Since this word is not in my desk dictionary (and may not be in the reader's), I'd better say a little something not only about connotations but on how's come.

Multiculture? Wouldn't that do? A CBS lighting expert who once lit up my lab like the surface of the sun defined multicultural as ham on kosher rye. That's not what I intend.

And I'm sure the reader knows, what with the many everyday usages of poly (polysaccharide, polyploidy, polygamy, polydodecahedron), that the Greek word polys, as a prefix implies many (the Polly of Bergen and cracker fame, of course, having two l's).

The 'culture' part needs a little history. The word has multiple meanings, of course. There's the yogurt-making culture--the cousin of the boy's locker room and stinky cheese kind. There's what anthropologists study. And there's what young women used to attend finishing schools to learn how to pour tea and sit on on the edge of a couch without revealing the color of their panties (if any).

The best definition for what I have in mind, though, comes from the late Professor Jay Lash of the University of Pennsylvania. We were both young then and, lean on seniority, had been pressganged into teaching in the dental gross anatomy lab. They were actually good students, the dents -- much better dissecters than the meds. But, mightily and daily -- much more so than the meds -- they resisted learning any anatomy beyond the jaw. Jay's section was right next to mine, and I once overheard him explain to a group of his students gathered around a dissecting table, the relevance, to dentistry, of the layers of the abdominal wall. "Culture," Jay told his group. One student immediately countered with, "What do you mean by culture, sir?" (In those days, even dental students were polite.) Jay answered in his typically quiet and easy way: "Culture is awareness."

Wow, I couldn't help thinking, then. Or now!

I've been inspired as a teacher by a theme expressed in Winslow Homer's painting. If you go there you'll see twelve darlings of varying ages and their pretty young schoolmarm engaged in teaching and learning up to their several levels, to deliver as well as receive.

Polyculture is used here as awareness, back and forth, across different levels of understanding. It's what Winslow Homer depicts. It's educating at its best. It's what I hope Shufflebrain can achieve.

¹ A Todd Reese of Adventist Development and Regional Agency International (ADRA) informs me as follows:

You may also wish to note in your definition of polycutlure that it is also a agricultural term used in the field of international development. In this sense, polyculture is using multiple crops which are beneficial to each other. The output of one crop becomes the input of another thus creating a balance in the soil and environment. I've seen a polyculture project in a semi-arid region of Brazil and was amazed at the difference between the soil and micro-climates of those that used polyculture versus those that did not.

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