Seeing cultural differences
The Summer Institute for Intercultural Communication (SIIC) happens for two and a half weeks each summer in the Portland, Oregon area. It brings people from all around the world together to study how to more effectively communicate across differences. Workshops range from one to five days, and the program is supplemented with evening programs and social events. This year it is happening July 11-29, 2007 at Reed College.
I have attended for the last three years as a participant and presenter, and will be presenting again this summer. It is always an amazing experience, and never fails to deepen understanding. Each year, I learn more about what I don’t know.
Participating in SIIC has given me the opportunity to test VisualsSpeak with people across many cultures. Not all of them love it. But those who don’t teach me even more than those who do. It is encountering profound differences that shows me my blind spots. It helps surface my cultural assumptions.
The first year I was there I was doing the testing for the culminating project of my masters program. I had dug deeply into the literature across multiple disciplines to find material to reference. One theme that repeated over and over was looking at present conditions and comparing them in some way to a desired state in the future. I found this model of looking at present and futureit in education, psychology, anthropology, organizational development, coaching, and mediation. Therefore, I asked people to create images of their present and future, with the transition between them. I had already worked with two groups. One group consisted of independent helping professionals who were all from the edges of dominant US culture. The second group were strategic communication professionals, closer to the mainstream of dominant culture. I wanted the third group to be people who were born outside of the US. SIIC was a perfect place to find a diverse group, and since I am monolingual, it was a great place to find those who also spoke English.
I was taking a workshop on designing intercultural assessments taught by Nagesh Rao. He kept talking about one of the key challenges is to be able to put our own cultural assumptions aside, especially in crafting questions. I was thinking about being white, French-Canadian, New Englander, female, exploring ways those viewpoints affected my thinking. I had the lists of mainstream American cultural norms: direct communication, task orientation, individualism, time consciousness, future orientation etc. I thought I understood there are differences based on cultural backgrounds.
In the first group of independent professionals, they jumped right in and happily made images of somewhat challenged ‘presents’ moving into gloriously successful ‘futures’. None of them kept the pictures within the confines of the background rectangles. Here are three examples from the group, the top one is a minister, the middle one is an acupuncturist, and the bottom one is a chiropractor.
The strategic communication professionals were similar in their approach. Once again, jumped right in to describe the challenged present, and the glorious future. The top image was done by a graphic designer, the middle an executive coach and the bottom was done by a writer. They pretty much stayed within the boxes.
At SIIC, classes are not scheduled on Wednesday afternoons. This gave me a chance to ask a variety of people to make images. The first one was from Italy. I placed the background paper side by side and asked him to make images of present and future. Same as always. While I don’t remember the exact words, I do remember the arm waving and dramatic expression about how frustrating Americans are with their future obsession. Didn’t I realize how important the past is? He’d decided to go along with me anyway, since he had been living in the US for a number of years and had kind of gotten used to it. Next I got a man from Rwanda. He didn’t want to tell me the story, he wanted me to tell him. He wanted no part of the background frameworks. After several hours, he told me life falls under faith in Jesus Christ. His story was about all the things Jesus provided and would bring him soon. The third person was a woman from Mexico. No frames for her either. Life centers on the fire of transformation and the passing of the seasons. The elements are balanced on either side.
Interesting. All the US Americans jumped right into the present and future. I thought it might have to do with being interculturalists, so I asked groups of US interculturalists, and more non-US born interculutralists to make images. US born jumped right into the present and future, the non-US born kept throwing out the frames or redefining them in some way.
This was profound learning for me, and ultimately the focus of my masters project. I thought I was aware of people being different, but seeing how asking a question that was so common and comfortable wasn’t relevant to other people from outside the US changed me. It changed me personally by fostering a new level of questioning my assumptions. It changed me as a facilitator by showing me how profoundly influenced my questions are by my own cultural conditioning. It changed me as a training developer because I am now more aware of my biases. And it showed me that no matter how much I read or understand intellectually, there are profound insights to be gained through dialogue with the other.
Other posts related to this topic
Creative Facilitation with Stephanie Pollack
Transitioning to Another Culture: Learning about change
