Hegemony in culture?

There's no way around it.

A few years ago I was in Tenerife at a conference in which several presenters argued against that fact that publishing in international journals requires non-Anglo-Saxon scholars to adapt to Anglo-Saxon norms of writing and thought (short, straight to the point, etc.). Shortly afterwards, in my research on critical cultural awareness (as defined by Byram), I came across literature (and I damn myself for not having saved it!) that argued agains the concept of 'critical' as being a universally accepted positive norm. In other words, in some cultures, being with the norm and not critical of it is seen as a positive value.

Suffice it to say, that when trying to write a chapter on culture and CALL for an American publication, how to we move beyond these concepts that 'we' hold as being 'universally true' for culture/language learning, when indeed, as we say in our own articles, any communicative event we partake in is inevitably influenced by our own life-worlds (culture, fields, etc.). I presume at this point that we can only take a stance and explicityly say 'this is where we are coming from and what we plan for our students' and hope that helping them (i.e. the students) develop an open mentality towards other cultures, to de-center their situatedness, will allow them to accept that maybe other cultures do NOT indeed give the same value to this de-centering as we do. We are coming from the hegemonic perspective of English and Western World and must instill this reality in our students and help them always take it into consideration when interacting with others.

As Mike Levy says in his article in LLT (2007):

These goals [the ones I mentioned above] go deep and are profoundly and genuinely felt. Yet they are, still, a manifestation of a particular cultural orientation, reflecting a particular system of beliefs and values. Significantly, of course, this is precisely the level at which culture operates—on our attitudes, emotions, beliefs and values. As Galloway (1992) says, "The complex systems of thought and behaviour that people create and perpetuate in and for association are subtle and profound, so elementally forged as to be endowed by their bearers with the attributes of universal truth…." (Galloway, p. 88).

What to do?

Here's a possible solution:

"For good or for bad, we all have biases. We see things in terms of what we know. Education, however, can turn a bias into a perspective that opens the eyes and allows understanding rather than into a blinder that restricts vision and ensures ignorance." (Patrikis, 1988, in Omaggio Hadley, 1993, in Levy 2007).