The importance of teaching culture to students who are often so close in some ways and yet so far in others to their own cannot be understated. However, it is even more important to understand how using culture and the arts as a vehicle for learning can be more potent than any standard curriculum we've seen.
This is primarily because of the complexity of culture itself. Understanding your own culture is not a cognitive act - it's something you're constantly immersed in, and that seems to come naturally to you. Understanding other cultures can seem daunting, especially to students who might not have had certain experiences that would help them develop a context for other cultures and places. This is a gap that is bridged in a sense by language. When we get old enough we open the textbook on China and we use our highly-developed skills as readers and thinkers to understand what it means to live there, what we learn from that culture, and how they interact with the world. However, at a more basic level, just as language is an innate human quality, so is the production of art. It is in this that we've found a coup. Rather than exploring culture after we've learned the language of our own, why not learn language through the shared elements of culture?
Serving a community whose children might not have the same linguistic capital from which to draw merely reinforces this need. Understanding Howard Gardner's ideas on multiple intelligences, we've developed a program whose very nature allows us to tap into all of them. As a dual language program, we are fortunate to have the opportunity to offer something that is needed in the community. As a culture and arts program, we have a jumping-off point.