The Challenge of "the Intercultural"
On Friday the 25th of April I participated in a one-day colloquium on youth exchange and intercultural dialogue in Paris organized by AFS Vivre Sans Frontière, our organization in France. Over 100 people registered for this event, many of course from AFS, but also a solid representation of people representing other organizations and from the educational and intercultural fields. There were a number of ideas and approaches that were new to me, which I will mention shortly, but I also want to comment briefly on the cultural context of the colloquium itself, because the way of organizing a conference, like everything else we do, emerges from a cultural context. For example, in preparing for my own 'intervention" in the conference, I had several cultural considerations: the level of formality I would find, expectations others might have about my own role and status in this conference, what language and communication style to use, what non-verbal behaviors, and, quite importantly, the use of time.

The "rules" for giving a presentation in the USA recommend a very direct and well-prepared speech that sounds as much as possible like a real conversation. This often means an informal tone to make the audience "feel comfortable." Every European is told to begin a presentation in the USA with a joke. In reality, this doesn't have to be a joke, though jokes are sometimes used. Still, joke or no joke, a good speaker in the USA will find a way to engage and get the attention of the audience and will entertain though comedy, emotion, or highly interesting material. Of course, the USA also has a good share of poor presenters.

I don't honestly know the rules for a good presentation in France, but I certainly recognized several presentations that I felt were very strong. Catherine LALUMIERE, President of the House of Europe in Paris, was the opening keynote speaker, and quite easily the most engaging and connected to her audience. Although she surely expected a predominately French audience, and she spoke on issues important to the French, her presentation did not presuppose an in-group understanding of the cultural meaning of every issue she raised, and so for those who might not know the issues, she gave some small sense of this context as she brought up various topics. All this was accomplished with just a few notes written down for herself, yet completely thought out, clearly spoken at an easy pace for the non-native French speakers, appealingly presented with a great deal of expression in her voice, and with no visual aids. Hers was a very broad overview of "the intercultural challenge" in Europe, but sprinkled with examples of specifically French ideas, values, and contexts that do not always fit or translate easily in the rest of Europe. She emphasized the importance of having clear objectives in creating exchanges, and the importance of "ouverture" or openness and curiosity as key values for Europe today.

Also quite interesting were the remarks of Jörg ESCHENAUER, head of the language training department at l'Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, which I felt connected to what I have been trying to say about the central role of relationships in learning. He also talked about the contradictory identities we each have and how these contradictions lead us to learning. My loosely paraphrased favorite quote: "Intercultural competence is not something you just learn once."

I want to thank Jean-Pierre VAN DETH, President of The National Language Placements and Training Courses Standards Agency for reinventing the myth of the Tower of Babel. If one supposes, as he does, that the laborers on the Tower of Babel were actually slaves, then the appearance of the enormous diversity of languages becomes a liberation of the many cultures who had been forced to undertake the project of a dictator who had imposed his culture and languages on all of them. This came up in the context of concerns about the role of the English language in Europe today. <<L'Anglais, c'est l'autoroute>> or "English is the highway" but he (and others at the conference as well) make a huge distinction between this lingua franca role played by English and the actual learning of the English language and culture as it is found in the UK, the US, or the several other English-speaking countries where English exists as a real language with a real cultural context. In Europe today, the question is not whether to learn English OR another language, but to learn English AND other languages.

Other distinguished speakers included Marc FOUCAULT, Director of International and European Affairs, Ministry of Higher Education and Research himself once an exchange student. He spoke about efforts to include an exchange experience as part of a French  "bac" or Baccalauréat degree. This was encouraging news. He also noted that students with international exchange experiences are typically better prepared for university.

The Time it Takes . . . and other observations on conference logistics.
Following the welcoming coffee and breakfast, the conference program proceeded without any break from its actual start at around 9:30 through nearly 13:00 (which I would normally write as 1:00 PM). The only use of powerpoint was to show the names of the speakers as they came, and the titles of their presentations. Most speakers (myself included) sat in a panel, with the moderators discussed their work and took questions from the audience. The 100 people in the audience sat still, mostly, for the entire time and paid attention. This is not something that anyone expects of an audience in the USA, but here one supposes that the audience doesn't require a coffee break to stay alert and interested. Meals are another matter. A lovely multinational lunch buffet was provided which we ate, standing around small tables or balancing our plates and cups of wine or coffee, and then the program continued from about 2:30 until past 6:30 with non-stop presentations. While each speaker was given the guideline to provide a 10-minute presentation to allow time for discussion, there was none of the time-keeping typical in a US conference. As a speaker, I appreciated this, as no one was trying to rush me. So often I have seen very open signals given to panelists in US conferences, ensuring that the audience is painfully aware of a speaker who is unable to keep to the allotted time and ends up skipping over 2/3 of his or her powerpoint slides while the moderator passes small notes saying "2 minutes!" or gives hand signals, or even verbally stops the person at the assigned ending time. Speakers at French conferences are presumably expected to self-regulate, but, on the other hand, this did not happen in all cases here and the last two speakers obviously felt the pressure to move their own presentations more quickly at the end of a long day.

The program concluded with a brief overview of the day, some necessary thank yous, and a simple cocktail reception. The relatively small size of the conference allowed for a good deal of informal and friendly interaction.

Merci beaucoup, AFS France.
I am very grateful to AFS in France for organizing this conference and hope, as they do, that it leads to more discussion about ways to increase intercultural competence and the role that exchange programs can play. They plan to produce a set of proceedings in French, and later in English, so that the results can be more widely shared. I will provide a link to these on the AFS web site in the Research and Education section.

Bettina Hansel
Director of Intercultural Education and Research
AFS International

UPDATE: AFS France posted photos of the event.

The Power of Place

Rome wasn't built in a day. This is something we say from time to time in the USA when something we're working on will take time. It's use seems so trivial as I compare it to the layers of history I am seeing now, on my first too short visit to Rome. My AFS colleague Roberto Ruffino, Secretary General of AFS Intercultura Italy, gave us a brief tour of a small portion of the thousands of historic sites here in Rome as we walked from the hotel to the restaurant. He pointed out a 12th Century house built on top of an open air theater from the times of the Roman Empire. We saw the remains of the earliest Roman street, now some three meters below current street level. Nearby, an old church and the last portion of a park from the era before Italian unification rises 4 meters above the street, which was the first commercial development -- quite new, really, from the 19th Century -- where the street was graded to allow horse carriages a smooth ride from the center of town to the newly built train station.

There are thousands of antiquities and works of art everywhere you look, yet these are just a small selection. Tourists come to see these monuments, but of course the Romans live their lives in this context.

Roberto once commented to me that in America there were still places where nothing had ever been built, where one could imagine that there had been no previous human footsteps. He understood a certain feeling of freedom that this might create, never stepping on the creations or the graves and ruins of your ancestors. This is not a feeling you could ever have in Rome. On this walk we imagined the burden of maintaining such an abundance of art and treasures. There is nothing you can discard, no place you can dig without turning up some ancient artefact, no unused space for your own new creation.

As a geographer, I want to add the experience of the place to the experience of the people. This brief experience of Rome, the place, helped me understand why I need to focus on this component of culture, which has too often been absent even from my own research on cultural differences and adaptation.

Roberto took us past the spot where the body of Italian Prime Minister Moro was found in a car back some 30 years ago: a new layer of meaning on an ancient landscape, less visible than the markers of 2000 years earlier.

As we continued our walk I noticed something else that I may or may not understand. It's just a store or a gallery, a space visible to the public in which two people were standing around a floor that is paved with old books standing with their spines up, closely nested, as if someone's enormous book collection pulled down on the floor so the shelves can be painted or cleaned and repaired.

But a stronger impression was that this might be a contemporary art installation in a modern gallery. I'm not sure which it was, but I found myself imagining what it would be like to be a 21st Century artist in Rome. Would you feel the competition from Leonardo da Vinci, whose works you pass daily? Would you draw inspiration from the ancient column stumps you pass on your way to your studio?

My stay in Rome is much too short to allow me to claim any great insight, but the cultural differences between Romans and New Yorkers are certainly discoverable in the diiferences I can see and feel between the two cities. The discovery of a new culture is largely a physical and a sensory experience more than it is a learning of patterns of behavior. You have to be there.

Bettina Hansel
Director of Intercultural Education and Research

"Instead of simply accepting the existence of a cultural difference, a tolerant person agrees to allow a difference to impact his or her life."

I found this to be a very meaningful way to think about intercultural learning and to understand how difficult it can be. It means that my openness to another culture is only as great as my willingness to change my life. So I think again about the five frameworks. As the frameworks suggest, it is much easier for me to change my language use -- how I greet people, what language I use -- than it is to change my beliefs, values and assumptions or the way I think.

I can't believe what I don't believe. This is what I used to say when contemplating certain religious beliefs, for example, or even scientific beliefs. I remember vividly from my high school physics class my disbelief that the moon had anything to do with controlling the tides. "That makes no sense," I thought. Now, when faced with something I don't believe, I am more inclined to ask, "Can I imagine believing this?" and "What would it mean if I believed this?" and "Why do I believe what I do?"

I have watched the changes over decades in what I have believed to be true, and found it less and less easy to judge. Sometimes I appear to hold completely contradictory beliefs simultaneously. Being able to do that makes it easier for me to contemplate letting someone else's belief impact my life. It's not easy, still. I am still very much bound by the logic I've been taught, by perceiving mostly what I've been taught to perceive and not noticing that which has never been called to my attention as something important.

This is still what fascinates me about learning another culture.

 

I'm heading to Rome on Saturday ... so you can imagine my interest in this New York Times article that appeared on Monday: Is Cuisine Still Italian Even if the Chef Isn't? It seems that there is some concern that Italian cooking will lose its flavor if immigrant chefs are increasingly getting creative in the kitchen. 

So often we see people worrying about the loss of a culture, and the threat of the influence of another culture, whether from immigration, as described here, or from global dominance as......well, as in the USA's global reach.

I have to accept that this is a real concern for those affected, while at the same time realizing that culture is not a thing to be lost but rather a creation of a group of people. The fear is not really the addition of, say, cinnamon in the panna cotta, (as proposed here by a Danish sugar company -- you can try it if you want), but rather the fear of the loss of control over the process of change. Italian culture and Italian cooking have evolved over hundreds of years. To stop that process and preserve the way it exists today would be to create a museum exhibit. You cannot preserve a culture if no one is creating it. The issues of one cultural group's power and control over other groups are quite worthy of concern, as is the openness of a cultural group to newcomers. But change is inevitable.

Over the next few weeks I will be reporting from Rome, Strasbourg, and Paris. Watch for my "eyes abroad" reports.

 

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International

Recognizing Culture

In the last issue I talked about how easily we recognize a close friend or family member even when we see them from far away because we are so familiar with the way they carry and present themselves. Can we also have this reaction to a culture?

Just as it's hard for a person to be fully aware of how she presents herself, we often are not fully aware of how our own culture "looks" from afar, and we may also be unaware of the stereotypes that others have of us, just as I had no idea my way of walking -- completely normal to me -- would be noticed as "a bit goofy" by my husband.

When we go to another culture, one of the first things we may notice is a different rhythm to the lifestyle. New York is stereotyped as a fast-paced culture. Though I am an immigrant to this city, having grown up in Kansas City, after 29 years here, I live the New York rhythm. I don't usually feel rushed, but Friday night I was rushing to Times Square for a reunion of my Kansas City school. Times Square may seem like the epitome of New York's fast pace with its massive advertising lights and crowded streets. But Times Square is filled with tourists, of course, and therefore moves at quite a slower pace than "New York" does, and in fact while the place is very familiar and I can help people who are lost, the culture of Times Square belongs more to the tourists than it does to New York, and the experience that these tourists are getting -- as wonderful as it may be for them -- is maybe not a New York experience at all.

When in Rome, do as the Romans.
In a week I will be in Rome for the first time, just for a few days, and most of it will be taken up with meetings. I cannot expect to really know Rome like this, but I want to look for the way Rome presents itself.

Bettina Hansel, Director of Intercultural Education and Research
AFS International

About the way you walk...

When you know someone very well, you recognize them immediately, even from quite far away before their facial features can be discerned. I was explaining this concept a while ago to my husband, talking about the kind of physical style that Robert C. Weigl described as one's "visible cultural persona" in his paper on the cultural self-study projects he has his undergraduate students do as part of their coursework. (The IAIR Symposium Papers that include Bob Weigl's paper can be downloaded as a pdf file from http://www.afs.org/research.)

 "Exactly," said my husband. "I always know it's you from that kind of goofy way you walk."

Goofy?  I have a perfectly normal way of walking. Gee, thank you very much!

One of the aspects of the self study is for the students to become more aware of the way they use their bodies, their physical type. How we stand, how we walk, how we sit -- much of our physical presentation our ourselves comes from cultural training. Women who grew up when I did may remember lectures on how to sit modestly in a short skirt, how to watch your posture, and to avoid chewing gum. Yet generally the way we carry ourselves seems just natural, instinctive. It's easier to see the physical style in others than it is in ourselves.

Sensing the need to redeem himself, my husband found an opportunity in our next heart-to-heart talk. "When you know and love someone so intimately, every aspect of that person is endearing and needs to be cherished as a contribution to the whole person," he explained. "Sometimes it's not very flattering, but it's part of what makes up who you are." It is comforting to believe that you are completely known, with all various flaws and inconsistencies, and loved anyway. We may worry much too much about how we are judged.

Why do I bring this up? We learned from our research that a number of our AFS exchange students, even after they return home, focus their attention on all sorts of negative judgments about their own culture. Feeling "in love" with their host culture, they flatter it constantly, seeing only the good aspects, while fussing about how poorly their own culture seems in contrast. How frequently do they travel abroad to their host country, or anywhere else, and hope to disguise themselves as one of the locals, to blend in and not let their own cultural identity show through. In the very process of worrying about how they appear, they risk becoming completely self-involved. Cultural sensitivity is not about "passing" for one of the locals. It's almost impossible anyway.

It may seem surprising that cultural self-study seems to help build awareness and sensitivity about other cultures. The reason it works seems to be that it helps students examine their own particular cultures in some very specific details, and understand how its influence is found in daily life, in ways they think, in how they make judgments about what is good, or smart, or beautiful. Maybe this process allows them to visualize themselves as something whole, endearing, and to be cherished, rather than a mixture of "good" parts to be kept and "bad" parts to be discarded. This more complete sense of self, with its interesting and complex cultural background, may make other people and their cultures seem much more interesting as well. The focus on others is what leads to the kind of awareness and acceptance that really matters.