True Story 10.07
Teaching students from the steppes how to give directions
The setting for this story
At the National University of Mongolia in Ulaanbaatar, Brita taught German as a foreign language. Most of her students were from the vast, virtually featureless steppe regions of their nation. In the following paragraphs, Brita tells of one lesson that revealed misaligned minds.
A story of misaligned minds10
For a lesson on “giving directions,” I decided that my students would be motivated by learning how to assist German tourists who cannot read signs in Cyrillic script. My first assignment was for the students to describe, in German, the path from our building to a nearby neighborhood. To help them grasp my instructions, I gave several examples. My students looked bewildered.
So I used chalk to sketch on the blackboard a large, rather detailed map of the area within several blocks of our building on all sides. On that map, turn by turn, I traced the route to the nearby neighborhood. They all watched me intently. But it became clear that they remained completely puzzled about what I was trying to tell them. I tried other stratagems as well.
No matter what I did, my students from rural Mongolia could not learn direction-giving.
Brita’s question
What is getting in the way of my Mongol students’ learning how to give simple directions?
Critique of story 10.07
Mongols are a largely nomadic people, many of whom grow up without ever leaving the trackless steppes and desert plains of their childhood. Rarely do they encounter large buildings, nor buildings laid out on an urban street grid. To adapt and thrive in their native environment, the steppes, they become adept at navigating in a way that’s completely different from our way.
Maps are abstract representations of selected visible features of the Earth’s surface. They are among the countless features of life in a Western industrialized environment that enable you and me to grow up thinking analytically. In those regions of Mongolia that remain untouched by Western ways, maps are exceedingly rare. So how do Mongols navigate the seemingly limitless and trackless steppes and desert plains where they live? I don’t know. Perhaps they learn by watching and imitating how their elders notice, use, and recall the locations of rivers, hillocks, rocky outcrops, landowners’ properties, and other subtle features, relating them to the position of the sun at different times of day. As far as we can tell, they don’t conceive of all these factors as separate features of their surroundings, then analyze them. They learn holistically, in a manner similar to how, in story 10.04, Abdiya learned to speak German fluently.
Do Mongols’ lack of familiarity with maps put them at a disadvantage? Not at all. On the Mongolian steppes, they have an astonishing sense of spatial orientation and are able to find their way across a vast plateau, even when visibility is reduced. Best of luck to you or me in such an environment!
Think of it like this: If German tourists in Ulaanbaatar asked a student from the steppes how to get to a nearby museum, the student could have personally walked with them to guide them there. But he or she could not have explained how the tourists could walk there by themselves.
Realistically, Brita would be well advised to move on to whatever she plans to teach next.
For thought
Brita’s students were having a “problem” solely because they were studying a topic associated with the West. German developed in Western and Central Europe, where modern urbanization and industrialization made maps ever more useful. Mongolian developed on the Central Asian Plateau, a nearly featureless expanse of over 1,000,000 square miles. Not much use for maps there! The nomads developed non-graphic methods – i.e., methods not involving lines or other symbols on paper or a screen – of finding their way around. Those methods are effective for them; for us, they’re mysterious. The two methods that humans have developed to orient themselves in space – and perhaps there are other methods as well – have almost nothing in common.
For an adult Mongol to learn to navigate comfortably in an urban area by means of maps would be almost as herculean a task as it would be for us to learn how to confidently find our way across a trackless, featureless Mongolian steppes with no maps, compasses, GPS-enabled smartphones, or other technological aids.
Related stories
Story 10.09 also concerns how humans conceive of and use the spaces that surround them.
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Endnotes:
10 Pappenhausen. Accessed in Ott, 247.
Full citations are available at misalignedminds.info/References.