Forum on Education Abroad

I'm currently, I mean like right now participating 'virtually' in a workshop at the Forum on Education Abroad in Charlotte, NC. Jon Rubin, Director of the SUNY Center for Collaborative Online International Learning Center (COIL) at Purchase College kindly asked me to participate together with him for the third time. As I write Jon is showing a video two of the students (one US, one Belarus) in his cross-cultural video course made together. These two students did not share a common language as the Belarussian student had no knowledge of English. All of the communication took place using video and music. Absolutely fascinating - communicating about oneself and one's culture using non-linguistic texts. It's like a discussion forum with no words. This needs to be part of the future of education. "It's really hard to talk about art. It's even harder to talk about your own art. But since you're collaborating, it's even harder to talk about how someone else, who you don't know, influenced your art."

Before Jon, Wayne, Professor of History at Purchase College at SUNY, presented a course he 'transferred' online to collaborate with a university in Turkey. He highlighted that two students who had just come home from study abroad made important contributions, as did two study abroad students in Turkey, and two more students applied to study abroad after taking his course. He ended with a comment on the fact that he believes there need to be more of these international collaborations, but that maybe they should be short, modular courses not worth more than 3 credits, in order to promote more of them. Couldn't agree more - it's kind of the conclusion we've come to in Padova with the whole stage option.

Before Wayne, Craig Little, who I'd already presented with, showed his international course on Social Control. Again, very interesting and what's particularly amazing is the amount of discussion that goes on.

Before that, me. More about that later. Right now they are having a coffee break so I think I might go have one too! It's an honor to work with these people.

Developing International Online Course Collaborations that Build Bridges to Study Abroad

• Jon Rubin, Director, The SUNY Center for Collaborative Online International Learning at Purchase College
• Sarah Guth, English as a Second Language teacher, University of Padua, Italy
• Wayne te Brake, Professor of History, Purchase College at SUNY
• Craig Little, Distinguished Service Professor,Sociology/Anthropology, SUNY Cortland

The online modality is increasingly part of our students’ lives and can become an important addition to international education, if approached thoughtfully. With many of those in international education raising issues regarding the present state of cultural immersion for those studying abroad in the age of Facebook, this workshop will attempt to develop a culturally sensitive response to current online life and will thereby help develop a new vision for education abroad in the 21st Century. Four faculty experienced in globally-networked learning will describe how their students work online with peers in other countries through shared syllabi in an experiential learning environment, and how this engagement has internationalized their classes and led to an increased interest in studying abroad. Each presenter will offer a case study of the course that they developed and taught, followed by an overview of the ways that courses can be linked to and encourage study abroad, the ways that the universities involved have (or have not) chosen to build upon this opportunity, how these courses also function to support faculty development in the area of internationalization, and ways that existing international partnerships can serve as the basis for the development of such courses and the plusses and minuses to this approach. Participants will explore the potential for developing international collaborative courses at their institutions. Prior to the workshop, registrants will be asked to identify potential collaborative courses and partner universities and we will develop these possibilities within the workshop interactively. A social networking web site will be built during the workshop through which workshop participants can stay in touch and continue to develop their courses after the conference.(Registration is closed for this workshop)

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)."

Intercultural Dialogue

Chapter 2

What strikes me in this report is the focus on culture being an individual characteristic rather than one than be ascribed to a nation-state. In other words, we each have our own culture or cultures based on who we 'are' and the 'experiences' we have had. As an American living in Italy I have often described myself as a 'hybrid', but maybe I am no more different than anyone else who lives these multiple identities-multiple cultures. This is the quote from the report that led me to these 'musings'.
"To describe as fault lines the differences between cultures — even those characterized by divergent or opposing beliefs — is to overlook the porosity of cultural boundaries and the creative potential of the individuals they encompass. Civilizations, societies and cultures, like individuals, exist in relation to one another. As one historian has noted, ‘consciously or otherwise [. . .] civilizations observe one another, seek each other out, infl uence one another, mutually defi ne one another. Their founding texts may endure, but they themselves do not remain static’ (Baubérot, 2003). Culture, it has been said, is contagious."

It would be nice to be able to say I am objective and can separate myself from what I'm studying, but if I'm investing time and energy into studying something, there has to be intrinsic motivation (especially considering that the extrinsic motivation in Italy is null!).

Interesting:
"Underlying this multifarious heritage, it is possible to distinguish three main modes of cultural interaction:

1. cultural borrowings,
2. cultural exchanges and
3. cultural impositions ("Yet even in the extreme condition of slavery, discreet processes of reverse enculturation take place and the cultural practices of the dominated populations come to be assimilated by the dominating culture (Bhabha, 1994).")

While ethically distinctive, all these forms of interaction have impacted very significantly, and in many cases very fruitfully, on forms of cultural expression."

Again, how can I as an American living abroad not react to these? Number 2 is what I believe in and what I do. Numbers 1 and 3 what I hate about the influence of America abroad.

Multiple Identities
"Today globalization, international trade and the rise of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and the media are making for more systematic encounters, borrowings, juxtapositions and cultural exchanges. Yet this new degree of mutual receptiveness among cultures will not place them on an equal footing if we do not begin to rethink our shared cultural categories. The transcultural ties that manifest themselves across the complex interplay of multiple identities are potentially powerful facilitators of intercultural dialogue. Irrespective of the stances adopted by the various parties, or their identifi cation with the particular culture of which they believe themselves to be the ‘representatives’, the acceptance of multiple identities shifts the focus away from ‘differences’ and towards our shared capacity to interact and to accept encounters, coexistence and even cohabitation between diff erent cultures."
"Indeed, as illustrated by opinion surveys such as the World Values Survey (see Table 6 in the Statistical Annex), when individuals are asked to which geographical groups they feel they belong, in many countries in the world they declare multiple identities (see Figure 2.1)."

How to promote cultural dialogue: (Schoefthaler, 2006)

1. Traditional modalities of dialogue between cultures, developed over the past decade, have largely failed because of their almost exclusive focus on what cultures and religions have in common. The present crisis calls for dialogue on differences and diversity.
2. The lack of mutual knowledge about sensitive issues linked to religions and any other belief is obvious. This gap needs to be filled as a matter of urgency. Information on religious pluralism needs to be provided at all levels of formal and non-formal education, in a terminology that is not faith-loaded but accessible to people maintaining diversifi ed beliefs and opinions. This information must include difficult concepts, such as what is ‘sacred’, ‘holy’ or ‘insulting’.
3. Too often, dialogue events have stressed collective identities (national, ethnic,religious) rather than identities of individuals or social groups. Dialogue fora composed of ‘representatives’ of religious or ethnic groups are counter-productive and contribute to the clash of civilizations scenario rather than preventing it. Dialogue between cultures must create space for mutual perception and appreciation of overlapping, multiple and dynamic cultural identities of every individual and social or cultural group.
4. [...]
5. Active tolerance, involving mutual respect, needs to be promoted rather than mere acceptance of diversity.

"Just as it can provoke a retreat into separate identities, cultural diversity can also be experienced as an invitation to discover the other. It is somewhat misleading to speak of cultures in this context, however, for, in reality, it is not so much cultures as people — individuals and groups, with their complexities and multiple allegiances — who are engaged in the process of dialogue. To be eff ective, intercultural dialogue must free itself of the concept of exclusive and fi xed identities and embrace a worldview predicated on pluralism and multiple affiliations."

Intercultural Competencies
"Defined as the ‘complex of abilities needed to perform eff ectively and appropriately
when interacting with those who are linguistically and culturally different from oneself’ (Fantini, 2007), these abilities are essentially communicative in nature, but they also involve reconfi guring our perspectives and understandings of the world."
"Various strategies exist for acquiring intercultural competencies and facilitating cultural encounters in the promotion of intercultural dialogue (Bennett, 2009).
[...] The ultimate goal would be that intercultural competencies become an indispensable element of school curricula within a larger framework of cultural literacy training (see chapter 4)."

In an intercultural encounter, basic capacities include the ability to listen, dialogue and wonder. Eberbard, 2008

in the age of tag clouds...

...cultures are clouds too.

‘Cultures are like clouds, their confines ever changing, coming together or moving apart [. . .] and sometimes merging to produce new forms arising from those that preceded them yet diff ering from them entirely’ (Droit in UNESCO, 2007).

*picture credits

notes from UNESCO report

from the General Intro

the relationship of cultures to change. For, as noted by Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, almost seven decades of the 20th century were to pass before cultures started to be understood as shifting entities. Previously, there was a tendency to view them as essentially fi xed, their content being ‘transmitted’ between generations through a
variety of channels, such as education or initiatory practices of various kinds. Today culture is increasingly understood as a process whereby societies evolve along pathways that are specifi c to them. ‘What is truly specifi c in a society is not so much people’s values, beliefs, feelings, habits, languages, knowledge, lifestyles etc. as the way in which all these characteristics change’ (Cunha, 2007).

a new approach to cultural diversity — one that takes account of its dynamic nature and the challenges of identity associated with the permanence of cultural change.

culture and identity:
The challenge inherent in cultural diversity is not posed simply at the international level (between nation-states) or at the infra-national level (within increasingly multicultural societies); it also concerns us as individuals through those multiple identities whereby we learn to be receptive to diff erence while remaining ourselves.

although it's become quite a buzz word in HE, there are true social implications for improving intercultural communicative competence:
Thus cultural diversity has important political implications: it prescribes the aim of freeing ourselves of stereotypes and prejudices in order to accept others with their differences and complexities. In this way, it becomes possible to rediscover our common humanity through our very diversity. Cultural diversity thereby becomes a resource, benefitting cultural intellectual and scientific cooperation for development and the culture of peace.

good justification for telecollaboration:
It has become clear that cultural diversity should be defined as the capacity to maintain the dynamic of change in all of us, whether individuals or groups. This dynamic is today inseparable from the search for pathways to an authentic intercultural dialogue. In this regard, it is important to analyze the causes (stereotypes, misunderstandings, identity-based tensions) that make intercultural dialogue a complex task. It is also necessary to explore the potential benefits of novel approaches, paying particular attention to new actors (women, young people) and the creation of new networks at all levels.
four key areas — languages, education, communication and cultural content, and creativity and the marketplace — with respect to the future of cultural diversity.
the fields in question are particularly relevant in the sense that cultural diversity both depends on and significantly influences their evolution.

1. Languages doubtless constitute the most immediate manifestation of cultural diversity. Today they are facing new challenges and steps must be taken both to revitalize endangered languages and promote receptiveness to others through a command of several languages — mother tongue, national language and an international language — and through the development of translation capacity.
2. In the field of education, we must seek to strike a balance between the requirements of education for all and the integration of cultural diversity in educational strategies through the diversification of educational contents and methods, and a new emphasis on the development of intercultural competencies conducive to dialogue. More generally, there is a need to promote practices involving out-of-school learning and value transmission, notably in the informal sector and through the arts, as developed by societies worldwide.
3. Concerning communication and cultural content, the focus is on the importance of overcoming certain obstacles that, by hampering the free circulation of ideas by word and image, can impair our responses to cultural diversity. Persistent stereotypes and major disparities in the capacity to produce cultural contents are a particular concern and call for greater efforts to promote media literacy andinformation skills, particularly through the information and communication technologies (ICTs).

Cultural diversity accordingly becomes a key instrument for the effective exercise of universal human rights and for the renewal of strategies aimed at strengthening social cohesion through the development of new and more participatory forms of governance.

I'm back!

Ok, today is really like the first day of my PhD. I finished (or at least I hope so!) the book, set up the exchanges and am finally sitting down to read. As I went through my emails today to do a bit of cleaning up, I found two messages colleagues had sent me about culture - the Global People project (Helen Spencer-Oatey) and the Unesco report on cultural diversity.
As usual, I'm lost as where to start so I'm starting here. The idea is that if I'm going to argue anything about telecollaboration, I have to be more familiar as to it's value from the three points of view - linguistic, cultural and literacies. It's reassuring that the Unesco report highlights the importance of language and modes of communication in describing cultural diversity. I'm going to try using Diigo to send a few quotes to this blog - let's see if it works. Then, of course, in the afternoon, a half hour of German?