AFS Returnee, Kylie Hitchcock of New Zealand, is a guest blogger this week.

One Teacher's Experience

Having a foreign exchange student in the classroom provides the extra perspective that this student offers to the overall learning. In a multicultural society like New Zealand, many students in the classroom come from diverse and quite different backgrounds. However it is sometimes difficult to draw the various perspectives this offers out in the classroom as the other students are so familiar with the backgrounds of the other children they see regularly it doesn’t seem special in any way. However with a foreign exchange student in the class the background difference becomes obvious. Drawing on this difference, and celebrating it within the classroom environment as part of the learning, not only includes the foreign student in the class, it also offers opportunities for local students to understand the exchange student and other cultural backgrounds much better. It also provides an avenue for local students to inquire into and celebrate their own backgrounds and cultural differences.

As a social studies / geography teacher I can draw on the experiences and perspectives of exchange students in most learning topics (if not all). For example in Year 12 Sociology we were looking at the institution of ‘the family’. It was wonderful to discuss this with the two exchange students in the class at the time, and then other students in the class (for example Maori, Korean, Tongan) were able to offer their perspectives. The Pakeha (European New Zealander) students also contributed, explaining their perspectives and experiences. Explaining to others is a great way to learn! It was an excellent session with wonderful class input, and I was able to relate my own experiences and perspectives gained when I was an AFS student to Czechoslovakia/Slovakia.

Having a foreign exchange student in the class;

• Allows students to explain concepts to others from outside the New Zealand culture, thus allowing the local student to view the learning more objectively from a broader perspective.
• Offers a wonderful learning resource.
• Makes the world seem smaller and more ‘homely’! *
• Allows students to see and celebrate the diversity we have in our global society.

Kylie Hitchcock

* A note for American speakers of English:  Kylie's use of "homely" here offers a good example of how language use evolves and varies from culture to culture, even when the language is basically the same as it is for New Zealand and the USA. She does not mean that the world seems smaller and plainer or uglier, but smaller and more home-like, or "homey" as we would say in the USA. One can speculate on how this positive meaning to the word might have become corrupted in the USA, but here is an explanation: "homely." Online Etymology Dictionary. Douglas Harper, Historian. 22 Sep. 2008. <Dictionary.com http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/homely>.

Lessons from an intercultural training program

I am writing this as I return from Costa Rica where I presented training programs in intercultural topics to AFS program staff from some 20 countries. Coming as it did in the midst of a flurry of other activities -- in particular my preparation for my plenary presentation at the Moving Beyond Mobility conference next month in Berlin -- I made this a very short trip, not even staying for the whole program.

I brought to the training the influence from several recent experiences for which I am very grateful. Domo arigato gozaimasu to Hayashi-sensei and his 3-day workshop on perceptual flexibility I attended this past July at the Intercultural Communications Institute's Summer Institute for Intercultural Communication (SIIC). This workshop profoundly affected my thinking in a number of ways. Ever since that workshop I have been working on a story that would communicate my vision for the way AFS should think about the way it approaches the orientation and support of our participants. I read my most recent draft to the 20 or so people attending the optional evening session on orientation. It's only one page. But as I read the story I felt the room grow quiet. From time to time as I looked up from my paper I returned the gazes of those sitting in whatever direction I was looking. Reading the next to the last sentence, I felt my own emotional reaction to the story, and I knew I had at least struck a chord in my own very deep commitment to AFS.

Timing may not be everything

With the advanced intercultural learning group, I wanted to try something similar to a couple of the training activities that I experienced or learned about from Hayashi's workshop. Having an internationally diverse group made this quite interesting. I had each person rate herself or himself according to the frequency with which employed various goals for communication (link to old post on this). Then half the people were asked to face away from the screen while the other half sought to describe or talk about this image to them, using one of the goals that they seldom used in their communication. Some people tried to be more direct, some to make the other person feel comfortable, some to express their true feelings. I didn't know how long to let the conversation go on but the conversation pairs were going strong until at some point I heard the volume drop as pair after pair became more quiet. I took this as a signal to stop and debrief, but now I wonder what might have happened had I waited a bit longer. Would there have been total silence at some point or a new round of chatter?

In the debriefing, some people did admit to feeling "silly" or uncomfortable trying this out, but I think the AFS staff may well be an audience that is flexible enough to participate gamely in spite of any discomfort. It was interesting also to hear some of the ways in which the listeners found that they had imagined a somewhat different picture, based on what they heard, than they now had with the photograph they actually saw.

Another activity I tried with this group was also interesting, but my timing was poor. A "digitally" oriented team received copies of printed news stories concerning my own neighborhood, while the "analog" team instead received a stack of photographs of my neighborhood, some of which I found on the web and others that I took specifically for the workshop to give people a sense of the place and culture. Two issues of timing came up. First, naturally, was that the analog team working with the photos was much more quickly able to grasp intuitively the whole sense of the neighborhood, while the digital team needed time to decode the written information -- additionally difficult because it was in English and almost no one in that group was a native English speaker. But both groups did very well with the tools they had. Coming back together, the groups reported to each other and filled in their gaps, but ideally the activity should have gone further. What I had not taken into consideration was the fact that I had deliberately chosen a local culture that was unfamiliar to everyone. But this also meant that they had no personal experience to convey, and even with the combined analog and digital information, there was still a cultural context that they lacked and this limited their possibility to extend the discussion.

D.I.V.E. = Describe, Interpret, VALIDATE, Explain (then Evaluate)

Do you know what this object is on the left? This was the image I used in the introductory session on intercultural learning. I could have brought the thing with me, but I didn't want it to take up the space in my suitcase so I decided to use a photo projected in full screen mode instead. When one member of my audience offered the possible interpretation that this might be a bomb -- it's not, of course -- I decided there was yet another reason it was better for me to present this as a photo than to put the actual object in my checked luggage. To find out what this is, you'll have to send me a message with your own three interpretations.

I used Kiran Cunnningham's "D.I.V.E." method, with this photo as the example, then I gave each group of about 3 participants a snapshot that I had selected from my own collection of ordinary photos with people I know from various places, very much influenced by a similar activity suggested by Hilary E. Khan, combining it with the "Describe, Interpret, Validate, and Explain" method. I want to thank both these anthropologists for the insights I gained from their NAFSA pre-conference workshop on anthropological methods in intercultural training. See my previous post, Eyes on NAFSA (part 1). The validation process was simply my own explanation of what was going on when I took the photo and what meaning I give to it.

The Intercultural Classroom

I also very much want to thank Jaime Wurzel for making a video several years ago illustrating a range of cultural differences in the context of a classroom. We showed the half-hour video (including the optional English subtitles for easier understanding for all our non-native English speakers) and conducted the first activity on values orientation. Other than ensuring that we had a decent sound system and proper set up, making copies of the first activity worksheet, and introducing the film and activity, there was little else that I needed to prepare to have a very informative session with a lively discussion. Though the film is set in a US university level classroom with a few US students and several international students discussing the international treaty on Antarctica, our largely European staff were able to connect the content quite easily to their own context of working with exchange students in their own country's high schools. A couple of the participants came up to me afterwards, looking for information on how to buy the DVD for use with the high schools in their own country. The information is here: A Different Place: The Intercultural Classroom and you can view a trailer for the video.

Jaime Wurzel's video gives a good sense of the problems that students (and teachers) experience when cultural expectations don't match, but next week guest blogger Kylie Hitchcock, a social studies/geography teacher (and AFS Returnee) in New Zealand, will describe some of her positive experience and the value of having exchange students in the classroom.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International

When is formal more comfortable?

Many years ago when my grandmother was still alive but already in her 90s, she was hospitalized for some emergency surgery that saved her life for several more years. I visited her in the hospital and remember my sense of shock that the nurses aides who were about my age were calling my grandmother by her first name. At that time I still called all my parents friends by their titles and family names: Mr. and Mrs. Glen, Mrs. Hanson, Mrs. Murphy, Mr. and Mrs. Daniels. I knew their first names, of course, because they were all good friends of my parents, but using their first names seemed disrespectful. I wondered how my grandmother felt, being called "Agnes" by such a young woman.

I started thinking about this after reading my colleague, Chander's recent blog where he provided a slide show of various communication styles presented as bimodal contrasts: direct and indirect, linear and circular, and formal and informal among others.

These days, communication in the USA is largely informal. I no longer expect the nurses' aides taking care of my mother call her Mrs. Hansel, though my husband does. And I rarely think of calling myself Mrs. Hansel or expecting anyone else to do so. The opinion seems to be that speaking informally to people will make them feel more comfortable, that it's more friendly, or that it's more candid and therefore trustworthy. Formal speech may seem insincere. We use casual styles of speaking because we like to view others as our equals. But even when we are not being rehearsed for an audience with Queen Elizabeth, there are many occasions when speaking informally seems startling, particularly when visitors from other countries are involved. My husband and I still laugh at the time when we took a European guest to a restaurant nearby. To order a beer with his meal, our guest asked the waitress, "May I have a Heineken?" to which she simply answered, "No." After we all had a good laugh, she explained that, in fact, they were out of that particular brand.

In places where a more formal approach is the norm, it can have the advantage of making relationships more predictable, especially between strangers. One might have expected our waitress to respond, "I'm terribly sorry, but we are out of that brand at the moment. May I suggest another?" But maybe in a culture with a more formal communication style, a restaurant may quickly alter its menu if a particular item is unavailable in order to avoid confusion.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education & Research

AFS International

How should teachers work with exchange students who are learning the language?

With thousands of AFS students newly arrived in their host country, one of the first challenges they face is the language. In the first days they will resort to some non-language communication: pointing to things, drawing pictures, using gestures and facial expressions. You may have seen a small booklet created for the traveler who doesn't speak the language. Point It by Dieter Graf is one example that has become fairly popular. Yet this approach can only go so far. After one's basic needs for food, toilet, shower and sleep are satisfied, it becomes difficult to rely solely on non-verbal communication.

Teachers hosting exchange students in their classroom may feel that it is important to correct the students' language errors to help them learn to speak and write correctly. But this may not always be helpful. Here are some guidelines:

1. Is the student generally confident and self-assured? Confident students are more likely to be able to benefit from some correction when they make language mistakes, but learning a new language can be a source of anxiety for those contemplating traveling to or living in another country. They may worry too much about making mistakes. This may be especially true in school, where students often feel that they are constantly judged. (In a previous post I described my experience in school of the red marks on my papers, correcting my French.) Students who are already a bit nervous may not be helped if their errors are constantly corrected, especially while they are struggling to make themselves understood. It may be more important to hear and understand what they are trying to communicate without worrying about the grammatical mistakes.
2. Did the student make a mistake that may embarrass him? Sometimes in trying to use the language the students accent or choice of words may give his words an unwelcome nuance. In these cases is it important that the students are aware of the double meaning they may have created, particularly if it has already provoked laughter in the classroom. It is helpful to provide a way for the student to remember the correct use so that he can use it confidently the next time. Any little gimmick such as a string of common words that rhyme with the mispronounced word, or an image to remember that will guide the student to the correct usage can help. Consider helping the student privately as well rather than in front of other students.
3. Are you unable to understand what the student said? If you cannot comprehend the student's language, you will need some special patience. Accept some of the responsibility for the failure of the message. The student may be speaking the correct words but because of the unfamiliar "melody" she gives to these words, you may not recognize what she said because your ear is not attuned to that particular accent. Give the student time to try again. Perhaps the student can also write down what she said or use some non-verbal communication.

The more the student uses the language and is able to successfully communicate his or her message, the more confident he or she will become, and the more open to accepting correction in the desire to improve.

Written Language

Written language is generally quite different from the way the same language is spoken. Anyone who has struggled with English spelling, whether as a foreign language or as part of learning your own language, will immediately recognize that pronunciation may not always be a good guide for writing the words. Competitive "spelling bees" where children are lined up and given words to spell correctly, are so common in the USA that a few years ago a documentary featuring the children and families in a national spelling bee became quite popular, followed by a Broadway musical production on the same theme. 

Some weeks ago a colleague from Paraguay was commenting on his impression of how strange this musical must seem to Spanish speakers, whose language is very phonetic and spelling presents few problems for native speakers once they have learned the alphabet.

Recently from the UNESCO web site I found a booklet on "Why language matters" dealing with literacy. In it was this very interesting map of scripts and alphabets used around the world. (The map links to the booklet.) One of the issues with the global digitalization of language is the huge number and diversity of written scripts. I was reminded of the problems I had faced during my time as director of systems at AFS several years ago. At that time, creating a database that  could work with Japanese, Chinese, Russian, and Thai seemed impossible. Chinese characters are double-byte characters while the Thai script uses one and a half byte symbols compared with the single byte of the Roman alphabet. Even diacritical marks posed problems not that many years ago and still sometimes are mis-coded when sent through certain email systems or with old web browsers.

Exchange students immersed in their host culture are likely to advance quickly with the spoken language and might be able to read reasonably well, but to be able to write like a native writer takes considerably more practice. It is not just the spelling or the script that presents the problems, though these can be very challenging in some languages. Many students will try to translate the conventions of their home country's written language, which might either seem too simplistic or terrible convoluted or difficult to understand in the host country language. A good exercise for exchange students is to have a small, ungraded written assignment of a page or a paragraph every day. The teacher can judge the progress being made after a few weeks and, observing the patterns of errors being made, can gently guide the student to improve his or her writing.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research
AFS International