The need for intercultural dialogue: One approach to start the conversation

This semester I will finally get the opportunity to teach intercultural communication again. It has been many years and I feel it is long overdue. However, many things have changed over the last 20 years, one of which is how communication, dialog, and culture is taught in our schools. More than ever I see students come into my classroom with fossilized concepts, having been educated in a system in which knowledge is content and facts. As a result, I spend much of my classes trying to teach students how to think and communicate critically.

I foresee a course like critical communication creating very uncomfortable conversations. However, I want my students to engage in these conversations, yet at the same time feel safe to extend their knowledge boundaries. This is not always easy to achieve. So I decided to begin the class with an exercise that will hopefully allow them to access their emotions, perceptions, and beliefs in a safe space.

Activity

I will be using a card sorting activity adapted from a workshop given by Kimberly Tanner from SEPAL at San Francisco State University.

Step 1: Personal Reflection

First I will ask students to think about how they would react to the following people if they were working alone late at a convenience store in their neighborhood. Students will not be asked to share their answers (or write them down), rather they will be asked to react and note their reactions mentally. My goal here is to begin the dialog about stereotyping and profiling in a non-judgmental way. As humans, we tend to categorize people by attributes, language, "otherness", and "likeness". Often these categories are based on values, perceptions, experience, and beliefs developed through personal experiences, our families, and our communities. These then create the patterns of perception, attitudes, and beliefs that are the basis of culture.

• A white professional middle aged woman with a dark complexioned young child
• A group of teenage boys of mixed race dressed in sports uniforms
• A group of black teenage girls dressed in hoodies
• A white middle aged policeman
• A dark complexioned man accompanied by a dark complexioned woman with a scarf
• A homeless man in his 40's 
• A homeless woman with an accent in her 70's
• A man with dreadlocks (complexion non-descript) dressed in casual clothes
• A group of East Asian men with no English dressed in business suits
• Two latina women, in 20's and 40's. The younger speaks English, the elder does not.
• An ungroomed older man (60's) in a wheelchair with a younger care giver bi-racial man with dreadlocks.
• A group of teenage boys with tattoos and body piercings.
• A bald white middle aged man dressed in camouflage with a Ron Paul button.
• A middle aged woman wearing a sari with a cough.
• A group of teenage boys with body piercings and British accents.

Step 2

Now I will break students up into groups. Some groups will be random, some will have commonalities (i.e. downstaters, foreign students, gender, major, language groups). I will then will give students cards with each of the groups listed above, one per card and ask them to sort the cards. The only directions will be there has to be at least 2 cards in each category and there has to be at least 2 categories. Students will be responsible for naming the categories into which they have sorted the cards. According to Dr. Tanner, categories tend to be superficial or based on simplistic visual cues for students that do not have a deep understanding of a topic. I expect that my students will sort according to physical attributes (age, race, fashion) or other easily recognizable attributes such as ability or accent. A more advanced student of intercultural communication might use other attributes (e.g. matriarchal, patriarchal, level of menace, distance from personal culture, approach in communication).

Results

I was pleasantly surprised at the sophistication of categories my students created. One possibility could be the fact that my class is very diverse so when they were put randomly into groups (by counting off in class), there were different levels of expertise within the discussions. As a result, the discussion became more complex. Some of the categories included: in-group, outgroup, strangers (communication rings) and lifestyles (i.e. caregivers, no social ties, members of groups). The word "stereotypes" and "profiling" did come up in class and we agreed to put it aside to later class (I plan on using it in the socio-linguistics class planned in a couple of weeks as the term has become packed with social meaning due to its use in the media).

I look forward to some great discussions in my class although I am still a bit nervous about opening up what might be difficult conversations in the class. I will update this post with changes to the process based on the results from my class. I will also be replicating this activity the last class to see if student understanding changes over the course of the semester.

Using online conferences in student learning

This semester, my students in my international marketing class are putting together an online conference in International Business Education.

It has been a long road to 1) get students to understand what an online conference would look like, 2) get student groups to work together, 3) get students to think off campus (many have only been using the resources of the college, not even looking to local resources).

However, I think finally there is a light at the end of the tunnel, albeit a bit late. Time is a factor my students always have trouble with. Surprisingly, they also are very myopic when it comes to the tools they know. For example, none of them were even considering using their networks on facebook, even though a number of them have friends studying abroad. In addition, trying to get them to use new technology such as delicious or a wiki has been a struggle.

I use these projects, however, as a learning tool for my students. In the end, the conference might not be that successful (I'm still holding out hope though). But learning things such as the amount of time something like this might take and how to use your network to market and gain access to information is more important. In a month, after the conference, students will be presenting in groups what they learned from the process of putting together and running the conference. This is when I will know if I have been successful or not.

Anyone interested in participating in the conference, I will be posting information as soon as my students email me what they have developed! Keep posted.

A disturbing trend: access to information

As I've mentioned before, I am teaching international marketing, one of my favorite courses to teach. Since the first time I have taught this course, in 1990, the way I teach it has changed extensively. By the turn of the millennium, my focus on this course went from finding information about international markets and making decisions with limited information, to learning how to filter and pour through the amount of information found on the internet about any given international market.

However, this year (it has been 3 years since I taught the course), I have discovered yet another trend that will impact how I teach this course. As part of the course, I require my students to write a feasibility study on an assigned country. Using all of the countries of the world, excluding those that an American company would be allowed to trade with (i.e. Burma, North Korea, Cuba, etc...), my students are randomly assigned a country to research (they pick it out of an envelope). This year, as my students began to investigate their countries, I noticed:

1. there are more resources from within countries about their markets, even those that have traditionally been difficult to find out about (e.g. south Pacific Island nations, Indian Ocean island nations, East Timor, Viet Nam, etc...)
2. Most English language resources can be traced back to one or two of the same sources (CIA handbook or BBC country profiles)
3. There are more diverse non-English resources
4. Most English resources outside of the two free ones I mentioned require payment to access the information
5. 
   

The last trend is part of a growing trend which I find especially disturbing. 4-5 years ago I could access information for free. The major barrier was knowing how to find the information. However, once found, it was fairly easy to access it.

Now, I am limited even in the information that I can access through our library and databases. Older material is available, but updated material is not. In addition, there are restrictions on what I can pass on to my students due to copyright laws. Some websites require that information that they have posted cannot be duplicated (copyright laws) OR LINKED to other websites without permission. This linking to other websites limits access to information. But I can understand how an owner of a website might not want to be associated with other websites due to possible misunderstanding as to the relationships between the two.

However, Harvard Business Review has the following restrictions:

It is not intended for use as assigned course material in academic institutions nor as corporate learning or training materials in businesses. Academic licensees may not use this content in electronic reserves, electronic course packs, persistent linking from syllabi or by any other means of incorporating the content into course resources. Business licensees may not host this content on learning management systems or use persistent linking or other means to incorporate the content into learning management systems. Harvard Business Publishing will be pleased to grant permission to make this content available through such means. For rates and permission, contact permissions@harvardbusiness.org.

In other words, I cannot require the article (even if I don't upload a copy, but make the students access the reading). I was shocked when I read this. That an academic institution would restrict access to academic information is disturbing. I find that the current climate of "intellectual property" laws will decrease the potential for the world economy, the US economy, and innovation. The countries that have survived the global recession are those that had open access to information. It is surprising that a country that has prided itself on its "democracy" and "innovation" through a free market economy, allows for the individual hoarding of information. We might find this can lead to our down fall unless we open up access to information.

Lost in translation

Janet Clarey had an interesting post about translating educational material. It actually reminded me of when I working on a project in Hungary in 1990-92. Our project came in just as Hungary was transitioning from a communist, centrally planned market to a more free market (I hesitate to say Capitalist, as it has many connotations that are not necessarily positive) economy.

As a normal course of work, we were asked by our funding agencies to conduct an evaluation at the end of our management and business training courses (workshops or one week intensive courses geared towards people that wanted to start their own business). One of the questions we asked was, "Are there any other programs you would like us to offer?" We had an outstanding translator on staff, but we also back translated the questionnaire to ensure the questions asked were what we intended. Everything looked fine, so we started using the quesionnaire.

I remember our Hungarian Director contacting us after the first set of questionnaires were used warning us that we weren't going to be happy with the results. When we started looking through the answers, we contacted our center to find out if we had the correct translations. Yep, now we understood his warning.

It seemed that Hungarians did not know how to answer our open ended question of what they wanted us to offer because they had never been asked. In a centrally planned economy, all decisions are made by authorities who analyze the environment, then make decisions based on government priorities, resources, and population needs. The answers we received on our question ranged from, "My brother in law needs $5000" to "we need to change the laws in how we do banking" to "how do I get a visa to live in the US?".

Lessons from our translation mess

We learned that we had to teach our students how to ask for what they needed. We also needed to realize that they would give us "feedback" in a different form than we were used to.

What Janet is really talking about in her post is the differences in rhetorical style, epistomologies (perception of what IS knowledge and beliefs in knowledge), and the cultural basis of learning. I tell my classes in international business/communication that you can tell what is important in terms of manners and basic knowledge by looking at what a learner in the lower primary grades learns. Think of how hard it is to unlearn "facts" you might have learned in first or second grade (when you were 7 or 8). We also learned the social conventions for schooling, what was the correct way to do a test, for example, turn taking, and how to interact with the teacher.

In a virtual classroom, students come in with these cultural assumptions (the teacher knows everything, the teacher is a guide that may not know everything, we need to do only what the teacher tells us to do, we are our own best teacher). So to update Janet's list (the university of Utah list she outlined) I would include the following questions to ask about the targetted students (this is based on research I did a few years back on replicating business programs in emerging economies)


1) what is the theoretical basis of knowledge for that educational system;
2) what is the perceived role of the teacher;
3) what are the expected responsibilities of the student in the learning process;
4) what is the perception of “business education” within the educational system;
5) what are the learning conventions used by the student;
6) what are the institutional constraints (language, student selection, business resources).

Lessons Learned in Working with International Virtual Groups

Christine Martel's blog last week journaled about her participation in a course on culture, technology, and communication. Each day, as she worked in cross-cultural groups, she gave her insights into working with an international group in a virtual environment. Many of her insights mirrored my students as they worked in on international projects in France, Peru, and Italy. I promised her I would give some of those insights after she completed the course (I am sure her instructors gave her the project so the class could experience the difficulties first hand).

So here are some of the most common "lessons learned" my students have come up with in the past:

1. Don't assume anything
2. Outline the communication and work process at the beginning, including ways to communicate, communication contact information and back-up information (in case of problems with primary contacts, another person that can track down what is happening), expectations of quality and quantity of work, and a tentative schedule.
   
3. Build in sufficient time into the schedule. There should be regularly scheduled updates and work should be divided up and planned in pieces, with early milestones given priority over other work.
4. There should be multiple channels of communication which allows for regular updates. If one system or process does not work, groups should be flexible enough to change it so it does work.
5. Analyze "silence" to make sure that everyone understands what is going on. What is causing the "silence": cultural differences? technology problems? problems with the group (dynamics)? Other problems that can't be seen?
6. When setting up a virtual group consider: time differences (time zones, including the change from summer to winter time), seasonal differences (there are different business systems for those in summer time and winter time--vacations, whether related work delays---between those in the northern and southern hemisphere. Those around the equator have differences between the dry and wet seasons), holidays, work schedules (how long the work day is, time for lunches, days of the week), access to technology (types of technology, training, accessible power sources--some countries turn off power in the night or early morning, others might have unannounced blackouts on a regular basis), and communication structures (gatekeepers to authority, organizational structure, language ability).
7. Have patience. Plan that things will go wrong and develop a plan of how to troubleshoot when that happens. This is especially important for language and cultural misunderstandings.
8. Be sensitive to differences in culture, values, concept of time, office relationships, and language. Ask, don't tell. Realize that others in the team are trying to figure you out as much as you are trying to figure them out, so be explicit and explain EVERYTHING. Don't be insulted about ANY questions that might be posed to you and don't assume that any question is dumb as long as the intent is to make the group work more efficiently. Put yourself in the others situation.
   

I have been doing international projects on and off for over 20 years now, and still these same issues come up. You will notice that Christine came up with almost the same issues. While I am very committed to international communication and business, I also feel I am successful if some of my students conclude that they just are not suited to international work. Often my students come into my courses either anticipating that they will be able to jet set around the world if they work in international business or they will be able to save the world with the "American way". By the end of my courses they have a much more realistic idea of the frustrations, challenges, and exciting new opportunities that working in a global context presents.

I feel that these are experiences that all new workers in the US should be exposed to. As the world economy shifts to Asia, Americans need to start recognizing that English may not stay the world language of business, and at the very least, more and more decisions and groups may have members outside of the US.