Intercultural Competence in Education

Alternative Approaches for Different Times

Fred Dervin, Zehavit Gross, Fred Dervin, Zehavit Gross

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137587336
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildungstheorie & -praxis

This book explores the concept of intercultural competence, focusing specifically on education. Intercultural competence can vary depending on the field of research or the context of application and has therefore developed over recent decades. As the world becomes increasingly global intercultural competence has become even more important but it is still not practiced satisfactorily. This book highlights views which are at odds with official and orthodox positions on intercultural competence to encourage fresh approaches to intercultural competence. It will be invaluable for researchers, practitioners and students interested in the global possibilities of education.

© The Author(s) 2016

Fred Dervin and Zehavit Gross (eds.)Intercultural Competence in Education10.1057/978-1-137-58733-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Towards the Simultaneity of Intercultural Competence

Fred Dervin¹ and Zehavit Gross²

(1)

The University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

(2)

Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel

End Abstract

Some months ago one of us attended a cross-cultural training session to boost his intercultural competence (IC) for selling educational services to ‘Asian’ colleagues. The session was run by a foremost cross-cultural consultant who had spent many years in different countries and spoke a dozen languages. The consultant provided the participants with a list of ‘to dos’ and ‘don’ts’ as well as ‘cultural recipes’, to meet people from the East ‘successfully’ and ‘effectively’, repeatedly emphasizing the fact that they had to pay attention to their Asian counterparts’ ‘face’. As the attendants were to present in front of the ‘Asian’ colleagues they were given tips such as ‘bow before you start presenting; this will show that you respect them. Respect is key to intercultural competence’. When the day came to meet the ‘Asians’ (who were all from China) one could tell that everyone was nervous. ‘Let’s hope we don’t make too many cross-cultural mistakes. I need to remember to bow and protect “their” face’, some said. All the local speakers did perform a ‘perfect’ bow—as they had been taught—before talking. During lunch break, however, the Chinese asked some of them if they also had to bow when they were going to give presentations in the afternoon, and if bowing was a Finnish cultural habit. They all laughed in unison when the local partners told them that they had been instructed to do it for them, as a mark of respect for their ‘culture’.

This anecdote, of which many readers will probably have ample examples, shows that the concept of intercultural competence can easily be non-simultaneous, in reference to E. Bloch’s Ungleichzeitigkeit, 1935/2009: the ‘recipes’ and ideological representations that the concept bears are opposed to the reality of our world, of today’s education. In other words the consultant’s approach could be qualified as something of the past, a perspective on the ‘intercultural’ which is out of line with the current zeitgeist. Interestingly enough, one person’s views on a ‘culture’ (‘Asians’) were meant to dictate the competences, attitudes and behaviours of 12 people from another ‘culture’. Like us, the authors of the chapters contained in this volume believe that ‘solid’ cultural boxes need to be urgently emptied. What we propose to do in this volume is to re-calibrate IC to a more simultaneous, synchronized position—IC for today’s education. We aim to discuss the politics of IC, its potentially ethnocentric and aggrandising aspects and the lack of reflexivity that sometimes goes with it.

Contradictorily the concept of IC can be both polysemic and empty in education: it either means too much or too little. Researchers, practitioners but also decision makers use it almost automatically without always worrying about its meaning(s), the impact(s) it has on those who are embedded in its discussions and the injustice it can lead to. A few ‘usual suspects’ whose work is systematically (and uncritically) mentioned have often managed to keep mainstream global understandings of intercultural competence simplified, fuzzy or unrealistic. In times like ours where the ‘other’ tends to be stereotyped, rejected, detested and sometimes abused, it is urgent to find new ways of dealing with the issue of interculturality from a renewed perspective. Education has a central role to play here.

This volume presents new, critical and original approaches to IC that try to go beyond these problematic ‘McDonaldized’ models and ‘reinventing the wheel’ perspectives. Some of the authors are interested in criticizing the most ‘influential’ models of IC while others have attempted (un)successfully to develop new understandings and models of IC. The editors wish to promote the idea that failure is also inherent to research on and teaching of IC. Too often an over-emphasis on success in the field represents a dangerous bias. The editors and the authors consider IC to be synonymous with multicultural competence, cross-cultural competence, global competence, and so on as these labels are also unstable and can be used interchangeably.

Warnings: The Non-simultaneity of IC

Different times, different worlds, different solutions. As hinted at earlier the way IC has been discussed, conceptualized and manoeuvred deserves full deconstruction again and again. One should never be satisfied with the concept. Non-simultaneous with the complexity of our world, more modern-classifying than postmodern-deconstructing in nature, many aspects of IC can often do more harm than good. In what follows we wish to oppose misconceptions of IC with the realities of our world.

Let us start with the following utterance: ‘I enjoyed the company of Malaysians. I had never spoken to a Malaysian before, but they were really great!’ For many people this simple utterance can signal IC: the utterer is open-minded, tolerant, respectful and so on. However the intercultural, like any other human and social phenomena, is ideological and highly political. Whenever we utter something about self and the other, our discourses cannot but be political. In the utterance above what the speaker says about Malaysians shows that he had (potentially negative?) expectations about them (maybe they are not great?) and that, maybe, under the surface, he believed that ‘his’ group or other groups were better. What we also find in this short excerpt is a good example of essentialism, whereby a few people are made to stand for an entire population (in the case of Malaysia: 30 million people). The British-Pakistani novelist and writer Mohsin Hamid (2014, p. 31) criticizes this monolithic approach when he describes different members of his family:

I have female relations my age who cover their heads, others who wear mini-skirts, some who are university professors or run businesses, others who choose rarely to leave their homes. I suspect if you were to ask them their religion, all would say ‘Islam’. But if you were to use that term to define their politics, careers, or social values, you would struggle to come up with a coherent, unified view.

As paradoxical as it might seem, an approach to intercultural competence that fails to point coherently, cohesively and consistently to the complexity of self and the other fails to accomplish what it should do: Helping people to see beyond appearances and simplifying discourses—and thus lead to ‘realistic’ encounters. As such Gee (2000, p. 99) reminds us that, when interacting with others, ‘The “kind of person” one is recognized as “being”, at a given time and place, can change form moment to moment in the interaction, can change from context to context, and of course, can be ambiguous or unstable’. It thus makes very little sense to present people with grammars of culture or recipes. IC should help us to question our solid ways of ‘appropriating’ the world and the other. The prefix inter- in intercultural competence hints at transformations, mélange, reactions not cannibalistic behaviours through which one of the interlocutors swallows the other by imposing their ‘better’ and ‘more civilized’ culture.

Another problem with IC lies in the overemphasis on difference (cultural difference), which is problematic in a world like ours where boundaries are loose and ideas, thoughts, practices, discourses, beliefs and so on travel the world so quickly. Commonalities can cut across countries, regions, languages, religions and so on. They thus need to be included in IC. We argue with Maffesoli and Strohl (2015, p. 12) that an emphasis on similarities does not necessarily lead to universalistic perspectives but to ‘unidiversalism’ (diversities in difference and commonality). Without this, IC has the potential to repress and silence any a priori rejection and critical reflexivity. It can develop criteria of relativism, and sanctify hypocrisy and closed eyes, when it’s ‘convenient’, in the name of interests and the noble need to show IC. Intercultural competence can be aimed at preserving social coherence and creating uniformity in a superficial sense, though not uniformity in the deepest sense. The aim can sanctify every means, and the means can be justified by the argument of interculturality.

The non-simultaneity of many approaches to IC also requires questioning the way we (are made to) believe in the aforementioned problems. In agreement with Merino and Tileagă (2011, p. 91), we need to be careful with mere reports of experience or discourses on interculturality: Culture can serve as an alibi, an invention and a way of manipulating the other or a way of showing others implicitly that we are better than them. IC also has the potential for flawed morality. In many cases, when people seem to be displaying IC, they in fact find themselves lying to comply with some form of political correctness, in order to articulate what ‘the other’ (or, e.g., educators) might want to hear. In actual fact, though, the speakers frequently articulate what is an a priori false representation, or a white lie. This raises the question whether the cultural is political, and whether the political is cultural—or both. Can we differentiate between them, or are there specific circumstances when we mix the two with the aim of achieving certain goals?

IC should thus help its ‘users’ to deal with these unfair phenomena and to question them in order to move to a higher level of engagement with others.

Proposals: Reinforcing the Simultaneity of IC

We agree with P. Nynäs (2001, p. 34) when he claims that ‘there is no way we can provide a technique for successful communication or a causal model for intercultural communication’. There is no panacea for IC. IC cannot be ‘acquired’ forever. Those who try to sell their models of IC as leading to success or efficiency are either naive or deceitful. Renegotiating and reinforcing the simultaneity of IC mean taking into account current analyses of postmodern and postcolonial realities. They also require deconstructing Western epistemologies that have helped to validate ‘our’ superiority (Andreotti, 2011).

A simultaneous perspective on IC starts from the idea of diverse diversities: everybody is diverse regardless of their origins, skin colour, social background and so on. Depending on the context or interlocutor, signs of diverse diversities may change. IC should also aim at educating about the dangers of non-essentialistic, non-culturalist ideas and to ‘suppress’ them as they can hide discourses of discrimination, power, superiority and can easily serve as excuses and alibis (Dervin, 2016). This approach also questions issues of ‘solid’ origins, which can conceal ‘codes’ leading to (hidden) discrimination, oppression, injustice and hierarchies.

Of course we need to bear in mind that this approach to self and other has its limits. IC can be quite unstable as it is negotiated in interaction with ‘complex’ people and in specific contexts, which has an impact on power relations. In some situations, because one feels inferior or simply because one is tired, the noble objectives of non-essentialism and non-culturalism cannot be met even if one tries hard. IC should thus recognize their importance but, at the same time, urge its supporters to remain aware of the ‘simplexity’ of any act of interaction. Simplexity, a portmanteau word composed of simple and complexity, represents a continuum between the simple and the complex—two processes that we have to face all the time (Dervin, 2016). There is a need to recognize and accept that, as IC researchers and practitioners, we can only reach a practical simplification of intercultural phenomena. Simplexity, an emerging theory in General Systems Theory, philosophy, biology and neurosciences (Berthoz, 2012), represents the experiential continuum that every social being has to face on a daily basis. We all need to navigate between simple and complex ideas and opinions when we interact with others. It means that we often end up contradicting ourselves, not being sure about what we think, adapting our discourses to specific situations and interlocutors, using ‘white lies’ to please the other, etc. Sometimes what we say shows some level of complexity (e.g., ‘I believe that everybody has multiple identities’/‘I don’t believe in stereotypes’), which can quickly dive back into the simple (‘but I think that Finnish people are this or that’). Neither simplicity nor complexity can thus be fully reached and what might appear simple can become complex and vice versa. Our own complexity makes it impossible to grasp the complexity of others. No one can claim to be able to analyse, understand and/or talk about the intercultural from a complex perspective because sooner or later the complex becomes simple and vice versa. ‘Simplexifying’ IC consists in recognizing and accepting that one cannot access its complexity but navigate, like Sisyphus rolling up his boulder up a hill, between the ‘simple’ and the ‘complex’. This is also why IC should move beyond programmatic and ‘recipe-like’ perspectives. Simple progression (‘stages’) in the development and/or acquisition of IC should be rejected. As such IC is composed of contradictions, instabilities and discontinuities. Awareness of instability can help people to accept that the world, and especially self and the other, are neither programmed nor better than others and to urge them to revise their power relations.

Finally, as hinted at before, most models of IC ‘available on the market’ fall into the trap of ‘success only’—a problematic feature of our times. IC should be acceptable as failure and, in a sense, promote the beneficial aspects of failure for future learning and self-criticality. Celebrating failure—as much as success—should be a ‘natural’ component of IC in a world obsessed with selective success only. Of course it is important to make sure that everyone faces failure and not just minorities or thos...