TCNJ

35 WINTER 2021 Literacy Department, where his goal is to help TCNJ students — many of whom will go on to work in the poly- phonic public schools of New Jersey — avoid this occupational hazard. What you say in one language about one culture can mean something very different when translated into another language for another culture, and your attempt at communicating across the gap can be garbled inadvertently — like that school bus, or another exam- ple he uses, the Swahili word "pole," which means "sorry," but not quite in the same way that "sorry" means in English. When Bwire sees somebody trip on a sidewalk, his instinct is to say what common custom in Kenya taught him to say. "I would say 'sorry' because that is pole translated. But unlike sorry, pole doesn't incriminate me, it doesn't say I caused you to trip, I'm not apologizing for your tripping. What's happening is that I am saying I sympathize with what you've just gone through," he says. "The English word 'sorry' doesn't carry the cultural nuances of the Swahili word." Bwire's own travels across cultural borders — he speaks four languages and spent five summers in Vermont earning a master's degree — sparked his interest in what became his aca- demic field: sociolinguistics, with a specialty in transcultural literacy. He did part of his doctoral dissertation research in that Alaskan school-bus village, where he learned some Yup'ik from the elders. "The objective is to get my students to understand that human language is broad, that we cannot be Anglocentric, monolingual-norm, Western-centric in our understanding of how human David Bwire Communicating across cultures To make his point about how words can shift meaning as they cross bor- ders and cultures, special education professor David Bwire often shows his TCNJ students a photo that once angered the students he taught at a high school in his native Kenya. His class was corresponding with a class taught by a friend of his in a remote village in Alaska, and the photo the Alaskans sent showed half a dozen of them sitting in an open trailer pulled by a fat-tired all-terrain vehicle: Our school bus, the Alaskans wrote. "My students were upset," says Bwire, who taught English and liter- ature in Nairobi for 10 years before coming to the United States for his doctoral studies. They lived in a big city with plenty of buses, and they thought the Alaskans were mocking them for not knowing what one looked like. "They were like, 'These guys think we come from Africa and we live in a jungle. They think we don't know what a school bus is. How dare they?'" But the Alaskans meant no offense. Bwire and his Kenyan stu- dents learned two lessons from that exchange — about what constituted a school bus in rural Alaska (anything that brought students to school, which, depending on the season, might be an ATV or a dogsled); but also about implicit miscommunication (how one person's school bus can be another's insult). That second lesson is the one he emphasizes to his TCNJ students. "Implicit miscommunication is alive and rife in our classrooms," says Bwire, an assistant professor in the Special Education, Language and language works," says Bwire. And he wants them to remember those lessons when they are teachers themselves. "One of the things I get my students to do is to reflect and ask themselves to what extent are they expecting that a student in their class should perform like a native speaker of English when they are non-native speakers of English?" One person's school bus can be another's insult. Sounds, like meanings, also change across languages, he tells his students, and some of those sounds are difficult for non-native speakers of a language to reproduce, and can sometimes lead teachers to misjudge a student's progress. Recent immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries, for instance, form the "D" sound by touch- ing the tongue to the teeth rather than to the ridge behind them, as native English speakers do, a pronunciation that might lead them to be wrongly placed in a remedial class. "What message are we giving a student who is bilingual by telling them that your bilingualism is a disability?" Bwire asks. He further demonstrates this point by playing an audio of his own fum- bling attempts, under the guidance of the Alaskans, to make the guttural sounds that are common in Yup'ik. "We have to understand that we live in a world where there are other peo- ple, and know that there is that kind

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