Collaborating Across Cultures (online)

Last week I attended a one-day conference in Purchase, New York organized by the SUNY Center for Collaborative Online International Learning. I was most grateful for the keynote presentation by Doreen Starke-Meyerring on applying the concepts of "genre theory" to intercultural learning and communication. A web search of genre theory produces quite a bit of material on literary typologies or film typologies, but this is not exactly where Doreen was taking us. Instead we were asked to consider a number of everyday aspects of our lives as genres. Genres are "the routine patterns of social action that emerge and evolve in human collectives over time because they meet recurring human needs." I was reminded of a long ago post on this blog, where I wrote about different patterns of jokes in different cultures while looking at why it is so difficult to translate humor from one culture into another. Such jokes involve a repeated, evolving pattern within a cultural context. Had it occurred to me, I might have pointed out that the "knock, knock" joke is an example of a genre. Doreen Starke-Meyerring mentioned other genres: a thank you letter, a wedding invitation, a school transcript, a conference program, a meeting agenda. All of these have a text format, but also include a set of cultural expectations concerning the activities and procedures around them. These genres "organize local activities, reproduce local values, and exert a strong normalizing force through repeated unfolding 'common sense.'" And, like the underwater portion of the "iceberg" analogy of culture, their normality makes them invisible -- until the person crosses cultures. Like the 5 Frameworks discussed frequently in this blog, the study of different genres can be a good starting point for uncovering differences in the structures created and used by a cultural group.

Second Life Experiences in Learning 

One of the most usual plenary presentations I have seen was the presentation by Bryan Carter of the University of Central Missouri, made via his avatar in Second Life. Equipped with the new video camera given to me by my husband, I videotaped sections of this presentation to share with those of you who are also curious about this bit of virtual reality. As we moved from "Virtual Harlem" to "Virtual Montmartre" -- both visual renderings or imaginings of these places as they were in another century -- members of the audience who also had avatars in Second Life joined Carter's avatar for the presentation. These audience avatars stood around (not necessarily facing Carter's avatar), walked here and there, and occasionally fell into the scene from the sky or flew across the screen on a dragonfly. Personally I found this distracting from the main topic, but Carter's students enjoy the fun aspects, they have the chance to collaborate in this platform with students from the Sorbonne on Second Life, and Carter can run his classes sitting Paris, France, instead of Missouri, USA, where his students are enrolled. It raises interesting questions about the outcome of cross-cultural dialog mediated by Second Life avatars, and reminds me of encounters at masked balls or Halloween parties. We don't yet have the answers about how patterns of communication between people using their Second Life identities relates to real world communication, but it Second Life also contains various virtual cultures and patterns of behavior as well as economic and civic communities.

Linked Language Classes

Also exciting was the excellent presentation by Sarah Guth, who teaches English as a Foreign Language at the Faculty of Engineering and Language Centre at the University of Padua. She joined us via Skype video conference from Italy. Though technically not as flashy as Second Life, the content was excellent as she relayed real examples of successful and not-as-successful online collaborations between her English-learning Italian students and the Italian-learning US students. For example, she confirmed that it's not easy to get the students to set up their buddy conversations on their own, and recommended that class time be set aside for these one-on-one language practice sessions. Students' progress was measured by group, peer and self assessments. Sarah's Interculturewiki is a continuous work in progress, and includes many useful links for those just starting to look at intercultural learning. 

As a presenter in the afternoon sessions, I wasn't able to attend the other sessions, but these were also interesting experiments in online collaboration, since each pair of presenters met first online on the COIL wiki to develop the plans for the session, and we met in person for the first time on Thursday evening where we had a chance to talk over our session over a lovely group dinner. My co-presenter is Russian, and he has also lived and taught in Australia and the USA. We came with very different experiences and approaches, but lots of flexibility. Though we outlined our proposals and ideas in the wiki, without the phone call first and the dinner the night before, it would not have been so easy to pull this together as a single session. This is way so many sessions at conferences end up being two or three individual presentations generally addressing a common theme rather than a jointly-run workshop. I felt we were able to link our approaches reasonably well, but only because of the telephone and face-to-face conversations. Even so, we agreed that the second offering of our session -- in spite of a technical problem -- was better than the first, since we'd by then had more experience of each other's style and timing.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International

Collaborative Learning

I recently came across a very interesting project that linked students learning foreign languages with each other for a guided collaborative learning of each other's culture and language. Cultura Project began in 1997 to link students of French at M.I.T. with students of English at Institut National des Télécommunications in Evry, France. The concept for the program is fairly simple: The students in the USA and the students in France completed similar surveys and then compared results. In this case, the format for these comparisons was bi-lingual, but it was the differences in language use and context in the two languages that seemed to draw the students in.  Does "liberté" in France equal "freedom" in the USA? While this would be a usual translation equivalent, the students in the program discovered some important differences. Similarly they found out why "individualisme" is a negative trait associated with selfishness in France, while "individualism" in the USA is a very highly regarded quality. But it wasn't just about individual word translations, or even about translation itself, but rather about the way language is so tightly connected to the culture in which it is used and how students can be prompted to ask each other about the context and cultural differences that are demonstrated in the different connotations found in the always inadequate translations.

One of the French students, for instance, asked the Americans why they talked so  much about nuclear families. Why do we? Merriam Webster Dictionary dates this usage to 1947, so whoever coined the term was familiar with nuclear bombs. Back then atomic terminology must have been everywhere in the USA. I am reminded also of the old clay and toothpick models of atoms that we made in grade school as part of our science class, with the nucleus at the center. Is that the image? The central part of the family, those different-colored clay bits mashed together, rather than those toothpick-extended parts that include our relatives? Probably none of this happened quite this way in France, but this raises another interesting point about the differences in family structures historically and today.

There are many other fascinating examples in the Cultura Project article and you can follow links to see some of the full examples of the online forums of students. Learning another language does demand that you also learn another cultural perspective. The AFS founders seemed to intuitively recognize the value of this and used the high school exchange program as their means to bring about this new understanding. I think online tools can also help make this happen, and will probably make people want to meet each other in person to build that relationship and enhance that understanding, because face-to-face relationships always do offer much more.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International

Overcoming First Impressions 

It doesn't take much to start badly when beginning an experience in a new place. Some aspect of the new place may make you feel uncomfortable, something ordinary that you do may anger or annoy others. You might lose something. You might feel that you need more information and have many doubts about your situation abroad. Accidents and misadventures do happen. But sometimes it's simply a rainy day, and you're just not happy to be here.

I recently returned from Barcelona where I spent a week on much-anticipated vacation with my husband, and we began with a number of problems and disappointments. A misunderstanding with the guy who rented us an apartment left him yelling at us for ringing the bell to the wrong apartment when we arrived. We then stood like school children called in front of the headmaster while he lectured us about the dangers of pickpockets and what we were and were not allowed to do in the apartment we rented. The apartment looked stark and uninviting and worst of all, everywhere smelled of cigarettes. We couldn't wait for him to leave so we could open wide the windows and try to freshen the air in the place. The next day we headed to the Ramblas area, me holding tight to my pocketbook the entire time, but I guess not tightly enough since someone picked my wallet and change purse, which I only discovered when I tried to pay for the tea and pastries that we had ordered. The afternoon was then spent contacting our bank and credit card companies and trying to recall how much cash I had had, and when this could possibly have happened. Not a good beginning to say the least, and even the pleasure we had taken in the boqueria market and the flower stalls and the small cafe seem diminished by the tedium of dealing with the theft we had been warned to expect and the lingering cigarette smell that even our fragrant lilies couldn't quite overcome.

Small moments of magic

It is at times like this that I remember so many years ago being in a small cafe, perhaps in Austria, perhaps in Germany, on a road trip with my host family. I am sure that I had some vague fantasy about what my exchange experience would be, though I'm hard pressed to explain what that might have been. Naturally, things had not been going as I had expected, and several times I had reacted very negatively to something that was surely quite ordinary to them but uncomfortable and strange to me. I complained about things I didn't like and I was easily upset. That day I seem to remember feeling car sick and generally cranky, but all that disappeared after a short time spent in that particular cafe. This was something new: people at every table were singing. The songs themselves were unfamiliar to me, but to hear the melodies and to see the eyes of my host mother as she swayed and sang softly and smiled at me ... well, I remember this poorly in detail but it was nevertheless a simple moment of magic, where I felt connected to everyone in the room and understood that life is good even when it is also difficult and disappointing.

And so in Barcelona we looked for simple ways to shift our focus from the unpleasant beginning, to remind us that on balance, life is good, and to make us feel connected to the people and the place. First, we reminded ourselves to look forward to a concert we knew we would enjoy in The Palau de la Música Catalana, and we easily lost ourselves in the beauty of Beethoven's 9th, stunningly directed by Frans Brüggen. In the apartment, our windows opened onto the windows of dozens of Barcelona neighbors, and somehow hearing the various sounds of people living their daily lives alongside of us was familiar and comforting. Like everyone else, we hung out our clothes to dry. The smells of our cooking mixed with those of our neighbors. We heard someone practicing music and we also practiced. We talked to people we met in the shops and restaurants, in the metro or walking in the streets. We asked about the public bicycle rental system, about the length of the school day. We talked about trying to remember to bring our own bags to the grocery store. We asked how to say things in Catalan. We found ourselves in a city filled with people from all over the world. The smell of our coffee overcame the cigarette odors. We referred to the apartment as "home."

It was raining lightly the morning we left. We crossed the street to find a taxi to go to the airport as as we looked for a cab, the woman in the apartment above ours called out to us from her terrace to say goodbye.

Just Cranky

While we could clearly identify the sources of our discomfort when we first arrived in Barcelona, as an exchange student or a newly arrived visitor to a new country and culture, you might not find it so easy to know what makes you feel uncomfortable. Being "cranky" is also part of life -- it's when you just feel like complaining about everything and you don't know what will satisfy you. For me, this happened when I came home, but it can as easily happen at any point in the experience of crossing cultures, or in the midst of transition of any sort. Is that all there is? This is probably one of the ultimate expressions of disappointment. I had expected something better. Those small moments of magic sometimes don't seem to appear when you need them to deal with the mass of demands on you, with the number of things that seem to be going wrong, with all the disappointments. Besides making you annoying to everyone around you, crankiness makes you annoying to yourself. Are you angry? anxious? sad? The answer is probably "yes" to all three, but what is is about? You need to do something about this.

Letting go

Though there are no hard and fast stages of adjustment that are true for each exchange student or each explorer of other cultures, there are certainly cycles of adjustment with their emotional high and low points, and fluctuations between places of comfort and places of anxiety and mistrust.

I was brought up in my culture to believe that I could accomplish whatever I chose to do. Over the years I have come to be quite relieved that this is not really true, and being immersed in other cultures (particularly India and Peru) is what helped me deal with the fact that quite often I am not in control of what happens. But it still happens that I want and expect things to proceed in the way I envision them, especially, perhaps, when I am back home and feel I have the right to expect to be comfortable and at ease. Yet even here I am not fully in control of what happens and sometimes I even here am not fully comfortable. My husband asked me why I was so angry with him, but I think it was more that I was angry with myself, angry that I could not make things happen the way I wanted them to. But this was a clear sign to me that it was time to let go, to stop trying to control how the world spins.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International