Intercultural Dialogue (2)

Telecollaboration as an opportunity for intercultural dialogue:

"The most obvious way to reduce intergroup conflict and prejudice is to increase contacts between members of different groups in such a way as to break down boundaries and build bridges between self-enclosed communities, thereby fostering more complex and personalized views of others’ worlds through knowledge. Such strategies are successful when they meet certain conditions — an equivalent social status, a positive context, an equal knowledgebase and reasonable objectives — while not seeking to solve all social-isolation issues at once (Allport, 1954). While more ambitious goals for reducing social gaps should not be abandoned, the strategy should begin by overcoming cultural boundaries by focusing on the concrete goals at hand. Since the aim is to foster authentic encounter between human beings who, beyond their diff erences, share common expectations, the contact should involve a more intimate dimension and not be seen as merely functional or circumstantial. For it is not so much knowledge of others that conditions the success of intercultural dialogue; rather, it is cognitive fl exibility, empathy, anxiety reduction and the capacity to shift between diff erent frames of reference (Pettigrew, 1998). Humility and hospitality are also crucial: ‘humility because it is impossible to understand another culture totally; and hospitality because one needs to treat other cultures like many traditional societies treat strangers, i.e. with open arms, open minds and open hearts’ (Fasheh, 2007)."