Johanna, here's a bad picture of me at the floating market outside Bangkok! You mentioned it was a favorite place.
Spent the day riding a boat to the floating market where there are canals filled with boats of people selling food and fruits from the boats with other market stalks around the canals. You have to bargain and my skills are definitely lacking!
We also visited the Grand Palace where the king of Thailand used to live. I'll write more about this but I was really struck by the syncretism; there was such a combination of Thai, Chinese, European, and Indian influences and you could really see this in how the Buddhist images and structures were influenced by Hinduism. It's so important to help students see the cross culturalization and how ideas spread from one place to another and are changed by local cultures. There are simple ways to help young students with this concept. Any thoughts?
More food pictures from the floating market:
Hi professor,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the shout-out! I'm glad you got to see the floating markets - definitely a cultural attraction in Thailand that is different from what most of us are used to. I can't wait to hear about what you thought of it, as well as how your trip went with Thai food which we talked about before. This is just a short post and I'll post on another entry after too, but I was just thinking that it would be a pretty neat idea to show Thailand's floating market in a lesson while also having them compare and contrast it to other markets from different places. I thought of this because last semester at my pre-prac, my CT had a unit on Mexico, and one of the lessons was a read-aloud of Saturday Market (by Patricia Grossman) and having a discussion about how it differed from the markets (or supermarkets) that we were used to in the U.S. It is interesting how something so common, like where we buy our necessities, differ in each culture, especially in how the markets look, what items are sold them, what their function is (i.e. some markets are more of a spot for socializing, while some are purely to buy groceries) etc. It would also be very interesting to observe how students in the U.S. may react to a floating market in Thailand.
I also thought that when teaching a lesson like this, it stresses the importance of having travel experience and being able to bring that into a classroom as an educator. For example, since you have already experienced the floating markets, it would make it easier to explain it to students compared to a teacher who has never seen or heard of the floating markets before. By incorporating previous travel experiences into the lessons, it would also help students to achieve a better understanding of learning about differences. I remember when a teacher was teaching about the markets in Mexico last year, she had never experienced it before and it resulted in a lot of assumptions made about Mexico and the Mexican people... it was not a pleasant lesson to sit through.
Thanks for your post, Johanna. I loved the floating market and couldn't get over all of the amazing produce and treats and how people were cooking food on their boats. We had amazing mangos, pomelos, and small bananas (I don't remember what they were called, but I had similar ones in Hawaii called Strawberry bananas). I also ate the most amazing fried bananas I have ever eaten and was a lot more adventurous in eating a few street foods than I thought I would. (It probably helped that I already had a dose of antibiotics in me when I got to Thailand because of my cold so I figured I could risk eating a few more things!) We spent a lot of time eating at hotels and restaurants that catered to tourists but the food was good and I tried to have more authentic snacks whenever I could. Yummy rice snacks (we'll have a special treat in class tomorrow) and sesame bars. I also took advantage of being in Asia to buy copious amounts of Pocky (I raided the Tokyo airport and the 7-11s in Thailand).
DeleteYou make a REALLY important point in your description of how the teacher you observed talked about the Mexican market with her students and that account underscores the significance of having as many different cultural experiences as possible in order to better represent and incorporate stories and cultures different from your own. Be sure to mention that story in class.