:: UCLA TODAY Home

©2004
The Regents of the University of California
 

Personal Journey

Peripatetic in Europe

BY BARRY A. SANDERS

The UCLA Summer Abroad Program recently made a lab course out of a campus exercise in lectures and reading. My communications studies course, “Images of America,” which revolves around classroom discussions on the ideas people abroad have about the United States, came to life when I taught it in Europe. It gained more from going on the road than could any other course except art history.

The course takes students into the minds of people outside the United States to consider the images they have of this country. We read a host of literary and scholarly works, including Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” Louis Hartz’s “The Liberal Tradition in America” and Amin Maalouf’s “In the Name of Identity.” I insist that students read The New York Times to get a sense of current events. We look at the influences of universal human emotions, of alternative political theories and traditions, and of differences in cultures. It is a popular course, but it is not easy.

I chose Hamburg and Milan as two cities characteristic of their nations. In Hamburg, each of my 20 students was required to interview a German person about his or her views of America. The students encountered the human capacity for contradiction. Soft-spoken, sylph-like UCLA coeds were startled to be told to their faces that all Americans are loud-mouthed and fat. A litany of complaints about American society was capped by a deep resentment that visas to move to the United States have become hard to obtain. The students spoke to young Germans who complained about America’s cheap mass culture while dressed in hip-hop clothing that could have come from the bureau drawers of any American urban teenager. The students could almost touch the love/hate relationship between Europeans and this colossus that fascinates European minds.

After two weeks in Hamburg, the class weekended in Berlin on the way to Milan. Berlin began with a specially arranged visit to the new Jewish Museum, whose architecture gave the class an emotional understanding impossible to convey in books or lectures. The floors, ceilings and walls of the building are askew, giving a feeling of vertigo that evokes the sense of disequilibrium the victims of the Nazis must have felt as their world was turned upside down and eventually destroyed. As a counterpoint, the next day I took the class to the Pergamon Museum to see its phenomenal Babylonian and Greek remains, a testament to the stability and longevity of ancient cultures that is hard to convey to students in Westwood.

I enjoyed this trip. It is very satisfying to see students hear something expressed in life that is just a theory in class. To see “The Last Supper” for the first time, to hear a great organ recital in a German cathedral, to tour the Doge’s Palace, to see what is on the walls of the Brera Museum — these are experiences that would stick with any student and anyone who likes to teach. I am going to do it again. Next July my students and I will be on the road to Vienna and Istanbul.

Sanders is a visiting professor in the Communication Studies program.

Editor’s note: With this issue, we begin “Personal Journey,” a new column about especially memorable experiences that staff and faculty wish to share with others.