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Leah Davcheva and Elena Tarasheva

The Intercultural Training Project for trainee-teachers of English, Geography and Biology was launched in May 1997 and will be completed in 2000. For its seventy participants from the School of Education at the University of Durham and from the four major universities in Bulgaria the project has been started as part of their initial teacher education programme. It aims to develop the trainee-teachers’ professional knowledge of language and culture teaching and, through enabling them to teach a series of culture-focused lessons in Bulgarian and British schools the project enriches and diversifies the personal learning experience of each of its individual participants.

In each of the three years of the project the Bulgarian trainee-teachers of English and Geography teach 12 –14 year old pupils from schools in Durham and Stockton-on-Tees. The choice of focus is the first professional challenge they face when they start preparing their lessons. Questions, with the potential for more answers than one dares count, emerge:

What is Bulgarian culture? Does Bulgarianness exist? How is it constructed and represented? How accessible is Bulgarian culture without any knowledge of the Bulgarian language? Would British children be interested to know? Who are they and what do they already know? How to provoke a child’s curiosity and coax them into venturing on an indefinitely long journey towards a distant and little known ‘other’? Which culture learning skills to develop in order to help them along?

The search for a culturally unifying and productive notion has led to the discovery of the ‘mountain’; the mountain in its role of a cultural entity which serves as a possible entry point to the multiplicity of Bulgarian culture. Mountains are universal. Like the sea, for example, they are features of our planet’s geography. No matter where children live, they are bound to come across mountains at some stage of their cognitive development. And yet, mountains occupy a special place in Bulgarian national, historic, and regional cultures, e.g. they form the opening line of the national anthem; play the role of national heroes in the historic past of the country; and have poems composed and songs sung to them.

Mountains are both real and imaginary. Children roam their forests, ski down their slopes or observe and protect their wildlife. On the other hand they learn about them at school, see them on television, read tales set in the mountains. Early in their childhood they learn to attach a special significance to the mountain, to recognize its relationship to a range of human values, e.g. friendship, loyalty, purity, justice.

Bulgarian children’s books play an important role in the learning process. Both through text and illustrations they introduce their young readers to the values which Bulgarian society has traditionally attached to the mountains and invite them to accept these shared values as their own.

The task of involving English children in the decoding of cultural meanings attached to the representations of mountains in Bulgarian children’s books intrigued the trainee-teachers. They structured a number of their lessons round the images of the mountain and welcomed the challenge to make them understandable to the children they taught in England.

Three different approaches to the image come across. The romantic portrayal of the mountain - as the abode of wild animals, birds and plants –sets off a sense of natural order where the good creatures are in harmony with the environment and any beast going against it gets punished and, eventually, is converted back to harmony with nature.

Secondly, the mountain appears as the setting of narratives where the characters are put on trial. The harsh conditions test the strength of character in the textual story, while in the illustrations the mountain embodies features which visualize aspects of behaviour. The shapes of the mountain incarnate the moral judgement of the author in a visual code accessible for children.

Thirdly, the mountain forms the typical landscape against which children learn to recognize their national identity. The accessibility of the stereotyped link landscape- national identity facilitates the presentation of a cultural paradigm .

The procedure which the trainee-teachers followed was, first, to show the illustrations to the pupils and invite them to make a story round the pictures. One would expect that the illustrations would prompt the children to tell a story more or less parallel to the story told by the Bulgarian text. However, the direction of reading from image to text yielded a narrative different from the original. Detached from the original cultural context, the children associated the personified images of the mountain with values different from those at stake in the story. One of the illustrations, where two mountain peaks assume the outlines of two sad figures lamenting over an impending historic treachery, was related to parents moaning over the illness of a child. Below is what one of the pupils wrote:

Once all the pupils told their stories the teachers would let them hear the original tale and encourage a discussion about the possible roles of the mountain in the story, thus tying up images with text and representation.

In another lesson the pupils would discuss the reasons for choosing the mountain as the setting of a story about friendship. They exploited the literary significance of the mountain, which, again, proved culture-specific. Few of the British pupils could find justification for using the mountain as the scene of the action. Preferred settings were the country - in unison with the peaceful environment, the city - because it is there that people are under stress and need friendship most, or because it was the most familiar setting to the children in the class, the moon - because of the challenge and need for support in alien circumstances.

In a third lesson pupils would explore the relationship between people and wildlife that inhabited mountain areas. When invited to create a story set in the mountains and involving characters from the illustration, the children’s interpretations of the picture appeared to be less determined by the specifics of their own culture. Perceiving the mountain as a home for wild animals, where people are often intruders or invaders, appeared to be a universally understood value.

Discussing the representations of the mountain in Bulgarian children’s books through text and illustration allowed some of the children from Durham and Stockton-on-Tees to use their imagination, letting them escape for a while from the cultural paradigm they are accustomed to. Thus, they could both identify with some aspects of the foreign culture and feel empathy with the perceptions of fellow children, or distinguish differences, allowing them to achieve a better understanding of their own through the values of the foreign culture.