EDUCATION
We can learn to become more aware of our own and others’ subjective cultures and to avoid misperceptions and errors of attribution. Although experience in international encounters is critical to such learning, experience alone is not sufficient.
Feedback from the other negotiators, mediators, and educators (and from trainers) is also necessary to make us more aware and capable of dealing with the impact of our behaviors and perceptions during such encounters. We can be trained to understand and explicate our own positions, including our values and assumptions, in ways that can be understood by those who may not share the same styles of perceiving, cognizing, reasoning, and/or communicating (Kimmel, 1992; Emminghaus, Kimmel, and Stewart, 1997). With training and practice, we can become cultural integrators. (See the upcoming section, Cultural Awareness.)Training Programs
To achieve such understanding and develop such communication skills, professional training in what I call intercultural exploration is necessary. I have found that realistic role-plays with and feedback from intercultural communication specialists and “cultural representatives” can facilitate empathic collaboration in Intercultural communication and problem solving (Kimmel, 1992, 1995). Intercultural exploration training does not try to persuade practitioners to develop or accommodate to a particular set of values, assumptions, or styles of perceiving, cognizing, reasoning, and communicating. Instead, trainees are confronted with their own subjective cultures and mindsets during the role-plays. Trainers then collaborate with trainees on developing their cultural awareness and communication skills so that they can continue to learn on their own in real meetings abroad.
To make intercultural exploration training relevant and transferable to today’s permanent negotiations, emotional involvement and practical skills are needed.
Programs presented through seminars, discussions, and lectures are unlikely to get at the emotional aspects of the cultural misunderstandings. Mere information about your own and others’ cultures will not affect your mindsets, nor provide a solid basis for intercultural exploration. Training that stimulates real emotions and communication among the trainees will. Effective intercultural training is specific, with scenarios that take place within and in relation to real cultural situations. Current cultural topics provide the context for the role-plays and generate the emotions that make them meaningful. As trainer and scholar, Edward C. Stewart notes, “Trainees gain subjective insight into how their own culture is perceived by others and how its assumptions and strategies contribute to or detract from cross-cultural interaction” (1995, p. 56).Cultural Awareness
Any training program should be tailored to the participants’ backgrounds, experience, and skill levels. In intercultural exploration training, the participants’ levels of cultural awareness are determined early in the program to establish the pace and duration of each individual’s training (Bennett, 1986; Kimmel, 1994, 1995). Levels of cultural awareness are:
1. Cultural chauvinism—best exemplified by the narcissistic and egocentric world of early childhood. Individuals at this level of awareness have little knowledge of or interest in people with different subjective cultures.
2. Ethnocentrism—differences among peoples are linked to evident linguistic, ethnic, traditional, religious, racial, and regional differences of the individuals involved. Individuals at this level of cultural awareness are convinced of the superiority of their ways of acting and thinking.
3. Tolerance—foreign behaviors and communications are attributed to living in a different society rather than being inherent. These differences are not necessarily seen as undesirable, but the practices of one’s own society are regarded as more realistic and effective.
4. Minimization—inherent cultural differences are acknowledged, but trivialized. Individuals at this level of awareness emphasize what they believe are more basic universal patterns of behavior—spiritual, economic, political, historical, or psychological “laws” that prove that all adult humans are basically alike.
5. Understanding—individuals at this level of cultural awareness believe that their reality and common sense and the reality and common sense of those from other cultures are fundamentally different and can be explained. They recognize that common and subjective cultures are created and passed on through the same social and psychological processes as other meanings.
6. Integration—those at this level of cultural awareness enjoy being with other cultural groups and creating microcultures. They are the least bound to their own cultures. They are skilled in recognizing their own and others’ mindsets.
Trainees may be at any of these levels of awareness and may change levels over time and situations. Trainers can determine the cultural awareness level of each participant in a given training situation by observing how trainees react to and judge the values, assumptions, and behaviors of others. The ethnocentric will see few, if any, values and beliefs as negotiable, while the integrator will see many as worth discussing.
For trainees at the ethnocentric level of awareness, the main goal of the initial training in intercultural exploration is to provide a description of cultural differences with an emphasis on the relativity of some of their own values. For trainees with more cultural experience and knowledge of cultural differences, it is possible to help them experience some of their basic assumptions and to improve their skills in intercultural communication. They can learn how to learn.
Learning to Learn
Training in learning how to learn begins with the development of more cultural self-awareness and results in the acquisition of skills to participate effectively in intercultural dialogues (Kimmel, 1989).
The more culturally aware person is conscious that he or she has internalized many cultural assumptions unconsciously over a lifetime. To achieve cultural understanding is to be more conscious of your enculturation from the concrete level of perceptions to the abstract level of values. To become a cultural integrator is to put this understanding into practice. Of course, it is easier to specify what to do in any training than it is to explain how to do it.Many of the skills needed for successfully interacting with people from different cultural backgrounds are similar to social skills developed while growing up. It is possible to help children avoid the development of strong cultural identities by providing them with mediated experiences in learning these skills with other children who have different cultural identities. Examples of such experiences are included in educational programs discussed in Chapter Thirty-One. However, the problem-solving, decision-making, and negotiating skills of most adults have not been culturally mediated and thus interfere with successful communication in intercultural situations.
To learn how to learn, we need skills that are less culture-specific. Because all perceptions involve archetypes that enable us to organize and categorize the characteristics of unfamiliar experiences, an intercultural explorations trainer must be familiar with the relevant archetypes in each trainee’s culture. Trainers must also know which social actualities (race, ethnicity, religion, language, tradition, and region) are relevant in given situations. Role-plays that make such contextual information explicit are created to enable trainees to understand and grow beyond their current cultural identities. The trainer takes an active, personal role in such training. He or she functions as a cultural integrator.
A technique that I have found most useful for expanding cultural selfawareness and understanding for Americans is the culture contrast training exercise (DeMello, 1995; Kimmel, 1992, 1995; Stewart, 1995).
In this training exercise, trainees try to persuade role players whose mindsets about a meaningful situation are constructed to be in opposition to those of the trainee. The role players are “cultural representatives” whose subjective cultures are specifically designed by the trainer to contrast dramatically with those of the trainees. Realistic scenarios are used to involve the trainees. Trainers help trainees understand their behaviors and reactions in these inter- cultural training sessions through focused discussions before and interviews after the role-plays. By directly experiencing their own misperceptions and miscommunications—sometimes on video—and then discussing them with the trainers and cultural representatives, trainees become more aware of their subjective culture and its impact on others. Through repeated participation in such simulations, trainees can also improve their skills in intercultural communication and conflict management. (How the contrast American training technique would work in cultures with other learning styles is not yet explored to my knowledge.)Cultural Relativism
A criticism often made of training programs like ours is that they condone or even encourage behaviors and values that may be inefficient or abhorrent in the name of cultural understanding and integration. This criticism rests on the mistaken assumption that to understand another’s subjective culture is to accept or endorse that subjective culture (a position sometimes known as cultural relativism). The intercultural exploration process does not require us to condone the values of another nor demean our own. In the process of creating new sets of meanings (microcultures) in an international meeting, we will be arguing for some of our own values while remaining open to the arguments of the others for theirs. Openness to different ideas and values and counterpersuasion is crucial to the development of cultural understanding through intercultural exploration (Brummett, 1981).
When we have developed such understanding, we can more effectively communicate with others as equals and learn about their subjective cultures. As negotiators, mediators, and educators, we can become more involved in examining and critiquing our own and others’ values, assumptions, and beliefs. Especially important are considerations of how functional these are in light of the context or ecology of current situations. We can learn to become cultural integrators.
However, even the most culturally understanding will find that some of their values, assumptions, and beliefs are not negotiable. Both the negotiable and the nonnegotiable values, assumptions, and beliefs of the culturally understanding can be explicated through the intercultural exploration process. What is currently nonnegotiable (one’s universals) may slowly change as we engage in the creation of microcultures and as the ecologies upon which our common cultures are based also change.
Creating a Microculture: An Illustration
In the 1960s the U.S. Fulbright program selected several American nuclear physics professors to take part in a two-summer public diplomacy program for advanced Indian graduate students. The professors were chosen on the basis of their teaching reputations. They were well-liked by U.S. students who appreciated their warmth, humor, and informality in the classroom, as well as their knowledge of the subject matter. They communicated well with these students through the use of discussions and question-and-answer periods. Of course, they took these American teaching techniques and communication styles with them to India.
Because it is quite warm in India in the summer, the professors dressed in short-sleeved, open neck shirts, and light trousers or Bermuda shorts. They often sat on the edge of their desks or leaned back in chairs when lecturing, and frequently asked the Indian graduate students for their questions, ideas, or criticisms. They used jokes and anecdotes in their presentations and they expected the students to “think for themselves,” to challenge established ideas in the textbooks.
This American style of communication and approach to teaching was very unfamiliar to the Indian students. In their system of education (heavily influenced by the British colonial system) the professor, whose job it is to pass on specific information to the students, is an expert in the subject matter. The students copy what the teacher says, memorize it, and repeat it on examinations. The professor is expected to be formal and reserved, somewhat aloof from the students, who are not expected to know anything about the subject matter before they are taught.
Needless to say, the students and the American professors did not work well together. The professors were disturbed to find that the students would not take part in the discussions or respond to direct questions unless they were on subject matter that had been covered explicitly. None would challenge the remarks of the professor (however outrageous) or the information in the textbooks. Even worse, they began to talk among themselves during lectures and to drop out of the class. The professors’ best jokes and anecdotes did not hold their attention.
From the students’ point of view the professors were incompetent. They did not know how to dress, present their material, or relate to students. They appeared not to know the material since they often asked the students for information. The students became confused when they were asked to challenge the authority of the professors or the textbook. Worst of all, they did not know what to study, because the professors did not make clear what information would be tested. As a result, they consulted each other for information or dropped out of the class to avoid the embarrassment of not doing well on examinations.
In the middle of the summer, the frustrated professors contacted the Fulbright officials and asked to come home. The officials contacted Dr. Bryant Wedge and asked him to go to India to straighten things out. Dr. Wedge, a psychiatrist and intercultural communications specialist, asked the professors for a meeting. He explained that the Indian students had very different expectations about education and asked the professors to modify their teaching accordingly. When some of them objected, he suggested that they treat the new approach as an experiment (hoping that as scientists they would find this an interesting idea).
For the remainder of the summer, the professors dressed more formally, presented their material in a traditional lecture format and tested the students only on the information in the textbook and the lectures. There were no discussions or jokes. The students responded well to this approach and did graduate level work in the course. The professors were quite uncomfortable with this teaching style, however, and all agreed that they would not return to India for the second summer of the program.
Once again the Fulbright officials called on Wedge. It had not been too difficult to show the professors how to accommodate to expectations about teaching that were similar to some they had experienced before in the United States. It was a more challenging assignment to persuade them to continue to use a different approach when they found such an approach intolerable. What was needed was an accommodation that would allow all parties to be comfortable. Intercultural communication is seldom effective when one party does most of the adjusting to the others’ values and mindsets, or styles of perceiving, cognizing, reasoning, and communicating. There needed to be more collaboration between the professors and students in learning how to communicate and problem-solve better—how to create a microculture.
Dr. Wedge looked at the problem from the point of view of the professors. What was it about the accommodation that was making them feel uncomfortable? Having been a teacher in the United States and abroad, he knew that they thought that the Indian approach to education was rigid, authoritarian, and ineffective. But what underlay these perceptions that made them intolerant of this approach, something in their own mindsets?
Wedge had the Fulbright officials call the professors together on the promise that if they did not like his new plan, they would not have to complete the program in India. He told them that they should go back to India for one week and continue to behave as the Indians expected professors to behave. However, at an appropriate time during this week they were to tell their students that they had neglected to discuss their philosophy of education; a philosophy that they knew to be the best approach to education. That philosophy stated that in their classrooms the professor is in charge; whatever he wants to do or wants the students to do is for the best and must be done. They expected all of their students to comply with this philosophy and accept the way they dressed and their pedagogy.
The professors were stunned. They considered themselves to be very pragmatic and not to have any universal educational principles. But they could clearly see that Wedge had discovered such a principle that was at the root of their discomfort in using a style of teaching other than the one that they preferred. They did as Wedge suggested and found that the Indian students quickly grasped their teaching philosophy. One professor reported that a student asked, “Why did you not tell us earlier about your philosophy so that we could have understood what you were doing?”
The second summer of education was more collaborative as both the students and the professors did some accommodating and learning. As they became more aware of their universals and effectively shared them with each other, they developed microcultures and began intercultural explorations. They learned how to learn and become cultural integrators.