AFS Intercultural Eyes: Intercultural Education

Issue 35. August 17, 2008

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 19:44:04 GMT

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

Eyes on NAFSA (part 3)

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 14:49:35 GMT

Three weeks later, I'm finally returning to finish reporting on the NAFSA conference last month in Washington, D.C. The report should not be any worse for the delay. Sometimes a bit of added time to reflect makes for a better report.

Eyes on NAFSA (part 1)
Eyes on NAFSA (part 2)

NAFSA Photo Album

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.

Eyes on NAFSA (part 2)

Thu, 29 May 2008 18:18:22 GMT

This is my second weblog from sessions at the NAFSA conference in Washington DC. (See also NAFSA's blog.)

Geography and Study Abroad
When I saw a session called '"Where in the world is geography in study abroad?" I had to attend, even at the cost of missing the great poster session on research on international exchanges. I though I would meet the other geographers here at the NAFSA conference, but the presenters took the approach that geography was an unfamilar area for the audience. Given the depressing statistics presented about the lack of geographic knowledge among young people in the USA, they may have been correct.

I did very much enjoy the presentation on the geomorphology of Scandinavia, with excellent photos and technical illustrations. I certainly can appreciate the relevance of the physical geography for those who will be going abroad, and it was telling that Dr. Osa Brand of the National Council for Geographic Education admitted that she had to leave Scandinavia and take a geography course before she realized that her native landscape had been formed by glaciation. I worried that some members of the audience might wonder what the connection was between geomorphology and study abroad, but Dr. Brand presents well, and who among us wasn't interested in volcanos as a child? So the audience was held and maybe as they see the metro stop on the blue or orange line called "Foggy Bottom" they might wonder what the place actually looks and feels like. (Or what it smells like or tastes like, which is how one of the presenters from the anthropology workshop on Tuesday challenged her students going abroad.)

Another interesting panelist, Michael Solem of the Association of American Geographers, talked about a project to connect undergraduate geography classes and professors in different countries for some online collaborative learning, noting that while the subject of geography is international, the methods used to teach geography may be culturally specific. The goal of the project was to create classroom projects where students study the local geography of both places, but also to expose the students to culturally different pedogogic styles in the process. This is a wonderful idea in theory, but as Solem pointed out, there were some practical issues in the amount of work, initiave and commitment demanded of the professors.

Theory and Practice
Sashi Tharoor, former Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations, was one of four panelists moderated by Judy Woodruff on Wednesday morning. He told a joke about the American who lays out four steps to solve a problem, and the Frenchman who responds, "That's fine in practice but how will it work in theory?" This was adopted almost instantly in the temporary NAFSA culture here as presenters and people in the hallways or at the expo were heard to talk about "theory into practice, or practice into theory" and similar variations. One of the "roundtable" discussions at the graduate student research session was already planned to be on "Theory into Practice" and I'm sure that this was not the only place where a more inductive "Practice into Theory" was introduced as a contrast.

I firmly believe that some of the best research available is conducted by graduate students so even though my graduate student days happened in deep in the last century, I wanted to hear what might be on the cutting edge of research on intercultural exchanges. I heard about students thinking about study abroad's impact on the hosting evironment, another about the predeparture motivations of students to non-traditional locations, another interested different classroom cultures, and much more. I've collected a number of business cards and hope I can remember who was doing what. I expect to see some new results in these areas over the next few years and how they shape the discussions at NAFSA meetings in Los Angeles, Kansas City, and Vancouver and beyond.

Service Learning Exchanges
Though the majority of AFS participants are secondary school students, AFS organizations in many countries also offer the opportunity for somewhat older participants to go abroad to volunteer with an NGO or community organization in another country. So I was very interested in the session on Volunteering and Service-Learning Abroad: Maximizing Positive Impact on Host Communities. Martha C. Merril of the International Partnership for Service-Learning offered a useful bibligraphy and highlighted some of the difficulties in determining what we mean by the host community (A city? An NGO or local agency? The population being served by the NGO?) and what is meant by a positive impact.

Another presenter at this session, Benjamin J. Lough of Washington University in Saint Louis has just returned from data gathering in Peru to try to look at the impact on the local community. He used focus groups in 10 agencies: 5 that use international volunteers and 5 that do not. The groups consisted of 10 people who were served by these NGOs, for example the parents of children served. He distributed a 4-page paper that could best be described as hypotheses and background, with findings expected in 2009. Watch for them. There is a focus on intercultural learning in the host community.

Bettina Hansel
Director of Intercultural Education and Research
AFS International

Eyes on NAFSA (part 1)

Wed, 28 May 2008 16:41:01 GMT

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

Issue 23. May 19, 2008.

Mon, 19 May 2008 15:05:32 GMT

Getting ready to go abroad?

As we in the Northern Hemisphere approach the summer season and the end of the school year, a busy travel season begins. If you're flying anywhere in the coming months, you may see large groups of AFS and other exchange students either heading home or starting their journey abroad. The one's going aboard are mostly some combination of nervous and excited, while those going home have an odd mix of excitement, sadness, relief, accomplishment.

Those past school age also may be going to a new part of the world to see the sights, observe the local culture, or maybe just to do some serious shopping, especially those coming to the United States right now when the dollar is so weak against many other currencies.

For exchange students and others heading out who want to understand more about the local culture where they will be staying, I'd like to propose a new way to prepare, in addition to your efforts to learn the language and scan the Internet for information about your destination. I thank Robert C. Weigl for sharing his course method of "Cultural Self-Study" which is part of the IAIR Symposium papers that you can download on the AFS web site. The basic idea is to reflect deeply on your own very specific cultural patterns of behavior, values, customs, expressions, and family history, and to write it down.

This year a selected group of AFS students in Canada have done just that, and I had the privilege of reading just a few of their wonderful essays, filled with very specific detail about the particular values, celebrations, and behavior patterns of their own families. These Quebecois students were assigned to write four short essays: one about their family history, one describing a typical family meal they remember growing up, another a family celebration, and one a description of waking up and getting ready for school. In the process, these students are becoming more aware of their rich cultural identity, how it has shaped them and how they share and create those cultural patterns.

Why is this important? First, the students recognize that what seems "normal" to them is a cultural milieu, not a universal one. Second, by focusing on their own background first, which is always interesting to them, they also become interested in the concepts of culture and how they both within their Quebecois shared culture and across cultures. Finally, they have a better basis on which to share their own culture with their hosts, and to understand the cultural basis for unfamiliar patterns they observe in their hosts.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International

Issue 22. May 12, 2008.

Mon, 12 May 2008 22:02:42 GMT

Motivation, Memory, and Mastery

Years ago we published a brief in-house research report called "Why an AFS Experience Accelerates Learning and the Growth of Competence" -- four pages of insight that Neal Grove and I first hand wrote on yellow legal pads, then typed, corrected, re-typed, proofread, and published in May of 1984. In this paper, Neal Grove and I looked at the many different learning opportunities provided by an AFS intercultural exchange experience, much related to the idea that the AFS experience is one that involves the not just the brain but also the body, the emotions, the immersion context and the AFS support structure. Half of this report dealt with the value of experiential learning, summed up in the 3 M's:

Motivation - students are motivated to learn because the NEED the information right now
Memory - learning from action and consequence, and with the emotions involved, is more easily retained
Mastery - daily practice using new skills and information leads to increased confidence and ability to learn further

We were quite pleased to find this theoretical support of what we observed about our exchange program alumni, which I believe came from James S. Coleman, though I can no longer find the reference.

Learning by Doing

"A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something that he can learn in no other way."

-Mark Twain

There is no standard year-end exam for intercultural learning following an exchange experience, so AFS has spent time over the years looking at ways to assess the "learning by doing" that we believe takes place on our program. Most recently, we returned to the AFS students of the early 1980s, a group that, at least in the USA, we had studied previously in a before and after assessment of how they rated themselves in terms of several expected outcomes of the experience. This time, we would be using a web-based survey that included the IDI: The Intercultural Development Inventory, and several other measures that we created from the results of our focus groups in 12 countries. We wanted to find out what distinguishes our alumni from their peers some 20 years after their high school experience.

Our first report can now be downloaded on the AFS Web Site, but here I want to talk a little bit about the questions we are exploring after examining the data we've collected about the relationships between international experience and learning.

When we studied this group in 1981, we found significantly different results for students who had traveled abroad before going on the AFS program.

Now we ask: Does the experience of traveling abroad frequently as a child relate to one's later fluency in a greater number of languages or greater comfort around other cultures?

As stated in our first report, we learned that 34% of the AFS sample from 1980-86 also participated in a study abroad program in their college or university years.

Now we ask: How might the AFS high school exchange experience differ from a college or university study-abroad experience in terms of the way they are related to learning outcomes?

We know that AFS programs generally attract more females than males.

Now we ask: In what ways do learning outcomes of the group, including the IDI, differ by gender?

In our focus groups we discovered that many AFS students joined the program because of the encouragement of their parents.

Now we ask: How might we characterize the influence of parents on learning outcomes?

Over the coming months I will be compiling our findings and creating our next study report that will address these and other questions that are emerging as we look more closely at our data. I will also be inviting Leo Hitchcock to provide some updates on his research about assessing intercultural competence. We look forward to hearing about any research you may be doing in this area as well.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International

Issue 20. April 28, 2008

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 14:50:12 GMT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bettina Hansel
Director of Intercultural Education and Research
AFS International

UPDATE: AFS France posted photos of the event.

Issue 18. April 7, 2008

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 14:00:49 GMT

Recognizing Culture

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

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

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

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

Bettina Hansel, Director of Intercultural Education and Research
AFS International

Issue 17. April 1, 2008

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 16:26:41 GMT

About the way you walk...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bettina Hansel
Director of Intercultural Education and Research
AFS International

Issue 15. March 17, 2008

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 14:37:28 GMT

Positive Feelings for Other Cultures

My niece is in love with Ireland: the music, the linen, the pubs, Riverdance, the green hills and quaint houses and even the climate I think. She's given both her children Irish sounding names that, in the USA work reasonably well with the Dutch last name her husband brought to the family.

Allophilia is the name given by Harvard University professor Todd L. Pittinsky for the development of positive feelings toward another culture. He sees this as a necessary approach to overcoming conflict between cultures, preferable to the more "neutral" tolerance that he has observed. You can download his paper on Allophilia and Intergroup Leadership.

Pittinsky mentions the problems for the leaders where such conflict exists, and suggests that the leaders might want to emphasis commonalities as an interim step towards a strategy of allophilia. Milton Bennett's Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity proposes that the "Minimizaton" of cultural differences is a necessary step toward acceptance and adaptation. Most of our exchange program participants and alumni are likely to focus on the similarities between cultures rather than the differences.

From the research on the AFS students from 2002 by Mitchell Hammer (you can down load the "Educational Results" study reports from Hammer's study here) and our newer research that surveyed our alumni from 1980-86, we learned that many of our students and alumni are already in love with their host countries. This may have all the benefits of Pittinsky's allophilia, but we also see that for some, this comes with a sufficiently negative and cynical view of their own culture compared with other cultures that one wonders if they can be an effective bridge between the cultures, regardless of how happy they are to feel included in the other culture.

I can recall how some 25 or 30 or so years ago I felt the burden of anti-Americanism stemming from a number of US foreign policies and action that were not so appreciated in other countries. When traveling to Europe, I hoped not to be recognized as American, as I thought my own culture would get in the way of my being accepted. I tried to look European, to "pass" in another culture. In the course of these travels I also met with friends who of course knew my nationality. I cannot even remember which president I was apologizing for to my French friends but I do remember the gist of their reply: "Don't worry about it," they assured me. "Our president is just as idiotic as yours. It can't be helped." It can be enormously freeing to recognize that human failings exist in all cultures.

While my niece's love of Ireland is easily accepted by her American friends, this would not be true if the two cultures were in conflict. One simply cannot fathom a Palestinian man who is in love with Jewish traditions, who gives his sons Hebrew names because he thinks they sound charming. Should such a person exist, it's hard to see how he could be a leader in the quest for peace between these two cultures. What credibility could he have with his own cultural group? How could he encourage others to see things his way?

On St. Patrick's Day, anyone can be Irish, but many of us in the USA can trace our roots to some Irish immigrants. Years ago I also went to Ireland for a SIETAR conference and found it quite moving to see the ruins of small stone cottages of the many, many Irish who left that country, more than decimating its population at the time of the potato famine. The historical accounts of the potato famine and the Irish emigration have obvious parallels with the desperate and forced migrations of people around the world today who risk their lives and give everything they have in hopes of basic survival, but information like this doesn't help me imagine the experience from the eyes of the Irish in the middle of the 19th century. What helps is to reflect on the unique history, culture, and beliefs about the world that surrounded this experience. It is the stories that bring another person's experience alive.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International

Issue 9. February 1, 2008

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 15:35:56 GMT

Learning from Each Other

In recent weeks, my husband is spending hours in front of the computer using special software to learn French. He's doing this because in April I will be attending an intercultural education conference in Paris sponsored by our AFS organization there, and he is coming along. (See notice in Event Calendar) He likes the program's technique of using mental images related to English as a way to remember French words, and he is having fun making up sentences that might or might not be of much use to him in France.

One of the challenges of learning a language is finding someone to talk to. Last November, the BBC reported on a case in Mexico of an indigenous language that is about to go extinct since the last two speakers of that language have refused to talk to each other. (See story from the BBC)

Fortunately for my husband, in addition to his efforts to speak with me in French, he will find plenty of people with whom to practice French, even without leaving the computer. An interesting social networking site, italki.com, helps match you with someone with whom you can practice your foreign language. This and other language learning resources have been posted on the AFS web site's Useful Resources list for Educators.

Yesterday I came across an old interview in New Scientist on line with Steven Pinker. (See full interview.) He talked about theories of the origin of language in humans, and the fact that, unlike some birds, say, humans aren't born speaking but have to learn speech. He said, "Learning is an essential part of language because by its very nature language has to be a shared code. If you spoke a language of one you might as well not speak at all. The learning period synchronises the language ability of each child to that of everyone else around them."

Language is not the only thing that we learn better together; maybe we learn everything better in a community. What would I know without my colleagues here at AFS, for instance? For example, one of them led me to an article about different types of intelligence, which led me to a very exciting but not so new article on The social/situational orientation to learning by Mark K. Smith, and his article collects and reviews the thoughts of several other educators, including Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger. What all these educators, anthropologists, and colleagues have discerned is that learning is not really an individual activity, but one that requires the input of others, and generally requires a community.

AFS intends to expand that community and promote intercultural education. While our exchange programs physically place a person in a community within another culture, we also want to use our worldwide community to teach each other, and to teach our exchange program participants, how to develop a broader set of social skills that are flexible enough to adapt to unfamiliar contexts and cultures. This includes the Five Frameworks of Culture that we have adopted from Milton Bennett, and it includes the nurturing of an openness to things that are unfamiliar and unknown.

I invite you, the readers, to also contribute to the learning by leaving your comments on any of the topics you read here, or to leave messages which I will answer promptly.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research, AFS International.