country from this perspective, I realize we are not ready for such changes; we need time to come to them.

Three times I have visited the United States, and every time it had a great impact on me. After the first visit, I thought confidently, “I’ve got it! I know what we need in our education. We need to look for the answers in cognitive psychology and Bloom’s taxonomy.” After the second visit, I understood we still need more: new methodology and a different philosophy of teaching.

Sometimes I ask myself, “Where would I be as a teacher if I had not been educated at least partly abroad?” I would be different. I probably would still seek good answers to my questions about education, learning, and teaching, and I probably could find them. But without seeing these processes in Yetta and Ken Goodman’s and Walter Kintsch’s classes, my understanding would be slightly different.

I am still working on my understanding of a democratic education and I am glad I have had impressive examples of it. Today I am tolerant with teachers in their search of knowledge. I know that our RWCT national conference should be led by them and they should decide about the content of our professional journal (copies of which are shown below). I understand that events like the conference and publications like the journal will only realize their full potential if they belong to everyone, not just to a group of administrators or university faculty.

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Sally’s Story

By the time I was 10 years old, I had lived in four different countries on three continents and had circumnavigated the globe. My father worked as an agricultural engineer for the United States Agency for International Development, so living in and learning about different cultures was part of my daily life as a child. While I was home-schooled in the first 2 years of school because there was no international school in the small town in Chile where we lived, I also spent 1 day per week at the local school learning to read, write, and do crafts and arithmetic in Spanish with the local children.

When we moved to Dhaka, East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), at the end of my second-grade year, I attended the small international school there and had friends of many nationalities. In fact, when I returned to live in the United States at the beginning of fifth grade, it was somewhat of a shock for me to discover that my interest in learning about the world was an anomaly.

Those early years set the stage for my abiding interest in being a part of a global community, in sharing my knowledge as well as learning from those who looked at life through a different lens and from a different perspective.

In my professional life, I attempted to move out (but not too far) of the comfortable niche of my white middle-class American lifestyle, to explore cultures that were not my own. I taught American children on U.S. military bases overseas. The children were truly a diverse bunch, many the product of crosscultural marriages and most having lived and traveled in several countries outside of the United States. But each military base remained a microcosm of American culture, language, and values insulated within another country, so I never had to confront essential differences in ways of thinking and being that are part of living in a different culture. At that time for me, cultural awareness meant accepting that there were differences, trying to understand what those differences were, and adding that store of knowledge to what I already understood about what it meant to think internationally.

I was truly brought up short, however, in 1997 when I joined the Orava Project in Slovakia, the prototype of and, for me, the springboard into the RWCT project and my visits to Kazakhstan. All at once I had to confront my own beliefs about teaching, learning, literacy, and democracy. While I had labored through my doctoral studies to make explicit my own personal and professional theories of teaching, learning, and literacy, I had never had to take out and examine my definition of democracy or the relationship of teaching and learning to democracy. And critical to that examination became revisiting notions of what it meant to be literate within a particular culture. I could no longer accept my carefully crafted definition of literacy as pertaining to all cultures, all languages, or even all political systems. While I had given lip service to the notion of multiple literacies, I can truly say I had not really delved beneath the surface to try and understand how those multiple literacies are integrally related to issues of linguistic and cultural dominance or marginalization, power, and who has the authority to decide what is knowledge.

From my time working with Kazakhstani educators, I came to understand several propositions that have altered how I look at the world. I learned that to be literate means to understand yourself, understand your own cultural heritage, and understand the cultural heritage of people who come from a life, language, and history far different from your own. The Kazakhstani educators I call my friends are steeped in the literature of their ancestors and are often able to quote from famous poets and authors at will. In addition, many have read classical authors from both eastern and western cultures and can describe areas of the globe closer to where I live than where they live.

I learned that nothing I do is free from political overtones -- political in the sense of being fraught with issues of power and who has that power. As much as I wanted to believe that our workshop participants and I were equal, in reality, we were not. As the “expert,” I had the power to decide what knowledge was valuable to share and construct during workshops, as well as if a proposed lesson was a “good” one. I had the power to judge the participants, while they really did not have the same power to judge me. I learned just how powerful it is, but also how frightening it can be, to be given choices, because with choice comes the responsibility to make wise choices and the risk of choosing an option that may lead to failure.

And most important -- to me, anyway -- I relearned the necessity of questioning the status quo and continually revisiting what I think, especially the relationship of literacy to democratic societies. My Kazakhstani colleagues remind me (not explicitly, but through their questions and their dialogue) to ask myself continually -- and to ask others as well -- “What does it mean to be literate? What are important characteristics of democratic classrooms? What are democratic practices around literacy? How do different literacy practices in schools as well as in the world support the emergence or shutting down of different voices and power structures?”

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Conclusions and Issues

Even though the three of us come from vastly different backgrounds and have had different experiences, our reflections bring up several common themes. These themes include issues around role and communication, differing theoretical perspectives and the reciprocal nature of learning, the process of educational change, and diversity.

Role and communication issues. For Sally and Angela, our role at times has been a murky one. We wanted to work with our Kazakhstani colleagues as partners, sharing practices that have been effective in our teaching contexts to support critical thinking, reading, and writing. At the same time, we wanted our Kazakhstani colleagues to transform those practices and make them their own. We felt we walked a fine line in supporting the transformation of what we had done while also having to judge whether that transformation changed in an essential way the goal of the original teaching strategy. In that way, we weren’t really partners as we had the power to judge right and wrong.

In many instances, when we visited the classrooms of our Kazakhstani colleagues, we were accompanied by the principal or assistant principal and several other lead teachers at the school. At the end of the lesson, we were often expected to critique what we had seen publicly, describing both the “mistakes” the teacher had made and the aspects of the lesson that were good. Although we declined this public judgment, we still had to meet with our colleague for a private judgment. At other times, it was clear (and admitted to) that the lesson we observed had been rehearsed with the students so that it would be perfect, both in the activity of the teacher and the responses of the students. The teacher did not want to be judged as not able to carry out what she was learning in the workshops.

As our Kazakhstani colleagues internalized the ways of teaching and learning that we were trying to model, our role necessarily had to change and we had to relinquish power. Instead of just sitting in judgment of them as they presented workshops, we were sometimes asked to present a lesson while our colleagues observed. Instead of observing our colleagues present lessons, we went with them as they observed participants in their workshops implement what they had learned into their own classroom instruction. Then we sat by as observers as our colleagues guided reflective feedback about the lesson.

Communication has also been an issue. Sometimes there have been literal misunderstandings because of the difficulties of translation, especially when concepts are not familiar. Further, Sally and Angela did not have detailed knowledge of the cultures and history of education in Kazakhstan. At other times, misunderstanding was due to different expectations concerning appropriate ways to communicate evaluative information and to support learning. Our colleagues were used to public critiques and direct statements. Self-reflection had not been valued. It was difficult at times for our Kazakhstani colleagues to realize that evaluation of their teaching could be formative, rather than a listing of problems and criticisms. Our approach as American and Canadian teacher educators, attempting to foster self-reflection through questioning, was sometimes perceived as lightweight and evasive. We had to learn to be more direct with our suggestions for improving the teaching and learning in our colleagues’ workshops and classrooms.

Differing theoretical perspectives. Lodge (1947) writes that “a realist and an idealist and a pragmatist, all discussing the same educational problem, may even use the same words in their definitions so that they seem to be speaking the same language. But since they use all words with characteristically different meanings and backgrounds, it is scarcely to be wondered at when they reach conclusions which are different and opposed” (p. 4). A goal in all three countries is to teach effectively, but each culture understands differently what that means. A main difference is the belief in the United States and Canada that educational theory should be applied in classrooms.

Different philosophies are also the foundation in explaining why Soviet and western educators have read and interpreted Vygotsky so differently. Progressivism in education in the United States and Canada is based on pragmatism, where the “doer” of the action is valued -- which means that every voice is counted and heard. In Soviet education, the social context of human development went so far that individuals was impersonalized. Rather than being individuals, citizens became “collectives.” From Vygotsky’s ideas about “scientific” and “spontaneous” (or everyday) child development, his followers from the Soviet Union investigated and continued only the scientific (Vygotsky, 1999), leading to a strong, sophisticated theory which very often had little to do with what was practiced.

The process of educational change. The RWCT project has been operating for 4 years in Kazakhstan. For some teachers in the project, it has been a welcome opportunity to develop ideas and strategies that matched their own burgeoning democratic teaching practices. For others, it has been a frustrating struggle to understand culturally alien practices.

Watching some of our highly educated and experienced participants struggle with planning, collaboration, and reflection reminds us of the complexity of change in schools. Our colleagues work in pairs or groups of three to present their workshops. For some of these teams, planning and decision making together is almost nonexistent. Perhaps one member of the team is a university professor and the other two are classroom teachers. The difference in status means that the professor often assigns activities to the teachers instead of collaborating with them to decide what needs to come next in the series of workshops, depending on the needs and progress of the participants.

Literature on the difficulties of change describes rigidities in U.S. and Canadian systems, which are theoretically democratic and open (Fullan, 1999). Grass-roots change in a centralized system, such as Kazakhstan’s, is not only a matter of bringing new teaching strategies to committed teachers, but also of reforming teacher education and changing attitudes to educational research. Although several of our colleagues are university professors or instructors in teacher in-service institutions, their numbers are small. While they are implementing new teaching strategies in their own classes where possible, the impact on teacher-education curricula is also small. In addition, research is still located in research institutions instead of colleges of pedagogy.

In Kazakhstan, educators today face several challenges. As teachers in the RWCT project are trying to transform their classroom teaching environments to include democratic processes and relationships, educational administrators have begun developing concepts of higher education. Their goals include developing education for lifelong learning, determining a rating system for evaluation of learning, and transforming secondary schools so students attend school for 12 years instead of the current 11. These changes will probably assist our efforts in the RWCT project. Our hope is that they will not only touch the outer form of schooling but lead to systemic change.

The reciprocal nature of learning. Angela and Sally gained many insights about schooling in their own countries by imagining that Kazakh educators had come to visit U.S. and Canadian schools:

• What would we most proudly show them?
• What would we hope they wouldn’t see?

We might invite our Kazakh friends to notice the diversity of students in U.S. and Canadian schools. Not only do children from a variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds work and play together, but children with physical and intellectual disabilities are part of our schools. Multicultural and antiracist programs are available, although they are inconsistently implemented.

On the negative side, we have too many children in the U.S. and Canada who are not academically successful, usually those from families who are considered economically disadvantaged in these wealthy countries. There are classrooms with unimaginative programs and rigid rules, which do not embody democratic and critical thinking ideals. The unacceptable classroom behavior of some children suggests that their lives are unhappy, and that families are not providing them with the security and intellectual stimulation that they need.

What does Kazakhstan have to offer Canada and the United States in terms of improving education? The apparent high levels of literacy in Kazakhstan seem to be related to community values for schooling. Students are expected to study hard, and to focus on school work throughout their school careers. In all schools we have visited in Kazakhstan, we have been struck by the serious commitment of students to their work. In the U.S. and Canada, many high school and university students have part-time jobs, in part to contribute to the costs of their education. Unlike in many countries, tuition for Canadian and American university students is expensive; consequently, students need to become part of the work force at a time when concentration on academic endeavors should be paramount.

In addition, Kazakhstani students learn at least one second language, and by learning that language, learn about the culture of at least one (if not multiple) areas of the world. In the United States, especially, second-language learning is often seen as an unnecessary add-on to an already full curriculum. We believe that both Kazakhstani and U.S. and Canadian education systems would benefit from growing opportunities to understand cultures different from their own. This project has been an opportunity to enter this global conversation.

Diversity. In an odd way, it may be that Kazakhstan could learn most from Canada and the United States’ unresolved issues surrounding multiculturalism and diversity. Canada’s population includes large numbers of immigrants from all regions of the world. Despite various government pronouncements about Canada’s status as a multicultural society and descriptions of the “Canadian cultural mosaic,” the country still struggles with its own postcolonial future. Media sources attempt to describe what it means to be Canadian. Negotiation of aboriginal self-government and educational governance continues. It seems unlikely that aboriginal peoples, French, English, and immigrant groups will ever come to a singular vision of Canadian society. Indeed, comfort with ambiguity may be a Canadian strength (Kymlicka, 1993). Perhaps Kazakhstan, as the education system begins truly to reflect its multicultural character, could learn from Canada’s acceptance of social complexity.

Friendships have been built through many crosscultural conversations with Kazakhstani educators and administrators. Respectful listening entails searching for points of contact, those shared experiences which are the places from which we can build mutual understanding. We found those familiar places in feelings for landscape and the ecology of place, in parallel struggles for cultural revitalization, in beginning to recognize the richness of student diversity. Crosscultural understandings can be difficult to build on more than a superficial level, but continued dialogue, negotiation, and reflection can lead to deeper understandings about our global community and appreciation for our cultural diversity.

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References

Fullan, M. (1999). Change forces: The sequel. Philadelphia, PA: Falmer.
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Kymlicka, W. (1993). Multicultural citizenship. Oxford: Clarendon.
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Lodge, A.C. (1947). Philosophy of education. New York: Harper.
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Postman, N. (2001). Democracy. In S.J. Goodlad (Ed.), The last best hope: A democracy reader (pp. 3-10). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
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Said, E.W. (1993). Culture and imperialism. New York: Vintage.
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Vygotsky, L. (1999). Thought and language (Ed. A. Kozulin). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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About the Authors

Sally Beach’s current research interests include early literacy, critical literacy in emerging democracies, teacher development, and the politics of reading. She has pursued these interests in travel throughout eastern Europe and central Asia, as well as around the United States, and has published articles in these areas; an edited monograph on beginning reading policy in Oklahoma is forthcoming. At the University of Oklahoma, she coordinates the reading specialist program and teaches undergraduate classes in early literacy development and methods, and graduate classes in reading development and schoolwide literacy programs. Reach her by e-mail at sbeach@ou.edu.

Angela Ward’s research interests include language and literacy in community and school settings, and she has published numerous articles and books in the areas of language and crosscultural education. Her most recent publication is Resting Lightly on Mother Earth: The Aboriginal Experience in Urban Educational Settings, edited with Rita Bouvier (Temeron Press, 2001). Workshop and conference presentations have enabled her to travel across North America, including to the Canadian Arctic, and also to eastern Europe. Angela teaches undergraduate and graduate language arts classes at the University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada, where she is graduate coordinator in the Department of Curriculum Studies.

Sapargul Mirseitova graduated from Almaty Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages with specialist standing in teaching English in secondary schools. She then studied at the Moscow Linguistic University, where she defended her dissertation on indirect interrogative sentences in English. She has taught English at Almaty University of Foreign Languages and the Higher School of Civil Servants in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Her research interests include text comprehension, indirect speech, and a pragmatic approach to text analysis. At present she is the executive director of the Soros Center for Democratic Education in Kazakhstan.

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Citation: Beach, S.A., Ward, A., & Mirseitova, S. (2001, December/January). Reaching across cultures: Learning about ourselves and learning about literacy. Reading Online, 5(5). Available: http://www.readingonline.org/articles/art_index.asp?HREF=beach/index.html

Reading Online, www.readingonline.org
Posted December 2001
© 2001 International Reading Association, Inc.   ISSN 1096-1232