AFS Intercultural Eyes

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

Issue 34. August 9, 2008

Sat, 09 Aug 2008 11:29:52 GMT

Private Lives

In the early hours of the morning when I was somewhere between awake and asleep and with my eyes still closed, my attention was drawn to a slightly smoky, slightly spicy and faintly familiar odor. I hesitated a minute before I recognized what it was. It was a smell I remembered from India. Opening my eyes I realized where it was coming from. I had put an Indian bed sheet on my bed for the summer when I don't need the additional warmth of a blanket. And it's a beautiful sheet which I brought back from India ... in 1992. It's been through numerous washes over the years but still has not lost its color, nor has it completely lost its odor, at least in my dreams.

It reminded me of the lingering traces of the cultural assumptions and patterns of behavior we learn in childhood that still cling to us long after our context changes and we intend to take on a new pattern. Like the storks who no longer bother to fly after living under nets as fledglings, we sometimes find it hard to escape those ingrained patterns and beliefs even when we have every reason to escape them. One of these ingrained patterns for me is my reluctance to ask people about their relationships, their feelings, their opinions. It's somewhat of a joke that I am always the last person to know the office gossip.

And I know where it comes from:

"Mind your own business!"

Somehow the pattern emerged when I was still a child that some questions I asked were perceived as prying into affairs that were private to the individuals involved and therefore should be none of my concern. Not wanting to be a "busybody" or gossip, I learned to refrain from asking people questions about their personal lives. If they wanted me to know, they would tell me. I learned I shouldn't ask. Now this seems to me to be an extreme form of the concern for privacy that was characteristic of the US culture during the time I was growing up.

"Don't ask. Don't tell."

A familiar restriction on asking about other people's private lives was made a policy in the US military during the Clinton administration. While intended to find a way to allow homosexuals to serve in the military rather than automatically being discharged, the essence of the policy was this: Your private behavior may be contrary to military regulations, but at long as I don't ask you about it and you don't tell me about it, then we agree that it doesn't exist. But of course, this does mean that I can't know you very well or really be a close friend, and I may have to pretend not to recognize some essential aspects of your identity because they are different than what is allowed.

Today, one the one hand there are myriad privacy policies that we acknowledge reading even when we don't, while on the other people seem very willing to tell all sorts of things about themselves to almost anyone. And they are being judged on what they put out there, with stars, comments, and sharing on Facebook.

"I don't mean to pry, but . . . "

I still worry about invading someone's privacy. Am I someone you trust enough to share these details of you life with me? This timid restraint that prevents me from getting to know you is not so useful to me these days. I now believe that it doesn't so much protect your privacy as it locks out our opportunities for meaningful exchanges. And for relationships across cultures, or even across genders, it is absolutely necessary to ask questions and show my curiosity and my interest in your life because I cannot assume that my own experience gives me the basis to understand yours. If I am to understand who you are, will need you to tell me, and if you don't think to do so, I'll have to ask.

"Curiosity killed the cat."

How many times did I hear this growing up? Don't be curious? Curiosity is dangerous? Why was this value promoted? But it's not so easy to lose the old habits. I still hesitate.

Bettina Hansel
Director of Intercultural Education and Research
AFS International

Issue 33. August 4, 2008.

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 19:16:14 GMT

Language Use And Perception

The Sunday Magazine of the New York Times has a regular feature called "On Language" that usually focuses on emerging uses of the English language in the United States. But this week a guest columnist, Caroline Winter, speculated on the connections between the capitalization of the languages first person pronoun, "I" and its potential connection to the cultural assumptions. See: Me, Myself and I (New York Times Magazine, August 3, 2008). The obvious rush to connect this to the individualistic nature of US culture and the "Anglosphere" (a term apparently coined by science fiction writer Neal Stephenson) is mentioned cautiously. Cultural norms, behaviors, and realities create language use, and then language use may reinforce those very norms, behaviors and realities. This is not to say that language use determines behaviors, or vice versa, but rather that they are interrelated.

Caroline Winter's idea that thinking of ourselves "as a small 'i' with a sweet little dot" might shift our thinking away from individualism and toward community may be just a bit of wishful thinking. Yet something I read when I began my career at AFS in 1980 prompted me to notice in my letters (and later, faxes, and later still, emails) how often I began a sentence with the word "I" and how difficult it is to avoid that while still sticking to the dominant business language rules that insist that we use the Active voice as more direct and clear and avoid the Passive voice. Any one can see what happens if you use US English grammar and spelling selections in Microsoft Word. Microsoft tends to demand a clear sentence subject (such as "I") that acts (hence, Active voice) than the more passive construction that can often be found in Spanish. So we say, "I forgot my purse," making the forgetting some action that we made, instead of "Se me olvidó la bolsa" where "forgot" is much more something that happened to us than anything we can be blamed for doing.

A comet

Speaking of language and the Anglosphere and the passive voice, I was recently introduced to the blog "Cultures On Line" by one of its authors, Guy Trolliet, who sent an announcement via the SIETAR 2008 Google group. Only a few months old, the blog is published both in French and English, and seems to have a strong interest in the complexities of organizational cultures. I was immediately drawn to an image developed by Guy and his associate, Peter Isackson who made the illustration of a comet to describe the complex cultural elements forming the colorful "tail" of the organizational comet. You may also enjoy their image to think about where your organization is headed and the composition of its tail.

Bettina Hansel, Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International

Issue 32. July 25, 2008.

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 22:25:47 GMT

Changing my mind

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

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

Swinging between analog and digital

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

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

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

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

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International

Issue 31. July 18, 2008

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 19:43:34 GMT

Pearls

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SIIC Workshop #13 Photo Album

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

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International

Issue 30. July 12, 2008.

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 20:13:51 GMT

Perceptual Flexibility

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

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

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

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

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

Bettina Hansel, Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International.

Issue 29. July 9, 2008

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 14:57:55 GMT

The Comfort Zone

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

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

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

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International

Issue 28. July 2, 2008

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 17:34:38 GMT

An Intense Homecoming

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

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

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

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International

Issue 27. June 25, 2008

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 23:07:02 GMT

Back Home and Homesick

It is perhaps expected when you go abroad for a long stretch of time that you may from time to time experience homesickness -- a yearning for something familiar and comfortable, for people you know and love. Less expected, but also quite common, is the homesickness that many exchange students feel once they return home. In the course of a few months or a year, the host country, family and friends, had become so familiar and comfortable that this is the longing.

"It is my goal to go back to Ecuador as soon as possible. If I can manage to get the money together, I’ll be back there this summer."

The urgency of the homesickness for the host country can disrupt the person's ability to become re-involved with his life back home. Such feelings are much more intense than, for example, the fond memories I carry of that lovely little house we rented in Montréal once. Sometimes I imagine living again in that house, chatting with the neighbor behind us, shopping for groceries around the corner, commuting on the Metro to some job, watching the children at the playground across the street. It wouldn't be a bad life, but I'm not so dissatisfied with the life I have now to contemplate making any plans to rush back. I also have fond memories of the mountains rising around Quito in a view that can take your breath away. I hope to return to both these places sometime, but my life right now is here in New York.

Now what?

"I’m going through a period of great disillusionment with my life and my plans. Maybe because last year, I understood what it meant to invest a year of your life in something wonderful, and am now struggling to find just as valid a plan into which to plunge myself."

Of course, it's not just the fantasy of what life might be like back in the host country that can create a disruption for the returning student. It's often equally a question of how to incorporate the benefits of the intercultural experience into the life you have at home. The exchange students coming home have a new perspective on themselves, a new outlook on the world. The more profound the experience, the more time and reflection is needed to rearrange the way one gives meaning to life to include these new perspectives and multiple layers of meaning. Going through the re-entry process thoughtfully leads to a richer life.

What can parents do to help?

Most of the AFS students are in their last two years of secondary school and still depend to a great extent on the support and concern of their parents. Recently we published an article on the AFS web site that humorously and indulgently talks about the re-entry experience, addressed (in this case) to Brazilian parents and their returning teenagers. Funny, emotional, and very much to the point, THE LONG AWAITED RETURN HOME, by AFS Educational Advisory Council member Andréa Sebben and Raquel Fernandes, is written with a very Latin flavor for parents who miss their son or their daughter but may be quite surprised to meet the young man or woman who comes home. (Also available in Spanish as EL ANSIADO REGRESO A CASA).

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.

Issue 26. June 11, 2008

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 13:08:40 GMT

Coming Home

In researching the impact of the secondary school international exchange program that AFS offers, I have become increasingly aware that much of the learning that takes place as a result of an international experience happens well after the student returns home. Immigrants who do not return home – the most common type of experience for the immigrants to the USA in the late 19th and early 20th centuries – undoubtedly have a different learning path and may miss some of the kinds of learning available to the exchange student.

Many years ago we met an Italian AFS student from Rome who had recently come into contact with a branch of his family who had moved a generation or two earlier to New York. To him, these family members hardly seemed Italian, although they spoke Italian with him.

In 1991- 92, when I was interviewing Indians who had returned to India after their studies in the USA, several of those I interviewed recalled the same kind of story, and this seemed to be part of what impelled them to return home to India. To my interviewees, these American branches of their Indian families were not very modern. In fact, they seemed to be clinging ever more tightly to the Indian lifestyle as it existed in the epoch when they made their migration to the USA. Because they were living abroad, they were virtually unaware of the ongoing evolution of Indian society and mores. One of my interviewees called them “fossilized” Indians.

This may be unfair if not unkind. Immigrants living in the USA are also creating and maintaining the culture they share that includes the fact of living in the USA as well as the community of their fellow immigrants. But it is true that their ability to touch and taste the life of their homeland is limited, and that their memories of home have in some ways replaced the direct experience of home.

The AFS student who returns home may also feel a little fossilized after a year of living abroad. He or she has missed a number of critical events in the lives of those living at home, but also the physical sensation of living in the home country and community may have become unfamiliar and the memory of how live at home feels is probably never quite accurate until you are there again.

Trusting this faulty memory now, I recall an aspect of a familiar playground activity when I was growing up: jumping rope. Occasionally a boy would get involved briefly, but largely this was an activity for the girls. While two would hold the ends of a rope and swing it, the others took turns running in, jumping, and running out while not stopping the rope. Each girl had the habit of standing outside the rope for a while, watching, nodding, and often using her hands and her whole body to mark the rhythm of the rope until she could internalize it. With different girls twirling the rope or with arms getting tired, the rhythm changed constantly, so as girls left the rope and came back, they again had to watch carefully and mark the rhythm.

I think of the thousands of AFS students who will be returning home in the coming weeks. They also need to stand outside a bit and watch the rhythm of life at home. It will be so familiar and yet not so. Many will even stumble over a few words in their own language, or start speaking to their parents in the now familiar Norwegian or Thai or Italian instead of their native language. It may take a while to understand what has happened, since they had not before tried to leave and return to this rhythm that was so natural to them before they went abroad.

And so the journey for the AFS returnee begins here, again, where it started, and where there is still so much to learn.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International

For AFS Volunteers a new section on the AFS International web site (www.afs.org) offers a special focus on intercultural resources and ideas to support your work. Currently the focus is on "coming home" and re-entry orientation.

Issue 25. June 5, 2008

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 13:49:16 GMT

Leo Hitchcock, a frequent guest blogger here on Intercultural Eyes, has recently traveled halfway around the world. Back in New Zealand now, he sent in this report in which he ties his own visceral experience of two different "worlds" to some of the concepts of Edward Hall.

Worlds apart: Saigon cf. Scandinavia

Recently I visited Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), followed by Copenhagen (Denmark), and Kristianstad, a small town in southern Sweden – in the same week. It was such a contrast it was almost double-culture shock! First that Ho Chi Minh City was so different to Auckland, New Zealand, then Scandinavia being so different again – two ends of a spectrum, with Auckland somewhere in the middle.

What immediately struck me is the difference in territoriality and exploitation. These are two (of ten) cultural Primary Message Systems (PMS) that control cultural norms and values (Hall, [1959] 1981). Territoriality establishes personal, community, and societal territory, or the use of space, including the rules associated with personal space of, or between, individuals. Exploitation controls the rules and practices associated with the use of tools and the environment as extensions of societal and individual needs. In a way these two PMS have some parallels.

Territoriality

Ho Chi Minh City: Much commerce in Ho Chi Minh City is carried out on the roadside. Stores have ‘touts’ with the objective of luring people inside or to the store. Many hundreds of stalls are set up on the sidewalk itself, even right on the kerbside to lure the riders of the seemingly thousands upon thousands of motor cycles and scooters tearing about. Even motor cycles and scooters claim territory not rightly theirs, for example they will ride the opposite side of the road or the sidewalk to avoid heavy traffic and/or red lights. And unless they are stopped at a red light (but one still needs to watch for vehicles coming through), traffic does not yield at pedestrian crossings at all – one must ‘run the gauntlet’ and dodge the vehicles (mainly motor cycles and scooters) tearing past. One can buy anything (anything!) off the street – including little dogs (please don’t ask!), other animals such as little piglets, all kinds of birds including crows, and many, many things – some things I just did now know what they were. Getting into one’s personal space is not an issue to the determined tout. If one gets too close to a store, especially in the markets, one is physically grabbed by the arm and quite forcefully dragged into their space and ‘worked over’ for a buy.

Copenhagen & Kristianstad: There are market stalls, but not on the roadside as such but in designated market areas such as a town square, with goods for sale limited to curios, souvenirs, crafts, food, and the like. There are no touts trying to lure you to these market stalls, nor into the stores. Traffic - and pedestrians! - are almost completely law-abiding, observing all the traffic and crossing signals. In the cobbled shopping precinct areas, vehicles even yield to pedestrians – unheard of in Ho Chi Minh City! When one enters a store space, one is cheerfully greeted but not ‘set upon’, and then politely attended to once one indicates a purchase is a possibility.

Exploitation

One can glean from the above that exploitation of the shopper’s dollar is a primary objective in the markets of Ho Chi Minh City, and exploitation of the available land for stalls and extensions to stores is also prevalent. In one street I walked along the store front had been extended out so far that there was no sidewalk left to walk on, and stepping onto the road in such traffic is not to be taken lightly! However, everything is neat, clean and tidy, and ‘in its place’ in Scandinavia. It is also much, much quieter! I believe ‘bargaining’ falls within this PMS, as bargaining is exploitation of the shopper’s available dollars on the one hand, and exploitation of the seller’s margins on the other. No bargaining in Scandinavia, well, not generally anyway. In Ho Chi Minh City however, bargaining is the norm in many stores, especially in the markets, and even some taxis and other forms of transport. It is interesting haggling over a low cost item. The exchange rate is 16,000:1 $US. This means that one can spend several minutes haggling over the difference between 50,000 and 35,000 for an item, if successful thereby getting a reduction in the buy price of 15,000 – less than $US1 !


Oh, where’s the sidewalk gone?	Mmm, how do I get across here?

Oh, where’s the traffic?	Everything clean, tidy, and in its place.

Primary Message Systems

Territoriality and Exploitation are just two of 10 cultural Primary Message Systems identified by the anthropologist Edward T. Hall ([1959] 1981). It is within these 10 PMS that study abroad sojourners will experience cultural difference, and, probably, some culture shock. The others are:

· Interaction: Interaction lies at the hub of culture and everything grows from it. This represents all forms of communication including linguistic interaction.

· Association: Association establishes social networks within communities. Levels of status are established within this PMS. Hall, ([1959] 1981: 38-40) refers to this as the ‘pecking order’.

· Subsistence: This PMS controls nutritional requirements along with the rituals and rules associated with food and eating. This PMS also establishes the norms and ‘rules’ around status and manual labor.

· Bisexuality: Like food, a basic necessity of life is the reproduction of the species. This PMS establishes the rituals and rules associated with the differentiation of both form and function (bisexuality) of reproduction, and the genders, that is the rules associated with what men can and cannot do, and with what women can and cannot do.

· Temporality: Temporality establishes the rules associated with cycles and rhythms. For example; the division of society by age, mealtimes, and tempos of speech, all of which vary by culture.

· Learning and Acquisition: A basic activity of life, this PMS includes the acquisition of one’s own cultural PMS (enculturation), shared behaviours and ways of living, and the required knowledge and skills. It also includes acculturation - the acquiring of a new culture’s ways of living. This PMS includes formal, informal, and technical learning.

· Play: Establishes the rules around the use of humor, competition through games, and degrees of enjoyment.

· Defence: This relates to the need for defence against hostile forces of external societies, within society, within the environment, within nature, and within the individual. The bases for the organization and content of religion and of medicines and cures arise from the latter two.

Ref: Hall, Edward T.; [1959] 1981, The Silent Language. Random House: U.S.A & Canada.

NAFSA Photo Album - Ward Chamberlin

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 13:08:56 GMT

Ward Chamberlin

Here are some of the photos taken of Ward B. Chamberlin, Jr., prior to his receipt of the Cassandra Pyle award at the NAFSA conference last week. Ward was one of the World War II ambulance drivers of the American Field Service who founded AFS Intercultural Programs and the first student exchange programs in 1947.

Ward was honored by NAFSA on Tuesday, May 27th, 2008 with the Cassandra Pyle award, presented at the NAFSA opening plenary with a keynote address from Vincente Fox, former president of Mexico.

Dinner at the Indonesian Embassy

The Indonesian Embassy in Washington was just one of several embassies hosting NAFSA participants for dinner on Wednesday evening, May 28th. The historic house near Dupont Circle includes original elements of the early 20th Century decor created by the original owners as well as important Indonesian works of art.

NAFSA Expo

The Expo is one of the most appreciated parts of the NAFSA conference, with hundreds of exhibits from around the world.

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 24. May 23, 2008.

Fri, 23 May 2008 15:50:03 GMT

Language Borders

Writing last time about the Quebecois AFS students preparing to go abroad led me to think more about the reality of language borders, which are often not identical to political borders. In Nigeria, for example, colonialism lead to borders with no cultural or linguistic basis and a colonial language (English) became the common and official language. Canada, Belgium and Switzerland all recognize two or more official languages within their borders and have chosen a variety of political methods to protect language communities. With the Canadian solution mandating a wide range of official and commercial text be provided in both English and French, it is not surprising to find that translation skills are in demand in all sorts of jobs in Canada. Many countries have distinct regional languages that have official status, such as Catalan in Spain. India is another example, where, according to the CIA World Factbook, "English enjoys associate status but is the most important language for national, political, and commercial communication; Hindi is the national language and primary tongue of 30% of the people; there are 21 other official languages."

Regional or minority languages within a nation are frequently not encouraged, and are sometimes their use is even prohibited. Recently the New York Times focused Liedekerke, a small Flemish town in Belgium with language issues in their story "Seams of Belgium's Quilt Threaten to Burst." It seems there is concern about French speakers from Brussels "taking over" and changing the nature of the town. Here in the New York City area we remember something similar a couple of years ago when Steven M. Lonegan, the Republican mayor of Bogota, New Jersey, tried to force McDonald’s to remove a Spanish billboard advertisement and make English the official language of his town, whose name is pronounced very differently from the capital of Colombia. See: A Sign of the Times.

English doesn't seem to be far from any danger of dying out as a language and certainly is not threatened in its dominance by an advertisement directed to Spanish speakers. Similarly, the Flemish-speaking portion of Belgium has traditionally been more prosperous than their Walloon neighbors, making efforts like these to legislate against the use of other languages seem xenophobic, mean-spirited or racist. Mary Ann Zehr's blog, "Learning the Language" is about the many issues surrounding the teaching of English as a Second Language in the United States. Discriminatory legislation frequently emerges. Recently her blog focused on the stories of refugees in the United States. Perhaps the stories of these refugees now in an exhibition at the Vermont Folklife Center, called "In their own words" can encourage more sympathy and compassion for people who were forced to leave their own culture and language. But this may not solve the real fear associated with linguistic "invasions" in a formerly mono-lingual territory.

Should we try to preserve languages? And how would we do so? In Language extinction, Doug O'Harra quotes University of Alaska Fairbanks professor emeritus Michael Krauss on his view that the world is faced with a catastrophic loss of most of the world's 6000 languages. You can also watch an entertaining trailer for the film "The Linguists" in which a pair of university professors track down and record the last speakers of some of these languages. National Geographic has a similar piece in an on-line video: Last Speaker of "Extinct" Language Found. They record the few words this last speaker of an aboriginal language can remember from his childhood. It's respectful of his origins and it documents a small relic of what was once a rich communication system. But this is not enough to preserve that system.

A living language evolves and the meaning of individual words or phrases changes as they are used. For example, the word "cute," shortened from "acute" (meaning sharp or pointed in the 16th Century) didn't always make you think of Hello, Kitty! (who is very rounded) and the very existence of such a phenomenal character as that white kitten cartoon without a mouth is likely to alter the context in which one can refer to a person as "cute."

Yesterday I found a very useful on-line tutorial created and maintained by Dr. Dennis O'Neil of the Behavioral Sciences Department, Palomar College, San Marcos, California, that talks about language and perception and helps to show why the language we use is a large part of how we organize our understanding of the world and ourselves. Learning a new language as an adult may mean never fully becoming fully fluent in all the richness and context that native speakers enjoy. It may also make you feel less competent as you struggle to, say, give your phone number in another language. Yet at the same time it opens your ears and mind to another perspective on the world and enables you to relate to others in a different way, outside of your usual context. And perhaps if Spanish and English speakers in New Jersey, or Flemish and French speakers in Liedekerke actually start conversations with each other, new expressions will show up in both languages and a new, living communication system could emerge.

Next week I will be blogging from the NAFSA conference.

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