“And so you see I have come to doubt
All that I once held as true
I stand alone without beliefs
The only truth I know is you.”

Kathy’s Song. Paul Simon.

I often marvel at how young Paul Simon was when he wrote this song, but it has haunted me for years, particularly these lines, with the stark emptiness of doubt in everything except for the one person for whom the song is written: Kathy, I presume. What impressed me most was the possibility of such a complete emotional upheaval that would leave a person clinging desperately to one other person, with no other bearings. The intensity fit my teenage years, but not too closely, because at that point in my life I did believe I could change the world, or that young people would change the world. Much of that optimism stays with me, but now also much of the doubt.

My first real encounter with another culture was my exchange experience in France at 17. I am rather amused to remember my efforts to connect with a street corner revolutionary just across the border in Germany where I traveled with my host family. He was handing out some kind leaflet, and I knew immediately that we both belonged to the same worldwide youth movement. My French was reasonable enough, but I still don’t speak German. My host family stood patiently by while I tried to make this important connection in a pigeon English. We traded revolutionary leaflets as one might now exchange business cards. My host family ushered me back into the car and of course I never saw that guy again.

The complete confidence I had in whatever it was that I believed at age 17 served me well in some ways, but it did not leave me very open to the cultural differences I encountered. I held my views a bit too strongly, and judged quickly. Openness requires some doubt about your own perspective, and at that age I didn’t see the value of doubting what seemed self-evident to me.

I needed very much to balance my certainty about the world with some serious doubt: to have a willingness to explore the possibility that what I know from my own perspective may simply not be true. Where certainty brings strength, doubt brings vulnerability, but it can also yield to openness, wonder, curiosity, and the realization that there is so much more to learn.

Next week as I leave the daily contact with my colleagues at AFS and start on a new journey, I welcome the doubt that is creeping in as a counterweight to the confidence in what I have learned so far and where I am heading, and I welcome the new and renewed relationships that bring me new perspectives to ponder.

Next week also this site will have a new look as I move it to WordPress.com. Click here for a sneak preview. You will still find it at http://www.interculturaleyes.org and I will provide links from the current site to help you find it.

Age and Experience

I'm often asked, "What is the best age to study abroad?" AFS students are typically 16-18. CISV (Children's International Summer Villages) organizes programs for 11-year-olds. University-level study abroad is rapidly growing. Interesting opportunities exist for older adults to study or research abroad as well. I see no reason NOT to take advantage of as many of these opportunities as you can!

How do you view human development? Do prejudices become more firmly fixed as we age? Are some ages riper for learning than others? Certainly one of the arguments for sending younger students is the idea that they are somehow not yet formed and there is still a chance to leave an imprint. Yet the longer I live the more I realize I am still learning, and now I am learning things I was much less open to when I was younger. I'm also less easily impressed or shocked.

A First Experience

Many years ago I took my then 7-year-old daughter on a road trip of French-speaking Canada. One episode stands out in my mind: we were walking along a trail in a park and encountered a French-speaking family with a similar-aged daughter. The two girls started speaking to each other excitedly, and then both of them suddenly stopped and stared at each other. For both of them it was the first time they had tried to talk to someone their own age who spoke another language, and they were unsure how to manage this. They moved to grunts, noises, and gestures but managed to discover that they both were interested in the music of Michael Jackson, who had then recently released the "Thriller" album. We, the adults, walked alongside, speaking a mixture of French and English while our girls seemed to move to their own language over the next hour or so as we hiked together.

Early experiences like this one often lead a young person in interesting directions later on. In the 15-country AFS "Long Term Impact Study" (available at http://www.afs.org/research) we found that AFS students were more likely to have parents who encouraged them to meet people from other cultures, who took them traveling to other places when they were younger, and who encouraged them to study abroad. These students were also more likely to study abroad at the university level, to seek jobs that involved working with people from other cultures, and to live abroad for a year or more while working or while following a spouse with an overseas job assignment. A social network community for such ex-patriots, InterNations, is an official supporter of AFS because of the numerous AFS returnees in its network.

These multiple intercultural experiences lead to greater intercultural sensitivity, lower anxiety around other cultures, and friendship networks that are culturally diverse. There are some differences in the kind of outcomes related to a high school program and a university program, as they Long Term Impact Study has shown, but the real pattern that emerges is the lifelong interest in other cultures.

Access to Opportunities 

This week I attended a special awards luncheon at the Asia Society, honoring the winners of the Goldman Sachs Foundation Prizes for International Excellence in International Education. It was a wonderful event highlighting many excellent programs and initiatives that try to bring an international perspective into the classroom and educational systems in the United States. I was particularly impressed with the Pulitzer Center's Global Gateway that links journalists with classrooms, and the efforts of individual schools like Independence Charter School in Philadelphia.

As I think of our mission to create a more just and peaceful world, I recognize that a big part of this is to ensure that the skills and insights that a student gains abroad will be applied when they get home to enable them to deal in a positive way with the diversity, stereotypes, and prejudices they find on their home turf. I'm sure this is true of many of the international exchange programs offered at various ages.

But from what I heard from Lynette Clemetson, Managing Editor of The Root, a Washington Post web publication, international education may often have its own blinders on. When she went to the University of Pittsburgh as an English major, Ms. Clemetson never heard about study abroad from her academic advisors. As an African American, she supposes that she probably did not look like the kind of student who would want to study abroad student, at least to her academic advisors. Only by accident did she learn of Semester at Sea, a program that was then sponsored by her own university. One of her friends, a woman who had been encouraged to go abroad, was applying for a scholarship for this program. So Ms. Clemetson decided to apply for one as well, received it, and saw China for the first time. This led her to graduate school at University of Pittsburgh, when she finally was able to begin studying Mandarin as part of her East Asian studies, with intense immersion experiences in Taiwan that helped her become fluent.

While Ms. Clemetson's story is one of a nearly missed opportunity, it's also a message that it's never too late for someone who is curious about other cultures and motivated to learn.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International

Always and Never

As I was growing up in the United States in the 1950s and 60s, it was my mother who was my main guide to the world and how it works. My father taught me useful skills, such as how to saw and how to hammer a nail into a piece of wood, and even an alternate way to tie my shoes, but when it came to questions about social behavior he was largely quiet and my mother dominated.

The messages usually included the word "always" or "never" as in:

"Never comb your hair at the table."

"Always cover your mouth when you yawn."

"Never walk around barefoot."

"Always write a thank-you note when you receive a gift."

These messages were reinforced with strong words about anyone who happened to ignore these rules.

"It was a filthy coffee shop. At the booth next to us there was a woman who kept combing her hair."

"She's old enough, she should know better."

"They're nice kids, but I don't know why their mother lets them run around without their shoes. They'll grow up with huge calluses on the soles of their feet."

"Your aunt called. She wondered if you got home safely after your visit to her. She never heard anything from you."

Oops. That last one was directed to me. I had to write a very long and apologetic thank you after that. It was a variation on the rule I hadn't recognized. You also must always write to thank someone for their hospitality when you travel to visit them. This one stung sharply because I was already "old enough to know better."

When a teenager travels on AFS as an exchange student they are also "old enough" to have internalized most of these rules. They know more or less instinctively how to behave in terms of their own culture's expectations, though even in their own culture's terms they may slip up a bit now and then. The astonishing thing that happens on the exchange program is that suddenly they have a different set of cultural expectations to meet. But since they are no longer little children, and probably don't speak the language that well, they often don't hear the "always" and "never" rules from their host family.

And how will the family politely tell the exchange student if he or she has slipped up and broken one of these rules? It can be a delicate matter.

"Vera," an exchange student from Germany, realized that there was some issue with the family rules about her plans to visit friends she had met who lived in what would be seen as a poorer, rougher part of town - a favela in Brazil. But the family didn't directly tell her not to go, and Vera's reaction was this:

...Meanwhile, I give in only rarely, for if they cannot tell me a clear “no,” then they must accept that I don’t hear a “no.”

On the other hand, for a US student in Ecuador who took a 1/2 hour long shower one day, the direct approach used by his host family was just a little embarrassing, though apparently necessary.

My family sat down with me and slowly explained why I can’t take long showers and that everything was ok but they needed me to follow this rule. My Spanish wasn’t too good then but they took their time and explained so I understood.... I felt a little foolish for not understanding them the first time they explained the rules.

As a German girl in Hong Kong discovered, home and host culture rules are sometimes exactly the opposite:

Their eating habits are quite different. For example, it is permissible to belch out loud, but if you have to sneeze, you must apologize. In my country it is just the opposite.

Here is a small clip from a video created by AFS Germany showing how some opposite expectations about table manners may play out. We used this in the online learning program we created for the AFS students, which is being piloted tested by AFS-USA and AFS Malaysia in the coming months.

The credits for the video clip go to the volunteers involved: Pongrachot Meesaiyat, Helmut Hein, Monika Vogel (the main actors) and Conni Emmert, the camerawoman and producer.

AFS has other materials to help host families and their exchange students discover where their rules may be different. One package we have available on the web in English and Spanish is designed to be used just before and in the weeks right after the students arrive in their host countries.

Share Your Own Rules
Lately in the blogsphere I find frequent invitations asking anyone and everyone to post their own variations of some sort of list. I usually resist -- I don't have that much time on my hands -- but I would be interested in hearing from people in a variety of cultures about the rules you were taught as a child and how you were taught them, and how you came to realize that these rules didn't actually apply in other cultures. It doesn't have to take the form of "7 Rules My Mother (or My Father) Taught Me" but that would be fine. A grandparent or a teacher might also have been the main source of your understanding of your culture's expectations for your behavior.

Consider yourself tagged. If you want to make such a list and share it, you can respond to the blog here, or you can email me at betsy.hansel@afs.org.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International

Online Cultures

I have recently been heavily involved in setting up an online intercultural learning program for our participants. One of the last pieces to put in place was a document of guidelines for blog and forum posts on the site. This is a typical statement of general rules about what can and cannot be posted, and states that the moderators have the right to pull off posts that we think are offensive or inappropriate. It is an explicit statement of how we expect people to behave in this online culture.

Like all sites, there are also some structural constraints to what people can and cannot do on the site, and these are difficult to change. We completed this pilot project with a very limited budget, but with the rapid evolution of the Internet, it makes no sense to spend years developing projects, and many very good Internet tools are practically free. Most important is to be able to complete the work in a matter of months or else the technology you were working with will be obsolete before you're through.

So even before the first students start to work with this site, we are already thinking of what needs to improve. This week, if all goes well, the first few students will start using it and I hope they will provide some feedback soon. The first students on line will be from the USA. The second group will be from Malaysia, starting shortly afterwards. This is the pilot test. We hope that the students will continue working with the program, the forum and blogs throughout their experience, from before they leave home, while they are abroad, and through the months after they return home. Our decisions about what to include are based on input from

Here are the icons we use throughout the program:

Even the icons are likely to receive different reactions from different cultures, let alone the structure behind them in which the participant is guided by an online "passport," and from there is led to specific questions to discuss in a forum, to a place to think things through privately in words and images in a portfolio, and to a place for reasonably open self-expression in a blog that can be shared with the community of students participating in the exchange programs.

The idea is that eventually the text portions would be translated and adapted by the various countries, but that the blogs and forums would be common spaces, and all students would have common themes that they work with. We intend and hope that they will learn from each other guided by our content. There are, of course a few technical issues that still need to be ironed out, but in theory they will work. I am more worried about getting the participants interacting than about working through the technical constraints to allow this to happen.

Over the past year or so, I have been talking to Jon Rubin of the COIL center at SUNY Purchase about the cultural variations and cross-cultural misunderstandings that are specific to online communication. The COIL center's mission is to promote and improve collaborative learning projects and courses, using technology to connect campuses in different countries. The interests overlap considerably with AFS, in particular with our soon-to-launch online intercultural learning project.

Recently I read some articles about cultural differences relevant to the challenge of creating a multinational educational web site.

1. Pfeil, Zaphiris and Ang, "Cultural Differences in Collaborative Authoring of Wikipedia" comes with the warning that different cultures structure information differently, which is in fact one of the points we make in the on line program. While we anticipated translation and adaptation by each sending country. It will be even possible for countries to change the order of pages to some extent if needed, but probably a full reorganization for each country is not going to work.
2. A. Xie, et al., (in press) Cross-cultural influence on communication effectiveness and user reminded me that people from cultures that normally use very rich, high-context communication may have trouble with a web site that is mostly text (like this blog). So our new online learning program has a lot of text but also videos, and plenty of images and graphics. But we may still be too text dependent. And yet: entire novels in Japan, some wildly popular, have been written via cell phone text message. The content is more important than the medium. But maybe a video will help. Here's one of the clips we put in the site that came from a larger work "Snapshots: When Cultures Interact" that was produced by our European umbrella organization, EFIL, the European Federation for Intercultural Learning (made possible through grants from the Council of Europe, the Anna Lindh Foundation, and Marco Balich. See: http://www.snapshots2008.eu/)
    
 
3. Richardson and Smith, (2007) The influence of high/low-context culture and power distance on choice of communication media found that Japanese and US students do choose different media for communicating with teachers, but also highlighted the difficulty of measuring these things. For example, they supposed that students might choose the most effective or preferred means of communication, but this was not borne out in their data. Instead they suggest that cultures also attach symbolic value to the act of sending email, telephoning, or meeting face-to-face, and people may choose based on the symbolic meaning. Written text may have more authority than a phone call in one culture, while an email message may be seen having a less serious purpose. Face-to-face meetings may seem like the most important communication, but people in many cultures have been known to interrupt the conversation with the person they are with to answer the phone.

With these differences, it is hard not to imagine that forum postings and blogging styles will also vary by culture, with some cultures more likely to jump in with encouraging responses for others, and others more likely to look for a humorous or ironic comment.

In launching our self-directed online educational program, I have several worries:

1. Will the text sections appear too SERIOUS?
2. Will the forum or blog appear intimidating?
3. Will the images seem too cliched or sentimental?
4. Will the students be motivated to push the "CONTINUE" buttons?
5. Will the learning they take away come close to what we intend? 

I eagerly and nervously await the first exchange students.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International

Open-minded

1. going to noisy, crowded parties
2. playing football (U.S version)
3. playing chess
4. reading comic books
5. jogging
6. shopping for clothes
7. repairing cars

Color Blind.

I have been following the Brother Peacemaker blog written by an African American man living in Saint Louis. I don't even remember how I came across this blog, but it interested me because my focus is mostly on cultural differences on an international level, but in fact it isn't necessary to cross political borders to encounter cultural differences. It is always my hope that the lessons learned by AFS students living in another country for a year, a semester, or even shorter programs will also take root in their ability to deal with cultural differences they encounter at home. Yet sometimes I worry that this doesn't happen, particularly when the research we've done shows that most of our returnees, our volunteers, and even our staff tend to relate to others primarily on what we all have in common - our basic humanity. This may sound like a positive approach, but as the blog entry cited above complains, ignoring a very obvious difference may not be helpful in building relationships.

The research we have done with the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI), Mitch Hammer's assessment tool based on Milton Bennett's Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity, shows that it is not only in the USA that minimization of cultural differences takes place. It doesn't happen that we overlook difference in every context, but it is particularly odd when we take pains to overlook differences that are highly visible, such as skin color.

Many years ago, a friend of mine took her small son into a shop with her. The little boy had not trained himself to minimize differences, or to concern himself with who might hear what he had to say. Instead he was intent on understanding what made other people different. Much to his mother's embarrassment, he pointed to another customer in the store and asked, "Right, Mom? That man's black?" It was just a question, and the African American customer so pointed out was amused, not offended. And though she answered her son with a quick, "That's right, dear," my friend would have much preferred to be invisible at that moment. She wondered herself why she felt that way. I also wonder why we do this. Is noticing differences so embarrassing?

Privilege, Power and Inequality.  Perhaps our effort to be color blind comes from the tension between our awareness of the inequality of privilege or power that exists between us, and our belief that such inequality should not exist. Any marker of a difference between us may be seen as a reminder of the inequality that we are suddenly overly conscious of. If instead we can view this person as being "just like me," the reminders of inequality disappear along with the differences.  

Tolerance and Conformity. When we minimize cultural differences we may also be dealing with a tension between a desire for conformity and a belief that we should tolerate differences. We can tolerate differences if they are not particularly important; if they are just variations on a theme. Life still seems organized and predictable if we are mostly the same, and if we are the same in all the ways that are important. With this stability, the small variations can even add some interest.

Inherent in the color blindness is certainly an avoidance of tension, and an avoidance of judgment. We do not have to be "for" or "against" in our dealings with people from other cultures and groups. Minimizing cultural difference is non-judgmental, but it is not necessarily open to the important differences that come with our membership in particular cultural groups. Relationships can be built on the appreciation of difference and trust can be established in many ways; we don't need to always look for the similarity first.

My particular cultural group celebrates Christmas this week, and with that comes a whole mixture of feelings from frustration to calm, from joy to depression. There is a group history as well as a personal history for me, and right now if feels very much part of who I am and what I'm doing: so much so, that I can't overlook it.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International

http://www.youtube.com/afsinterculturalprog

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International

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

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

Sometimes the greatest benefit of attending a SIETAR conference is not that you learn new content, but that you learn a new way of communicating that content. SIETAR is the Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research which has been around in some form or another for at least 30 years. I typically spend more time with the "R" part, exploring the new research in the intercultural field because I am fascinated by new findings and gain insight by thinking of how these findings apply to the AFS exchange students. Perhaps because I always liked school, the academic approach appeals to me, and after so many years of my youth spent in classrooms and seminars and writing papers, it is now an even more comfortable culture for me than it was when I was in graduate school and would sometimes shudder at the thought of having to undertake Serious Geographic Research. In fact, doing research suits me well and are much less stressful than, say, being at a crowded cocktail party with dozens of people whom I barely know.

What is challenging for me, though, is to know how to train a group, particularly a culturally mixed group which is the norm in AFS. Knowing something about the variety of teaching and learning styles that exist in various cultures is not enough, especially when my goal is to help people learn how to move across cultural styles. So at this conference I found myself drawn to some less academic sessions and found that I learned a lot -- not in terms of new theories about intercultural learning, but quite simply in terms of organizing and presenting very familiar content to people for whom this may be very new. Since we have been doing some of our staff training "virtually" in the past year or two, I wanted to learn more about how this is done and how people take culture into account when working in this way. From the session by Kimberly Blanchard and Pamela Berland Ex, "Virtual Training: Engaging clients anytime, anywhere" I got some of these practical ideas. In particular, I have some new thoughts about improving the assignments between conference calls and some simple pre-training needs assessment that could be done. 

Since I have been focusing a bit on schools and classroom culture, I particularly wanted to look at education across cultures at this conference. Two sessions formed bookends on this topic. Each provided a quick worksheet to assess my own preferences in terms of instructional styles or cultural attitudes toward education. In all cases, I seemed to be seeking a balance between extremes, putting myself largely in the mid-range, with no consistent philosophy of learning or teaching. For me, it usually depends: on the cultures involved, on the age of the students, on the subject matter. Perhaps in a way, that is the point. No one method or style suits every situation and every culture, and even I am constantly changing my ideas and preferences. The first of these sessions was a workshop by Karen Rolston and Jack Lee, "Cultural Perspectives on Teaching and Learning." Though I attended this session by chance since the one I really wanted to attend was canceled, I was pleased with the discussions in our groups and the way the material was presented. Later in the week, Cornelius (Neal) Grove and Astrid Kainzbauer followed up with a workshop on  Instructional Styles in Global Perspective. In the 1980s I worked with Neal Grove at AFS and completed my Ph.D. while working on the AFS Impact study under Neal's guidance. Many familiar themes from Neal's extensive research were included in Neal's presentation, now organized in a very clear structure. But the country-specific challenges were presented by Astrid's personal account of her teaching in Thailand.

I heard a number of personal stories that helped me connect to other cultures and how different people make sense of the world. One of the first was Nancy Adler's story -- or perhaps more specifically, her mother's story. While similar in many aspects to numerous stories I have heard over the years about Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, hers was still unique and moving. Sometimes the best stories were ones that came out accidentally in small sessions or over coffee: stories of growing up with parents of different cultures like Nancy's, or stories about the challenges of teaching abroad, of marrying someone from another culture, and of living abroad generally.

In my last blog I wondered about the influence of the local Granada culture on the SIETAR conference. In addition to the Flamenco performance and the Alhambra tour planned for the program, I was also pleased with the many young Spanish volunteers in conference T-shirts who were ready to talk and find  solutions, such as helping me correct the Spanish subtitles on my Power Point slides. Though they were busy with other tasks assigned to them, they made time to talk to me rather than directing me elsewhere. Lunch was a comfortable 2 hours each day and a huge space was provided for coffee and pastries or cookies, with plenty of tables for small groups to stand around and talk. The poster sessions also took place in this large space. This large space was also the communications center: where to find colleagues, where to learn about conference logistics (usually verbally and through word of mouth), and to discuss the sessions attended.

The conference was very different from the SIETAR-USA conferences I have attended and I think this was a good thing. I never liked the geographic split of SIETAR into regional and local entities, though it does make it easier for interested people to meet, and new SIETAR organizations have emerged in Italy and in Arabia just recently. I hope that the various SIETAR organizations may join together again and start to consider some of the virtual tools that several sessions addressed and planning some SIETAR global virtual conferences. The fact that SIETAR conferences are almost entirely dependent on volunteers makes it challenging to organize something on the global level. Financial sponsorship of the conference was crucial, as well as participation fees from those attending. But it also depends to a large extent on the membership and each SIETAR organization is quite different. All the more challenging it must have been to create this global conference.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research, AFS International

I want to direct you to our AFS web site for information about the Moving Beyond Mobility Conference which took place this week (October 13-14, 2008) in Berlin. It was exciting to be involved in this event, attended by some 275 people from 46 countries. It combined presentations of recent research on exchanges and of reports on interesting and successful educational programs connected with exchange programs. Many of the studies presented showed different ways in which students are impacted by their study abroad experience while some dealt with the challenges faced by students studying abroad and how students (and sometimes host families) can increase their learning and insight and deal with the dissonance of encountering cultural differences. The conference closed with a panel looking at some of the obstacles to student exchange, and a call for action to nations and ministries of education to break down some of these obstacles and to provide increased opportunities for students to study abroad.

I always wonder why it is that so many ministries of education and individual schools do not allow students to receive credit for the time spent studying abroad. For many of our AFS students, to go on a year-long exchange program means spending one more year of high school back in their home countries to "make up" for the missed courses in their academic program. And yet these students have spent their year attending high school, living daily and studying in a foreign language, gaining new insights into their own culture and history as well as that of their host country. It is in all respects a more challenging year than they would have spent at home, and one that has a strong impact leading them to seek out additional opportunities to reach out across cultures, learn additional languages, and to seek career and volunteer opportunities that bring them in contact with people from other backgrounds. Most of all, they are more confident about their abilities to adapt to new situations and more comfortable to be around people from other cultures.

We would like to see it become a very normal thing for students to take the opportunity to study abroad, especially in the context of immersion programs with host families and where they study with students from the local community rather than in international student communities. We also want to help the schools make the most of the exchange experience for the entire school community. More on this in future issues.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research, AFS International

in Berlin, Germany

Shocks to the Senses

I've focused quite a bit in this blog on sensory perception because this is often the source of the first impression of "foreignness" for exchange students. Tastes, smells, sounds, the quality of the light: these are the aspects that can shock or reassure, and may be the first things that we will react to and judge when we approach another culture.

Years ago we did some research concerning students who returned home early. Though only a small percentage of all students on the AFS program returned early, we found in each of the two years we studied that there were some exchange students who arrived and almost immediately felt uncomfortable and homesick. Sometimes a small medical problem or some bad news from back home provided the excuse to give up on this new culture and just go home, but even a loving phone call from a parent could trigger homesickness and the desire to return early.

I understand why. At age 10, I could not last even a week away from home while at a children's summer camp. I was a fussy eater and did not like the smells of the kitchen. Worse than that were the wet floors in the large common bathroom shared by all the girls in my cabin. I had wanted so much to go to summer camp, but my fantasy about going to camp didn't include smells of unfamiliar food and slightly run-down facilities where the toilets didn't always flush.

Even now so many years later my memories of that week include much more than the bad smells, the gnawing feelings, or the tears. I also remember a magical evening sleeping under the stars, the taste of orange juice sucked through peppermint sticks, the songs I learned. And I wonder why these happy moments didn't more than balance the awkwardness I felt, the food I didn't like and the wet bathroom. As an adult, none of this would be terribly important to me, but at age 10 I was overwhelmed. Certainly it was NOT the fact that I was hit in the head with a baseball on the second day and was taken to the doctor's office, nor the fact that the saddle and I slid off the back of a horse the next day during one of the horseback riding lessons. I was not hurt or even bothered much by these events, but they provided a needed excuse to return early. Most of all, I believe, it was the daily letters from home that pulled me to end my one-week summer camp after 5 days.

Rather than daily letters, exchange students today have an array of options to stay in touch with their families and friends back home, and are likely to talk with their parents regularly, not just exchange email. The frequency of communication can be problematic, but it is the nature of the communication with the parents that may nudge an anxious student toward an early end to the experience. Parents who find themselves on one end of such a conversation will do well to remember that their daughter or son needs:

• to feel confident that she is capable of handling the experience;
• to know that her parents are managing fine at home without her; and
• to recognize that she will not always feel this way.

Abroad for the First Time

I returned Saturday night from a visit to Minneapolis for the IDI conference where I talked about how AFS is using Intercultural Development Inventory and the underlying theory of the Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity. In one of the sessions that afternoon, I was struck in particular by Paula Pedersen's research concerning a program of US university students studying abroad in England in what is known as an "island" program, where students travel abroad in a chaperoned group and study together in another country. The students in this program came with very little previous exposure to other places or cultures. For most of them, this was their first exposure to another culture. Dr. Pedersen's students tended to cluster together much of the time, and needed to be challenged through their course work to break away from their group and move out into the host culture. She used coursework assignments to get the students more involved in the host culture and to make the program more beneficial to them.

Getting the balance right between support and challenge is the key to the learning process and an important aspect of program design. Living with a host family as the AFS students do, the support provided by the host family is frequently packaged with the biggest intercultural challenge our students face. We will be focusing more in future issues on the preparation and support needs of host families.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International

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

What makes you anxious? 

Thursday night there was another shooting in front of the apartment building a block and a half from my house. This is probably the 5th shooting I know about in as many years. Other than a listing on the crime map of the Gothamist of a "shooting, 8/21/2008 7:44 p.m."there has been no news to be found. Information on the neighborhood blog from a "newbie" to the forum said that "someone was shot in both arms and legs." Another posting on the same forum came from someone who said the police told him the guy would live. While this was happening, I was thinking about anxiety as it relates to the research I've been doing, and reading a colleague's blog about her recurring panic attacks. But I heard nothing. I only found out about the shooting when my husband came home and asked me what happened. Our road was blocked off and the police were out in force but I had heard nothing. 

I  am not an anxious person by nature but I see how even a little level of nervousness affects me when it comes to interacting with the many people that live in that apartment building. I smile and say hello to the mothers and children on the stoop, but I don't know any of them by name. I recognize and greet several in the group of mature gentlemen who regularly sit out front on folding chairs and we joke a little. I like them, and feel comfortable around them, but nevertheless very soon I continue on my way. I can't call this a real relationship, but we know each other a little bit. When these men are not there and when no children are playing on the sidewalk, then very occasionally someone or something I see on that block makes me suspicious and I watch carefully while also trying to make it seem that I do not notice anything unusual. In these moments, I am nervous, and I greet no one.

The research I've been doing at AFS looks specifically at the level of anxiety or discomfort or awkwardness that people report feeling when they are interaction with people from other cultures. It also looks at how safe they feel in their own neighborhoods, and while traveling. From Mitch Hammer's research in 2002 we learned that AFS students generally have substantially less anxiety around other cultures after their experience with AFS than the did before they left, and this is much different from their friends who do not go abroad. We now also know that this lower level of anxiety around other cultures is also found among our older alumni, who are significantly less anxious, or more comfortable, around other cultures than their peers. Reports on these studies can be downloaded from www.afs.org/research.

Considering the effect of my own anxiety barometer around the nearby apartment building, I realize how important it is to be able to reduce anxiety and how powerful the AFS experience is. By providing a teenager the opportunity to live as a member of a family in another culture, they are expanding the definition of what is safe and comfortable for them to do. I firmly believe we are enabling them to establish more friendships and deep relationships with people who are very different from themselves.

Bettina Hansel
Director of Intercultural Education and Research
AFS International

Classroom Cultures

Every year, AFS sends close to 10,000 secondary school students from some 50 countries to attend high school in another country, for a year, a semester, or a few months. For most of these students the first days in the new school are as confusing as they are exciting. Their challenges with the language account for only part of this confusion. In many cases they hardly know what is expected of them. Teachers and students in the classroom in their host country behave very differently than they are used to. Students going to Japan may be quite surprised to find that they are expected to clean the school building. Students going to the USA may be unprepared for the weekly schedule that has them shifting to a new classroom with a new group of students every hour. Students used to listening to formal lectures and remembering what has been taught may wonder what is going on if the teacher walks in, sits on the edge of the desk, and starts asking the students questions.

Learning Styles

In the USA these days there are many educators who feel it is much more important for the student to learn how to think and how to learn, and that the particular "facts" can always be easily looked up on the internet if they are important. An example is this older post from the blog, Dangerously Irrelevant.  In this post Scott McLeod may seem to compare the available memory space in the human brain to that of a computer's hard drive. Why not off load some of the facts that aren't immediately needed to some external hard drive like wikipedia where they can always be found?

I apologize here to Scott for misrepresenting somewhat his more thoughtful and nuanced perspective so that I can highlight a contrasting perspective. I do agree that learning how to learn helps a student achieve and grow in the USA. However, when one relies too much on the ability to look up information when needed, sometimes facts are simply ignored. We have seen many times over the years in our US political system, where candidates will state opinions and present their solutions to national and world problems supported by "facts" that could be seen as merely placeholders for a URL hyperlink to the actual statistics, which anyone could find if they felt they were really important, but few people really know or can even judge if the facts are true or misleading.

In classrooms in many other parts of the world, learning facts is critically important.  Facts are seen to be important pieces of information that are known to be true, and on which to base your understanding and conclusions about the world. I recommend seeing Jaime Wurzel's video, The Intercultural Classroom. The trailer on the site gives you a taste of this and other cultural differences in teaching style.

Teachers may not be aware of how much of their pedagogy depends on the cultural context the students bring to it. Even exchange students who have excellent language skills may talk less than expected because they don't know what to talk about. They may not be used to a format that asks them to state and defend their own opinion about anything from abstract art to environmental policy. "How do I find out what is the right answer?" they may wonder. It can be difficult to understand that the teacher believes there is no right answer, only good arguments. Well, what makes a good argument? In cultures that emphasize harmony rather than debate, arguments may be avoided in favor of relationship building. US teachers in particular who have exchange students like this in their classrooms can help, first by being aware that the student is working from a different context, and then by deliberately teaching the expected structure of a logical argument.

Similarly, US students who are used to being asked their opinion on all sorts of issues may have more trouble remembering the key facts that may be required of them, or starting their essays with a relevant theory rather than with a specific anecdote or example. The inductive approach of drawing connections between individual examples to create a theory is more popular in the US, while in France, it is more typical to create the theory on principles and then deduce the examples. Again, being aware of this potential cause for the students apparently poorer performance can provide some insight on what hidden lessons need to be deliberately taught to these students.

These new challenges for the exchange student are an important part of the learning that takes place through cultural immersion, and AFS thanks the teachers around the world who are welcoming our students into their classroom. On our AFS International web site we hope some of the information we have provided for schools will prove useful for the teachers and school administrators who work every day with exchange students like ours.

Bettina Hansel
Director of Intercultural Education and Research
AFS International

War & Peace

AFS, like NAFSA, is celebrating 60 years of intercultural learning: 60 years since the end of World War II. Our organizations are expressly interested in building peace. With the presentation of the Cassandra Pyle award to AFS Ambulance Driver Ward Chamberlin, who was one of our founders, we were reminded of that war time in which Ward and many others served not as combatants but as those who rescued the wounded. On Thursday morning (May 29) we learned about another war experience: this one of a child, now a young man, who had been forced to become a child soldier in Sierra Leone. The video below shows Ishmael Beah last year, on a Canadian news show called "The Hour" but at the NAFSA plenary, Ishmael spoke mostly about what happened in his life after the war experience, when he came to the USA and went to Oberlin College, and when he wrote his book, A Long Way Gone.

I watched Ishmael on the Jumbo Tron, sitting next to a long-time friend and colleague. We heard him talk about how he came to realize how important it is to recognize that cultural differences are not as important as the fact that we are all human. My friend and looked at each other and at the same time whispered, "Minimization!"

Why Minimization? Both of us had spent long hours with Mitch Hammer and more long hours with Milton Bennett and with staff at AFS explaining the findings from Mitch's 2002 study with our students that most of the students reach a developmental stage that Milton Bennett named "Minimization" -- one in which the person minimizes cultural differences and focuses on the underlying human similarity -- in his Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity.

What we also learned in the research is that many of the AFS students worry about focusing on cultural differences, believing that differences create conflict, and so it's best to minimize these differences and, if possible, enlarge the similarities we share. At AFS we have spent a lot of time explaining to staff and volunteers how we would like them to challenge the students to be able to appreciate cultural differences without having these differences lead to conflict.

Yet minimization is powerful and Ishmael helped to remind us that this IS a good thing. It is how conflict is overcome. It is how one person stops dehumanizing another person, and it's no wonder that anyone who has faced violent conflict stemming from cultural differences would cling tightly to the belief that all people are ultimately the same, deep down, and that this is what is important to know and to observe.

At some point, though, the messy business of building peace requires an ability to negotiate, and to recognize how very differently another person, from another culture, experiences the world. At some point, the relationship needs to go deeper into those differences, to understand them and to build those very important differences into the dynamic of the conversations and shared activities across cultures.

Life & Death

Mitch Hammer also presented a session at NAFSA on Thursday afternoon, which was based in part on his book, Saving Lives, but translated to the context of an international student program or study abroad program at a US university. While I might complain that the information he presented -- especially the riveting case study of an international student dealing with a stalker -- was not presented with its full cultural context, Mitch definitely shook up many people in the audience and made them realize that they may need to pay more attention to the personal safety of their students to an extent that they might not have considered before. While these situations can happen as easily to a student in his or her own country and culture, there are many complications that arise when students are not in their own culture, and anyone who deals with student exchange needs to know how to approach these situations.

Theory & Practice (redux)

Darla Deardorff's "Assessment Toolbox" session provided a chance to chat with two of the four presenters who highlighted the use of particular research tools to assess intercultural competence. This could have been an entire workshop, but like a good wine tasting, it gave us a sense of which of these tools you might want to study in depth at a later time when you're ready to do some serious research.

Lisa Chappel led a very down-to-earth session on providing post-study abroad support. Lisa used to work for the AFS office in Chile and she was kind enough to provide some follow up information for our volunteers which I posted on the AFS International web site. The other presenters were also great, filled with specific ideas and programs from their own campuses.

Finally, one of my "Must Attend" sessions came when I could hardly attend at all: the very last session on the very last day. Victor Savicki, who has been one of the presenters at Darla Deardorff's morning toolbox session, organized a team presentation on using theory and measurement, but also a presentation of a fascinating on-line course that is very much the kind of thing we are hoping to do.

As promised, I am blogging from the email kiosk at the expo at the NAFSA conference in Washington, DC. When I am able do so, I will add photos and provide more of a report on the whole conference.

An Anthropological Approach
Culture has been the focus of anthropologists since its beginning, but they have not had the audience they perhaps deserve to have when it comes to intercultural education or study abroad program planning. So I was pleased to participate in a workshop on Tuesday morning organized by Kiran Cunnningham of Kalamazoo College and a large team of anthropologists who are working in the context of study abroad programs at US universities.

DIVE into Another Cultural Context
I have often found the D.I.E. method (Describe, Interpret, Evaluate) to be a useful one for helping exchange students and host families stop and reassess a cross-cultural situation that has troubled them. Professor Cunningham has helped me find a new version that not only has a more pleasant acronym but also adds an important step to the process.

DIVE stands for Describe, Interpret, Validate, and Explain, all of which, according to Professor Cunningham, should happen before the evaluation step. Let me give a real Washington cultural example from Monday night. On the train to Washington, I was reading Au Contraire: Figuring out the French, by Asselin and Mastron. I had particularly enjoyed the section they had written on the cultural differences between French and Southern Californian waiters and what might be expected normal behavior for a waiter in France and in the USA.

So let me describe our experience with a waiter in Washington. We are sitting at a table on the outdoor terrance of a large Italian style restaurant. We are looking at our menus when our waiter arrived. He said to us, "Mind if I sit down here with you?" and proceeded to pull up a chair in between the two of us, placed his figure on the menu one of us is holding, and guided us along with an explanation of the portions offered and the special items that could be had which are not on the menu.

My possible interpretations:

1) The waiter is trying to convey that this is a fun and friendly restaurant.

2) The waiter finds my young companion, the niece of a colleague, to be very attractive and is doing everything possible to get her attention.

3) The waiter was tired or his feet hurt from walking around, so he needed a moment to sit down while giving us the required information about the menu.

4) The waiter is convinced that this particular approach with customers will yield a large tip.

The next step would be to validate my interpretations. Perhaps the best way to do this would have required that I have a conversation with this waiter, which I didn't really want to do, frankly. I could also talk with other employees of the restaurant to check out my interpretations, or discuss with other restaurant customers in the Washington area to see how they interpret the behavior I have described.

In fact, the validation process leads you to describe again from a new angle, re-interpret, and validate through several cycles, and if I do this, I might be able to explain a certain type of Washington restaurant behavior to a Parisian friend. Not having time to do all this, I made a quick evaluation and decided to leave a 20% tip, based on my #4 interpretation.

I will have several more restaurant experiences in Washington before I return to New York, and I will now be looking to see if other waiters also want to sit at my table and if waiters tend to sit more at tables with young women, whether the type of restaurant makes a difference, and whether waitresses behave similarly or not. I will not be able to draw any conclusions in less than a week.

Some other highlights of NAFSA  workshop #50:

We received some very useful handouts from Susan Buck Sutton of Indiana University Purdue University Indianopolis, which made me VERY sorry that I arrived late to the workshop. These ideas themselves deserve a blog to themselves.

What started out as a generic powerpoint template presentation on visual methods, which at first struck me as quite ironic. However, once some of the photos were introduced to the slides, the points became much clearer and perhaps the contrast itself was the lesson. Hilary E. Khan of Indiana University (Bloomington) showed us how "home photos" or snapshots could become tools for looking at cultures.

I will come back to these ideas in future blogs.


An AFS Ambulance Driver is honored.

Ward Chamberlin was one of the founders of the AFS exchange programs some 60 years ago when the American Field Service ambulance drivers returned home from the Second World War. The move of the organization's mission from the humanitarian efforts to treat wounded soldiers to one of building peace through international exchanges was honored at the opening plenary of the NAFSA conference where Ward Chamberlin was honored with their Cassandra Pyle award. Ward was able to reach thousands with his moving speech about AFS and NAFSA's joint efforts to build a more just and peaceful world. This was followed by they keynote speech by former Mexican President Vincente Fox.

This was followed on Wednesday by a special AFS breakfast to honor Ward. It was a very special highlight for AFS at the NAFSA conference.

More to come!
This is only a recap of my first full day at NAFSA. The sessions this afternoon -- including one on geography! -- and the dinner at the Indonesian Embassy await.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International