AFS Intercultural Eyes

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

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

Changing my mind 

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

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

Swinging between analog and digital

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

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

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

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

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International

Pearls

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SIIC Workshop #13 Photo Album

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

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International