Changing my mind 

I have been reading Richard Nisbett's book, The Geography of Thought which makes a nice added reading to Hayashi's workshop on Perceptual Flexibility that has been the focus of my last two blogs. Back home in New York, deeply immersed in a range of work and daily routines, I find it difficult to use my imagination in quite the same way as I was able to while in Portland. Yet it seems so important to try. I think what impressed me most both in Hayashi's workshop and in the Nisbett book were the creative possibilities unleashed when you can change the the way you think.

When I think of digital and analog, I think of my own preference for the analog watch. Somehow seeing the position of the hands on the face of a clock or watch gives me a "feeling" for what time it is, while reading the numeric output of a digital clock is a mental exercise. With a digital clock, I don't see how near or far away from 10 o'clock it is, for instance, at 9:38, which teases me numerically into thinking it's really only half-past nine (or "half nine," as the Irish would say) in the same way that the $19.95 price tag on something doesn't sound nearly as expensive as the $20 it nearly costs you. The fact that I'm talking about the feeling of $20, or the feeling of 20 minutes (or 1/3 of an hour) shows an analog tendency.

Swinging between analog and digital

Perceptual flexibility means using more than just one way of thinking. Hayashi taught us to pay attention to our movement along three curved dimensions or arcs that are defined by something like polar opposing mindsets, and he gave us some exercises for us to "swing" back and forth between the poles of these arcs. Thinking of this as a swing is useful because the flexibility demands that move back and forth in our conversations and negotiations with people from other cultures, and one never rests at the polar ends of the swing. These exercises take practice, but I felt most successful in swinging along the digital and analog arc, even when I wasn't always so sure what might be considered digital and what would be analog.

What do I perceive digitally? Anything I describe by putting it in a category. It's a car, a box, a calendar. It's things that have properties, and the Nisbett book is helpful in explaining how common it is for people in the USA to teach their children nouns and explain their properties. Whether you put the adjective before the noun (as in English) or after the noun (as is typical for French and Spanish) the noun tends to be the focus of much of "Western" thinking and the adjectives highlight the properties. So we analyze things and take them apart, and take them out of their context. A German Shepherd dog in a city apartment is not seen as a different kind of dog than the German Shepherd dog on the farm. We group them together in a broad category of "dogs" with a sub category which is German Shepherd.

But what if I swing the other way, and instead of paying attention to the dog, I pay attention to the activity going on. I first notice that this photo is taken in a field. It is in a rural area, near the mountains and two dogs are looking up expectantly, seemingly waiting for something to happen. They look wet, and the caption says that the dogs are playing at the lake. Well, the caption is some digital information but otherwise I'm thinking about my subject more holistically, in a more analog fashion, with the greatest attention paid to the context and what the dogs might be doing. I don't just say, "It's a photo of two German Shepherd dogs." According to Nisbitt's book, this way of thinking about the photo would be more "Eastern" than "Western" and he has many studies that confirm this kind of broad difference across cultures.

I'm sure that my notes from my three-day workshop with Hayashi and the Nisbett book will find their way again as my thinking evolves.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International

Pearls

When we are in a dialogue with someone from another culture, what do we do with the cultural differences that emerge? Milton Bennett has often talked about the situation where each person adapts in some way to the other culture and in the process a "virtual third culture" is created that is used by both people during the time that they are in contact with each other.

In an abstract, theoretical way, this makes perfect sense and I am sure that examples abound, but I don't actually have a good one in my head, in part because I always feel the back and forth of the two cultures. On the other hand, last week at Kichiro Hayashi's workshop on Perceptual Flexibility, I found an evocative image that works less on a theoretical or digital level and more on an emotional and analog level. More about digital and analog in a future post.

What is it, then, that happens when two people with very different ways of thinking find themselves wanting to or needing to work together? I found myself in this position not so long ago, in conjunction with a project here at AFS. My colleague from Malaysia was approaching the task at hand with a strong need for a particular framework to unify the concepts. Ten years ago, I would have probably said, "What is he talking about?"

As Hayashi explained in the seminar, we often react to the foreign concept like we do to a foreign body in our system: we either say, "Get this out of me" or perhaps we run away from it. But instead, he told us, we should let the foreign particle stay there and live with it in us. Don't try to immediately merge your idea with the other person's. Just let it be there for now. Stay with your own cultural way of looking at the issue in front of you, but now include this foreign element in your work and in your consciousness, even if it seems to contradict your own conclusions. Let it be equally a part of your work. Let the contradictory parts stand next to each other, equally valid and important. Take the time that is needed and continue to edit or refine your work while keeping the foreign element in it.

For those that ask "Well, where is this going? When are you able to reconcile the differences?" Hayashi assures us that the process of working with both cultural elements leads to a more creative approach that ultimately is more than either the sum or the average of the two parts. 

As I thought of this idea in our workshop, the image that came to me was that of a small piece of grit that gets into an oyster's shell. The oyster lives constantly with this foreign element working with it in an oyster's way to create a pearl. It can't be particularly comfortable, but something amazingly beautiful is created and the foreign element, that piece of grit that is no longer visible, is absolutely essential to the process of creating the pearl.

I realized how this worked because of my recent experience with my Malaysian colleague and the framework he was proposing that didn't seem to fit with my mentality. Rather than "rejecting it from my system" as I might have done in the past, I decided to assume first that my colleague had a useful and promising approach. Though I did not have a clear sense of where this would take me, I studied the new framework, tried to comprehend what was intended to do, and tried to connect it to the project we were working on together. We discussed terms and language quite a bit, back and forth in my early morning and his late night. I involved another colleague in this approach and we all compared our results from looking at the project through the framework.

In the end, I shifted my approach and came up with another way of working that does NOT in fact look very much like the framework of my Malaysian colleague. But it's at least 10 times better than what I was using before, and we've been using it within the working team in the past couple of months as a way to check to make sure everything is included.

SIIC Workshop #13 Photo Album

I wanted to show some photos taken on those reflective times of listening. Notice Regina Rowland's graphic art. When we ate meals or walked with others on the Reed College campus, people would ask, "Are you in the workshop that has those beautiful pages we see on the wall?"

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International

Perceptual Flexibility

I want to thank Kichom Hiyashi and Regina Rowland for the workshop I have been attending this week. My notebook is full of ideas that will come through this bog in the coming weeks. There is too much for just one report.

Much of the work we did is in the form of images, and Regina Rowland facilitated the workshop by providing incredibly beautiful images and words that communicated the content on another level as Hiyashi-sensei spoke to us persuasively and gently and with good humor. The three days were enormously challenging and intense, but in a way that builds excitement from the confusing possibilities that we have ahead of us. I do not feel any stress; rather I feel thoughtful and calm.  I don't yet know what will become of these ideas, but I know I will return to this blog space in a short time to talk about swinging back and forth between different mental approaches.

But on this sleepy Saturday, I'm much more able to talk about the images. As Hayashi described his ideas and metaphors and Regina interpreted these on huge sheets of white paper, the atmosphere was rich with a visuals. Several people also used VisualsSpeak photo packets as part of the work, and I conjured up my own images as we went along, both from memory and from imagination.

I will share now just one of my images that came from this three-day workshop. It concerns the storks I saw in Alsace last April. I have a nice photo here that I took at a stork sanctuary in Alsace. As you can see, I walked right up to the birds in their nest where they sit more or less in the middle of a picnic area. The stork is a symbol of Alsace, and so the people in that region established this sanctuary when they became concerned about the bird whose lengthy and treacherous migrations coupled with shifts in the local habitat seemed to decrease its numbers each year. The photo I'm showing here is not my image however. I didn't photograph the extensive nets that float about 5-8 meters above the ground as a soft roof over the fenced-in fields of the fledglings. Local wildlife managers move the young birds here after they hatch and keep them under the nets for the first few months as they are learning to fly. Then after some period of time, the nets are removed and the birds are free to roam and fly at will. The great majority never leave, though a few take up fairly high perches on chimneys in the surrounding village. But most have broken from the stork's migratory pattern and stay within the sanctuary borders. The analogy to the cultural patterns we learn early in life is such that we also often stick to particular behaviors and habits that may not be the only ones available to us. In particular, our own cultural patterns of thinking are used almost exclusively in spite of the fact that our brains are very good at learning and growing. Hiyashi called this pre-mature cognitive commitment and helped us find ways to change our thinking to allow us to make these shifts.

It's a fairly comfortable life for the storks at the sanctuary. They look very healthy. I don't project on them any wistfulness or longing to rediscover their Southern Hemisphere nesting grounds or to travel to far away places. But I do have that sort of longing and I hope to stretch my capacities. The cultural nets that formed the way I think were also useful to me, like the child's training wheels on a bicycle, but they have been gone for some time now, and I can decide where to go and how to get there.

Bettina Hansel, Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International.

The Comfort Zone

I'm in a different time zone today, on the West Coast of the USA, in Portland, Oregon at the Intercultural Communication Institute's "Summer Institute" which has just begun its annual round of training workshops. Flying in quite late on Monday night, I stayed at a convenient and comfortable airport hotel. Now I am staying in the dorms of Reed College, reminded only slightly of my life on campus so many decades ago. The narrow bed is exactly as I remembered it, but not much else. But it isn't my physical comfort zone I'm here to test. I want to stretch my perceptual comfort zone. I will be attending a workshop by Kichiro Hayashi on perceptual flexibility. I have been warned by ICI Executive Director, Janet Bennett, that this workshop does not use the learning style I am most comfortable using, and maybe exactly for that reason I decided it was time to do this.

Even coming to Portland from New York is a major shift in culture. Teenagers on the subway -- oops, the Maxi -- look strangely vulnerable and innocent to these New York-trained eyes, but I needn't worry that they are not quite tough enough to be out on their own. They will easily find their destination, I know. Our teenagers on the New York City subway may look a little threatening from this perspective. An entirely different set of assumptions apply here, even though the general USA culture provides a familiar space. I tried to make analogies and asked a colleague from New York who now lives in Portland to explain what neighborhood here might be "the Park Slope" of Portland so I could describe to another colleague where one of our AFS students was going to be living in New York next year. From what he could conclude, there really isn't a comparable neighborhood. Nor, when I walked around his neighborhood of Kenton, could I think of anything comparable in New York City.

Many of the mental categories I use regularly are not applicable in other contexts, and so the conclusions I draw may also not be accurate as my context changes. And the context does change from place to place, and it will change as I continue on my journey through time (see "Generational cultures"). So I don't expect to be comfortable all the time, but it should always be interesting.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International

An Intense Homecoming

I have been planning for some time to post a story on our web site that chronicles the return journey of a young Danish woman who had a most difficult re-entry experience after her AFS year as a high school student in Kenya. Julie Gehl originally wrote this story in 1984, a few years after she had been on the AFS program. Read Julie's story on the AFS web site.

Julie's experience of Kenya left her confused about her identity as Danish. She had so fully taken on a Kenyan identity and set of values that she had a hard time finding her way back to Denmark. She returned to Kenya for a long visit to her host family and friends in Kenya, and somewhere along the line in this journey, she understands that her future is in Denmark and she finds the strength to meet the challenge of readapting to her own country again. Julie is now an oncologist in Denmark and fully participating in her own culture these days, but as she says in her story, "there will always be a little bit of Kenya in me somewhere."

Julie's experience is uniquely her own, but many exchange students will relate to the intensity of her experience, and the importance it had for her life. AFS wants every student to have a life-changing experience, and this means that going home at the end of the year can frequently be difficult. How can you return home after such an experience, and act you did before, as if you never left? Even when the home and host cultures are more similar, the changes brought on by the experience can be monumental. It is important to hold on to what has been learned and to find a carefully balanced integration with the way of life back home. Coming home is part of the journey abroad.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International