Fooled by the pink elephant? | Image by neozen

Are you still reading? And did you visualise a pink elephant?

How come? I clearly asked you not to do so!

The simple answer is that our brain tends to ignore “not”, “don’t” etc. and focus on the content words. You thus tend to do exactly the thing that I am asking you not to do.

If I then say “don’t discriminate”, what happens then? Well, some people believe that you might do just that – not out of any bad intentions, but simply because you get so obsessed with the differences that you are not supposed to discriminate against, that it becomes very difficult to see the similarities and treat people equally. Soon then you start—often unconsciously, and often unintendedly—discriminating others, whether through positive or negative discrimination.

Appreciative Inquiry

In their book Appreciative Inquiry: A Positive Revolution in Change, David Cooperrider & Diana Whitney tell a story about Rita Simmel, the president of a New York-based consultancy – a business specialised in mediating heavy conflicts between men and women that often include sexual harassment. This company had spent millions of dollars and many years on trying to solve such conflicts for different companies, but had started to doubt whether they were really making any difference.

A concrete case in point had been one of their current clients who they had worked with for years, but according to all measures things were only getting worse: there had been numerous complaints, law suits, and evaluations showing that people were getting more and more insecure. After training sessions and workshops on the issue, many participants said that they felt more insecure about how to communicate with the opposite sex, felt increased distance and decreased confidence. Furthermore, no women were promoted – and so Rita Simmel wanted to know how she could use Appreciative Inquiry on this conflict.

Appreciative Inquiry is about the coevolutionary search for the best in people, their organizations, and the relevant world around them. In its broadest focus, it involves systematic discovery of what gives “life” to a living system when it is most alive, most effective, and most constructively capable in economic, ecological, and human terms. AI involves, in a central way, the art and practice of asking questions that strengthen a system’s capacity to apprehend, anticipate, and heighten positive potential. (Source)

In other words: appreciative inquiry is a method where you focus on best experiences and on what you really want instead of the problems and the things you don’t want, as is too often the case.

Cooperrider asked Rita what she really wanted to achieve by the intervention in this company. Rita said that they of course wanted to diminish the cases of discrimination against woman (read: don’t discriminate / don’t think of the pink elephant). Cooperrider asked if that was really all she wanted to achieve. She then got silent and thought for a long while and then said that what she really wanted was to see a completely new organisation with high quality work across the sexual boundaries.

Cooperrider thought that this was a great idea, and asked what would happen if all members of the organisations were invited to nominate themselves in pairs as candidates to share their stories about how to create and maintain high quality work across sexes?

Nominating mixed-gender pairs
Photo by Sarah Macmillan

Rita accepted Cooperriders proposal and was soon surprised that in this very same company where they had for so long time tried to fight discrimination, hundreds of pairs now nominated themselves. The project kept growing: a group was trained in interviewing colleagues about their best experiences with cross-sex cooperation. They found lots of stories on mutual confidence, constructive leadership and conflict management and good ways to deal with stereotypes about each other. These interviews were used for inspiration when defining a vision for the organisation and designing policies and practices accordingly. Within just a few years, this company won a price for the “best workplace for women”.

Just imagine… | Photo by zen

Now imagine what would happen, if we as youth workers stopped focusing on creating awareness on cultural differences and prejudices and stopped repeating: “don’t discriminate ethnic minorities.” Imagine what would happen if the first we did was to ask our participants: tell me the story of the time where you have experienced the best cooperation ever with ethnic minorities in your work, what happened? What did you do? What was your contribution? Imagine how much information this would give us about how to integrate and include. We would not just get information about and become aware of cultural differences, and about problems of integration or examples of discrimination. However, we would get really cool and useful information about how to include ethnic minorities into our projects and organisations. And imagine what would then happen if we found ways to enlarge and repeat these best practices and to do much more inclusion.

Imagine what would happen if we started the project development phase during training with asking the participants to tell us the story about when they have themselves felt most included and empowered by being involved in a project. And we then asked them to use this information, (enlarge it and repeat it) to plan how to involve and include ethnic minorities into projects and organisations. I believe that none of such stories would be about “how someone made a project for me”, but rather about “how I was involved in the decision-making process from the very beginning, how I was listened to and taken into account” We might then be so lucky to get youth projects where both minority and majority have been truly involved in all phases from defining, planning, implementing and participating, rather than just be seen as the final recipients of the project.

When being presented with such a method, you might think, oh very nice, but isn’t it too superficial when you cannot deal with the things which went wrong… Or you might think very nice but it wouldn’t work in my case because we really have big problems. And yes you are right; this might be the outcome of focusing on the best, if you do not facilitate the process carefully. On the other hand, if you do use the method of appreciative inquiry to its full potential, you will be amazed with the power it has to dissolve problems and turn the focus towards creativity, ideas and energy. And isn’t that exactly what we need for dealing with the challenges of multicultural societies?

This is the sixth and last article of our critical series on intercultural learning by Lene Mogensen from In Dialogue. [1] Start with The Derdians if you have missed the beginning.

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1. It was originally written in 2006, and has lost none of its potency. ↑

Three steps to change behaviour? | Photo by Rohit Mattoo

Many training manuals say that there are three steps in changing behaviour. The first step is raising awareness, the second one is creating new skills, and the third one is getting into action. A brief review of most exercises, however, leaves me with the impression that most exercises focus on creating awareness, whereas the next steps are assumed to happen more or less automatically as long as the awareness has been raised.

Take simulation games and role plays – commonly used methods during intercultural learning. It is often said that they both stimulate awareness about cultural differences—by letting the participants encounter with a simulated different culture—and new skills as participants try to interact with this culture.

There is just one problem: in such games you normally get clear role-descriptions telling you how to act, what your values are, how you greet, how you communicate, what offends you etc. These role descriptions are often made in such a way that there is an inbuilt conflict in the simulation, and you can only overcome this conflict by being disobedient to the rules of the exercise – behaving differently than you are asked to.

So stop being a Derdian and stop following the rules of the Engineers (link to first two articles). How can you both stick to your ‘cultural stereotyped role’ and develop intercultural communication skills – when intercultural skills means that you have to cross the boundary of your habitual behaviour and try out new ways of communicating and acting, which normally means that you have to cross the boundary of your habitual behaviour?

The same issue occurs during many exercises on e.g. inclusive teamwork. Examples are games, where participants have to complete a puzzle nonverbally or deal with pieces of information missing (symbolised by for instance keeping back one of the pieces). The point drawn during debriefings is that everybody is important, that you should cooperate rather than compete, that you should share information etc.

And so, fair enough, awareness of very important aspects of teamwork has been raised – but what is left out is how you cooperate, how you share information, how you learn as a team, how you make everyone feel as an important member of the team.

Participants are not trained on these skills – they are not given the alternative to possible shortcomings. During the exercise they have no chance to practice these skills, because it is an integrated part of the game that they are not allowed to talk and that they will never find that missing part.

I believe that such games can mainly create awareness, but can not develop skills. Does it matter, you might ask? Will people not automatically change behaviour if they are aware of the cultural differences and know that communicating in their usual way will not get them very far? Will they not next time remember, that they have to cooperate and share information? Can we not just assume that awareness automatically gets transferred into skills?

Why do wars continue?

Well, I have doubts, and indeed both research and common sense actually show the opposite – otherwise why do smokers not just stop smoking despite knowing that smoking kills, why do people not just always use condoms despite knowing that HIV is contagious, and why do we not just stop discriminating each other despite having been told since WWII that this is very bad?!

These examples—as selective and controversial as they are—show that the issue is more complex and has many more layers: we do not only need knowledge and awareness, but real and feasible alternatives – we need skills and competences to act differently and a structure in which to do so.

Here is one of the many crucial questions we need to raise: What is polite intercultural communication? How does it sound? What do you say? When do you say it? And another: What does inclusion look like? What do people say, what do they do, how do they organise projects, what is the content of such projects etc? And we should not just be satisfied with the easy answers of “you have to be open-minded, tolerant and listen and respect and include everyone”. Continue asking: How does tolerance look? What do you do when you listen? What is an open mind? Do you need to be open in all cases (also when that means accepting things you would otherwise not accept? What are you going to include them in and how? Remember that including is including into something; e.g. an organisation, decision-making etc. – and not just doing something for somebody.

Practicing intercultural communication | Photo by Josh

And: participants need to have time and space to practice such tools! They need to get a chance to practice listening. They need to try out tools for facilitating participatory based decision.making (not just be aware of including everyone), tools for facilitating the creation of shared visions and goals, giving voice to everyone. They need to know how to oppose to discrimination in an assertive way and set limits to unreasonable behaviour, where culture might otherwise be called upon as an excuse. They need communication tools useful for conflict management and lobbying. Remember that empowering is empowering people to do something e.g. make decisions, manage challenges and conflicts, facilitate meetings, create political changes, and not just being aware of problems of feeling better after participating in an activity.

The question is whether this can be done in simulated surroundings where you are given a role to enact and told to follow artificial rules from the start. I believe not! I believe that skills and competences should be developed in relation to real-life cases and real challenges. I believe that it is more fruitful to train participants to draw on particular skills and to use particular tools; e.g. listening skills, facilitation skills, coaching skills, teambuilding skills, not through raising awareness about their potentials, but by letting them try these skills and tools – listen to each others challenges, facilitate group discussion, coach each other on each other’s real youth work challenges, and giving each other constructive feedback on the performance.

Another way is to use appreciative inquiry – a method looking at past best practices and projecting them into the future. I will get back to this method in my next article…

This is the fifth published article of our critical series on intercultural learning by Lene Mogensen from In Dialogue. [1] Start with The Derdians if you have missed the beginning.

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1. It was originally written in 2006, and has lost none of its potency. ↑

What a controversial quote!

Photo by Lisa Marie Knitter | www.youthphotos.eu

And definitely a statement to trigger very interesting discussions at trainings. Bringing in controversial cases—with themes ranging from violence against women, exploitation of welfare systems, or explaining terrorism or school performance with Islamic culture—and controversial statements such as the one of Nasim Karim often leads to heated discussions, to great frustration with getting the terms right, and eventually to relief—both from participants with majority and minority background—when, at the end, a consensus is reached about what should be named culture and what should definitely not be named culture.

The title of this article might be rather provoking for some, as we have been raised to think that cultural awareness is the way to create tolerance. But we fail when confronted with the above examples:

If violence against women is a cultural expression, should we then accept and respect it? And if doing so, wouldn’t we be feeding the extreme right with arguments against multicultural societies? And if we should not respect it, does it then mean that certain cultures are bad, primitive, and cannot be integrated?

Of course not! But there is no doubt that youth workers and trainers are confronted with such dilemmas. Let’s look at a concrete example: During trainings on multicultural teamwork, we use Forum Theatre [3] to explore conflicts that might arise in multicultural settings. The participants, using cases from their daily youth and social work, put escalations of conflicts on stage, eventually asking the spectators to intervene.

A Forum Theatre Scene | Photo by Nuno da Silva

One group once put a young guy with ethnic minority background—played by a participant with ethnic minority background—as the oppressor of a female teacher and the school director, whom he accused of racism. The play started and the guy, who called himself Mohammed, entered the fictive computer-room, where his two friends were receiving classes from the female teacher. Mohammed and his friends were joking and ignoring the woman, and the teacher got upset about the disturbance of her class. Mohammed was therefore invited to a talk with the director, and this very fast escalated into open conflict, where Mohammed accused everyone of being racist. The play created lots of discussion on two-sided oppression and different tools for communicating and interacting with each other in respectful ways.

At first, we were rather surprised as a more “political correct” way of showing the scene would have been to put the teacher and the school director as oppressors of the ethnic minority guys. However, the play was touching upon exactly this dilemma: What to do when somebody explains or excuses negative behaviour with culture? Should we respect and accept their behaviour? Should we conclude that the culture is violent or bad?

My answer is another question: Do these happenings have anything to do with the thing called culture? The cause of the dilemma is to our belief that culture is not a concrete thing, but rather a concept that is used in many different ways. One example is the way that the extreme right in European societies has taken over the concept of culture: they are aware of and respect cultural differences – as long as they are practiced somewhere else! Change the notion of culture with race in the sentence – and feel the shivering! Another example is persons with ethnic minority background justifying violence against women by drawing on their culture.

Of course the way that the extreme right and some ethnic minorities use the concept of culture is very different from the way that it is used within youth work, anti-racism work etc (or is it?). But that is exactly the point: “Culture” is used to cover everything – and thus nothing. Basically the concept of culture is used by almost everyone to argue for their own point of view: being it the extreme right to explain the conflicts in current European societies (including terrorism) and to justify heavy discrimination, or some ethnic minorities themselves to justify what could otherwise be seen as transgressions towards e.g. women or homosexuals.

Everyone seems to be “aware of cultural differences” (even extremists on both sides) – and it quickly gets very difficult to see how more of such awareness—as is the goal of much intercultural learning—can actually contribute as a frame for the encounter between majority and minority and foster mutual respect and understanding.

We are, as the recognised (though controversial) Norwegian anthropologist Unni Wikan (2002) observes, turning culture into a new concept of race, as it becomes a term for the exotic, which we mainly apply to “them”, but not to ourselves.

Where majority youth is seen as having agency, will and opinion of their own, minority youth is often seen as “products of their culture” – defined by the nation where their parents or grandparents once lived. Minority youth committing a crime must therefore be caused by their culture – whereas it is caused by mental or social problems when a majority youngster does something similar. We thus mainly explain “the other’s” negative behaviour with culture, but don’t apply the term when they behave just like “us”.

What we observe is that the discourse of culture is becoming a new “discourse of exclusion”, where most people agree that we should appreciate and respect cultural differences, though at the same time use these cultural differences to explain high delinquency rates among minority youth, exploitation of the social welfare system, failure on the labour market, and even terrorism etc.

Just reading the newspaper on any other day, you will most probably encounter an article exemplifying this. What is lost is thus the critical social analysis of what defines these young people’s realities – apart from culture – namely (a lack of) access to education, and work, and spaces where decisions are taken, and much more. The concept of culture can thus be said to disempower us by hiding the real causes of behaviour and leaving us with no tools for meaningful integration.

What we need is not more awareness of cultural differences, but to beware of the way “culture” can be misused to argue for the wrong things. We furthermore need an alternative explanation of societal problems, and alternative means to deal with the challenges in order to truly include everyone.

This is the fourth published article of our critical series on intercultural learning by Lene Mogensen from In Dialogue. [4] Start with The Derdians if you have missed the beginning.

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1. Nasim Karim, a Norwegian of Pakistani descent, was able to escape Pakistan after being forcibly married there. She was almost beaten to death because she tried to refuse the marriage. “She managed, against all odds,” Unni Wikan writes, “to make her way to the Norwegian embassy in Islamabad and, with the embassy’s help, to flee the country.” She had to go to court to have her marriage annulled. ↑
2. Wikan, Unni (2001) Generous Betrayal: Politics of Culture in the New Europe. University of Chicago Press. ↑
3. Forum Theatre is a drama method developed by Augusto Boal to explore oppression and empower people to take steps towards this oppression. ↑
4. It was originally written in 2006, and has lost none of its potency. ↑

This is the first published article of a series on intercultural learning by Lene Mogensen from The Sparkle.

How many of you have ever heard about the country called Derdia? If you haven’t, just take a quick look at the training kit on intercultural learning, where the simulation game “The Derdians” is described here.

In “The Derdians” half of the group has to act as engineers, having to teach the other half – people from Derdia – how to build a bridge with paper, scotch and scissors.

Both the engineers and the Derdians get clear role-descriptions: The engineers are told by which criteria the bridge should be built, and that they should not build it themselves, but teach the Derdians so that they will be able to build bridges in the future. The Derdians on the other hand are instructed in their “cultural behaviour” – e.g. that they touch each other a lot, that they only accept a particular kind of greeting: a kiss on one shoulder, and thus get offended if somebody tries to shake their hand, that they always say yes, even when they mean no, and that they have a particular tradition and religion which prescribes which tools men and women respectively are allowed to touch.

And how does this game look in action? Great fun! Everybody is having a great time. If you use this game as a trainer you will most likely hear laughter and see a group of participants deeply engaged in solving the task – and you will afterwards hear positive feedback: “What an interesting game – the highlight of the course!” Satisfied as a trainer? I am definitely not! Let’s take a closer look at intercultural learning as represented by the engineers meeting the Derdians.

The T-kit proposes that the trainer debriefs the game, writing up facts, feelings and interpretations and discusses to which degree we assume that other people think like we do, and interpret other people’s actions accordingly, and how cultural background influences the role you play. This will for sure lead to an interesting discussion about cultural difference, which we should respect and value. But something still seems to be missing.

Not so long ago I made a group play this game with the above mentioned results: “fun”, “interesting” etc. However, we departed from the above described debriefing and asked the group to describe the two different cultures. Not surprisingly the Derdians were characterised by touching, kissing on shoulders, hugging, sexual segregation, friendly, not liking work so much – behaving according to their culture. The engineers on the other hand were task-oriented, knowledgeable about bridges, delegated the work, able to teach and willing to try to understand others.

Through the discussion following the exercise it became clear for everyone that the “culture” of the engineers is more or less not-existing, according to the simulation game – they have science and knowledge, which they can use to teach the other group something about building the bridges. The Derdians on the other hand do have a “culture”, with such characteristics as kissing on shoulders, hugging, clear gender division etc., which actually complicates the mission of the engineers – namely to bring them knowledge and development. When the group was asked to place the two cultures geographically, there was large agreement: The engineers live up north and the Derdians to the south and east. Disagreement occurred however, when it had to be decided how far south – the northern-Europeans thought that Southern Europe was far enough, whereas the southern Europeans thought we had to go further south – somewhere in Africa. Through this discussion it becomes clear, that the simulation game says more about how Europeans look at other parts of the world/other cultures (sometimes how the majority looks at the minority), rather than actually showing cultural differences.

So back to the start: What is intercultural learning? An interesting discussion of this subject has been started by Gavan Titley’s paper on intercultural learning in DYS COE-activities (also found on this site here).

One of the conclusions is that culture is not a thing, we can characterise, define and almost touch – culture is a concept, which can be defined in indefinite ways. So which one do we choose? “The Derdians” seems to be clear on that point. As far as I can see the simulation game takes a concept of culture on board, which was prevalent in the 1950s-1970s, and which is heavily outdated.

Let me explain: Previously progress was viewed as a development from tradition to modernity. Culture was seen as a characteristic of “traditional societies”, whereas modern societies had “overcome their traditional/cultural beliefs” and were instead ruled by science, rationality and knowledge.

Culture was in this way a kind of “resistance to modernisation, which had to be overcome” (Titley, 2005, p. 12) – just like the engineers have to overcome the kissing and hugging of the Derdians to be able to build bridges. Of course this view of culture is based on a Euro-centric point of view – where the modern are “us” and the traditional are “the others”, who compared to “us” seem to lack something – our rationality and science.

But isn’t this ethnocentrism exactly what we were supposed to fight by intercultural learning?

Time has moved on, our understanding of culture has developed towards greater complexity, and my argument is that we need to base intercultural learning on another concept of culture if we truly want to fight intolerance, prejudices and discrimination. Taking a recognised game like “The Derdians” (but also other games like Albatros and Rafa Rafa) and using it in an unreflected way is very dangerous. Rather than tolerance I am afraid that the game reproduces stereotypes and arrogance of certain population groups or countries towards others. It reduces differences between groups or countries to culture, rather than bringing up a discussion of educational systems in the respective countries, of economic injustices etc.

This point will be discussed further in a series of articles on ICL on this website, which will try to exemplify (and show alternatives) to the critique that Gavan Titley has raised on current ICL practices. So make sure to visit this site again!

Post scriptum: At the above mentioned training the trainers recommended the participants to skip this game and find other means of stimulating intercultural learning. An important question is whether the trainers committed the same crime as they warned about by showing the “wrong example” to reach these points rather than its alternative. This question became very urgent, as many participants kept mentioning the game as a highlight, because it had been so much fun!

Summary of related links:
Training Kit 4 ‘Intercultural Learning’
The Derdians – Excerpt T-Kit 4
ICL is not enough
The Sparkle

Contact Lene by e-mail or share your thoughts with everyone and leave a comment below!

During my previous articles on this page I have raised critique against intercultural learning (ICL) as used in European youth work these days. I have described how some intercultural learning exercises like the Derdians, where participants are split into those that have modern knowledge and those that have traditional culture, present an old-fashioned understanding of culture, leading to the risk of creating prejudices through intercultural learning.

It might now be time for a small disclaimer – or as we would say in Danish (according to an old aphorism), we have to watch out that we do not “throw out the baby with the bathwater”. Intercultural learning focusing on creating awareness of cultural differences can be useful… in certain situations at least.

Many exercises that are prevalent in current European youth work are based on work done within the business sector. The business sector has developed training programmes, which aim at making business men or diplomats aware of cultural differences in other countries, when they take an overseas assignment or have to negotiate with businesses from other countries.

If one single person is going to travel to another (culturally very different) country, there is indeed a big chance that the persons he will encounter with, will on average be “culturally different” than him, and he does well in adapting his communication style accordingly if he wants a successful outcome for himself and the company.

This approach adapted to youth work makes sense when it comes to preparing individuals for a long term exchange programme like European Voluntary Service (EVS) projects of the YOUTH programme. Or when it comes to developing projects with organisations from diverse countries that have to reach a common agreement.

However, the same ICL approach is used during trainings focusing on societal changes – on involving ethnic minorities in youth work, on fostering diversity, fighting xenophobia, racism and intolerance etc. The argument goes that because it all has to do with culture the answer is the same: increase the contact between culturally diverse people, make them aware of cultural differences, and voila… you get tolerance, acceptance etc!

Practice seems to be based on the “contact hypothesis” that came into fashion in the 50’s stating that increased contact would automatically diminish prejudices – unless the contact was superficial. So one of the objectives of many short-term exchanges, seminars and trainings is to get a group of people together from as many nations as possible (both in the team as in the group of participants) – the greater the geographical spread the better.

But isn’t getting a group of young people from different cultures together for one week exactly that: superficial? Add to this that the research never has been able to confirm the hypothesis about increased contact leading to increased tolerance. The human being is a group-animal; we tend to identify with our in-group and see “the other group(s)” as less good – whether we talk about cultural groups, youth groups and organisations, social class etc. Bringing representatives from such groups together does not a priori tear down the boundaries, but might just as well lead to increased conflicts and prejudices if there is no common goal for the different groups.

Okay you might think – but that is why we do not just bring them together but also try to stimulate intercultural awareness, give people knowledge about cultural differences etc. But to this I have to add that learning that a Turkish immigrant behaves in the Turkish way is not actually telling me anything about his experiences as an immigrant, but giving me some stereotypes about this person.

Can a participant from Turkey really teach us about the lived experience of a 3rd generation minority whose grandparents originally emigrated from Turkey and now live in Denmark? (Would we ever dare to ask the granddad of young Danish woman, what her culture is and how her behaviour should be?).

Stereotypes is to judge people according to their group-belonging, thinking that somebody behaves like everybody else from that group and has no will of his or her own. It doesn’t tell me anything about this person’s dreams for his own life, about his visions for the society he lives in and about the possible discrimination he might have experienced. Moreover as discussed in previous articles the challenges of multiculturalism in our societies is not just about culture – it is about power, social inequality, access to education, proper housing, job-market and decision making bodies. Focusing on culture disempower us by hiding these other factors.

There are at least two big differences between the two mentioned situations: On the one hand travelling abroad or starting cross-national cooperation, and on the other hand dealing with challenges of multicultural societies:

First of all the first kind of situations justify that I assume that the people I am going to deal with in the foreign culture are averagely “culturally different” from me. However, assuming this in a multicultural society, means judging the individual based on group belonging – it means robbing immigrant youth from defining their own life rather than live the ones of their parents and grandparents, and it means making culture the major determinant of their behaviour.

Secondly the first kind of situations imply a common goal: we are going to cooperate in the same business, organisation or network and have to negotiate a solution we can all agree upon. The situation of multicultural societies is different: Majority and minority often compete about the same resources: the same apartments, the same jobs, the same political positions. Not surprisingly racism and xenophobia is most prevalent in the lowest classes – among the people who are afraid of losing the most in this fight. And those in power do not necessary have a wish to truly include minorities as this might endanger their positions as well.

So what should be the outcome of intercultural learning? I would claim that this depends on which situation you are going to deal with: preparing individuals or teams for time-limited travel or co-operation or work towards increased tolerance and inclusion in multicultural societies. Just being aware of cultural differences is not good enough, but the participants need specific competences to deal with the different situations.

Therefore specific training approaches need to be developed for each situation instead of just using the same simulation exercise in all cases.

Lene Overgaard Mogensen, The Sparkle (lene@thesparkle.org)

Fire away with your comments!

This is the second published article of a series on intercultural learning by Lene Mogensen from The Sparkle. Read the first article here.

I have previously described my critique towards certain ICL-games as means of creating intercultural understanding and tolerance. I used the example of “The Derdians” – a simulation exercise from T-Kit No. 4 – to make the point that prejudices might actually be reinforced rather than fought.

A counterargument might be raised, that the main asset of non-formal learning is that it is experience-based – that the participants form their understanding based on their own experiences. The game is therefore not transmitting any values and understandings in itself – but is just a neutral vehicle for creating such experiences that the participants can then interpret. That non-formal learning is just that: learning from your experiences while you are playing and participating in exercises and discussions.

That it is not about transferring a certain understanding of culture – defining culture in this or that way. Let the formal school system – the universities – carry out that job of defining – and let the non-formal learning system provide the participants options for reaching their own conclusions. To qualify such arguments, Kolb is often perceived as the saviour, as he is said to stand up against all formal education by stating that learning is based on the first important step: experience!

Well, actually Kolb didn’t say that, and I think a great problem of non-formal approaches towards intercultural learning is based on a misinterpretation of Kolb (Kolb, D. A. (1984) Experiential Learning, Englewood Cliffs, NJ.: Prentice Hall.).

The question about what comes first: knowledge or experience, is the question of the hen and the egg. The question simply doesn’t make sense. Maybe it makes sense at the very first moment that the newly born baby sets eyes on this world, but from thereon a certain knowledge-structure, a certain understanding of the world has been created, and all further experience will be interpreted based on this knowledge/understanding, as well as new experience will change or widen the knowledge structure.

The innovativeness of Kolb doesn’t lie in his turning the linear approach of the formal school system upside down. Where the formal school system is claimed to start with abstract concepts and generalisations, which can later be tested and applied, Kolb is said to start with experience, observation and reflection and then abstract knowledge and concepts from experience. His innovativeness, however, lies in creating a circular model, where the two approaches are combined in a never-ending spiral.

Interpreting “The Derdians” – or similar ICL simulation games in this understanding of Kolb brings forward interesting questions. From the T-kit we can deduce what the experience is: the engineers will most probably experience frustration during the exercise, because it turns out to be more difficult to build the bridge, than they thought.

We also know something about the observation and reflection, as the debriefing should be lead towards a discussion of cultural differences and interpreting other people’s behaviour. But which abstract conceptualisation will follow, is an open question. Just as it is not certain which implications this will have for further action and whether any new intercultural skills will actually have been learned during the exercise. “Of course!” – it might be argued, “as this depends on the experience of the participants and the conclusions they make”.

This conclusion is, however, based on the above mentioned misinterpretation of Kolb, stating that experience is the first step in learning, and thus a “neutral” first step, on which participants can make their own conclusions. But Kolb drew a circle and said that there was something before the experience: namely abstract concepts and generalisations with implications for actions. The authors who wrote the T-kit and the trainers who select the exercises and facilitate the debriefing did/do this based on such generalised concepts (whether they are aware of it or not). The participants come with prior knowledge of what culture is and interpret their experience in the exercise based on this (whether they are aware of it or not).

In the last article it was claimed that “The Derdians” is definitely based on a certain understanding of culture – namely one which ascribes culture to “traditional” societies, to the “exotic” the “distant” the “southern”, whereas “we” – the engineers – are modern, developed and have science and knowledge. Well, I consider this a generalisation / concept, which might very well have prejudices and discrimination as practical implications – toward countries in the South/East or towards minorities in our European societies.

The conclusion is that many ICL games run the risk of just reproducing the abstract concepts and generalisations that they are based on. Rather than being neutral vehicles for creating experience and reflections among participants, on which they can make their own conclusions, they just reproduce old knowledge (not much different from the formal school system). Ironically some of these concepts and generalisations of what culture is are outdated and have for instance within anthropology (the study of culture) been rejected long time ago. They have been rejected exactly because their practical implications turned out to be prejudiced and colonising development work (exchange your culture with our knowledge) as well as prejudices and discrimination against ethnic minorities. The science of anthropology is increasingly expressing worries about the concept of culture, which they themselves were promoting some decades ago.

There seems to be an urgency of reconstructing intercultural learning. I cannot see how “awareness of cultural differences” in itself can give any tools towards dealing with such challenges in our multicultural societies and globalised world. Additionally I fear that we are contributing to the reproduction of prejudiced and discriminatory practices, when we strive towards exactly the opposite, by reproducing an old-fashioned way of looking at culture. But what are the alternatives? Well, hang on to this channel (read: website) for further discussion on the subject.

Fire away with your comments!

How many of you have ever heard about the country called Derdia? If you haven’t, just take a quick look at the training kit on intercultural learning, where the simulation game “The Derdians” is described here.

In “The Derdians” half of the group has to act as engineers, having to teach the other half – people from Derdia – how to build a bridge with paper, scotch and scissors.

Both the engineers and the Derdians get clear role-descriptions: The engineers are told by which criteria the bridge should be built, and that they should not build it themselves, but teach the Derdians so that they will be able to build bridges in the future. The Derdians on the other hand are instructed in their “cultural behaviour” – e.g. that they touch each other a lot, that they only accept a particular kind of greeting: a kiss on one shoulder, and thus get offended if somebody tries to shake their hand, that they always say yes, even when they mean no, and that they have a particular tradition and religion which prescribes which tools men and women respectively are allowed to touch.

And how does this game look in action? Great fun! Everybody is having a great time. If you use this game as a trainer you will most likely hear laughter and see a group of participants deeply engaged in solving the task – and you will afterwards hear positive feedback: “What an interesting game – the highlight of the course!” Satisfied as a trainer? I am definitely not! Let’s take a closer look at intercultural learning as represented by the engineers meeting the Derdians.

The T-kit proposes that the trainer debriefs the game, writing up facts, feelings and interpretations and discusses to which degree we assume that other people think like we do, and interpret other people’s actions accordingly, and how cultural background influences the role you play. This will for sure lead to an interesting discussion about cultural difference, which we should respect and value. But something still seems to be missing.

Not so long ago I made a group play this game with the above mentioned results: “fun”, “interesting” etc. However, we departed from the above described debriefing and asked the group to describe the two different cultures. Not surprisingly the Derdians were characterised by touching, kissing on shoulders, hugging, sexual segregation, friendly, not liking work so much – behaving according to their culture. The engineers on the other hand were task-oriented, knowledgeable about bridges, delegated the work, able to teach and willing to try to understand others.

Through the discussion following the exercise it became clear for everyone that the “culture” of the engineers is more or less not-existing, according to the simulation game – they have science and knowledge, which they can use to teach the other group something about building the bridges. The Derdians on the other hand do have a “culture”, with such characteristics as kissing on shoulders, hugging, clear gender division etc., which actually complicates the mission of the engineers – namely to bring them knowledge and development. When the group was asked to place the two cultures geographically, there was large agreement: The engineers live up north and the Derdians to the south and east. Disagreement occurred however, when it had to be decided how far south – the northern-Europeans thought that Southern Europe was far enough, whereas the southern Europeans thought we had to go further south – somewhere in Africa. Through this discussion it becomes clear, that the simulation game says more about how Europeans look at other parts of the world/other cultures (sometimes how the majority looks at the minority), rather than actually showing cultural differences.

So back to the start: What is intercultural learning? An interesting discussion of this subject has been started by Gavan Titley’s paper on intercultural learning in DYS COE-activities (also found on this site here).

One of the conclusions is that culture is not a thing, we can characterise, define and almost touch – culture is a concept, which can be defined in indefinite ways. So which one do we choose? “The Derdians” seems to be clear on that point. As far as I can see the simulation game takes a concept of culture on board, which was prevalent in the 1950s-1970s, and which is heavily outdated.

Let me explain: Previously progress was viewed as a development from tradition to modernity. Culture was seen as a characteristic of “traditional societies”, whereas modern societies had “overcome their traditional/cultural beliefs” and were instead ruled by science, rationality and knowledge.

Culture was in this way a kind of “resistance to modernisation, which had to be overcome” (Titley, 2005, p. 12) – just like the engineers have to overcome the kissing and hugging of the Derdians to be able to build bridges. Of course this view of culture is based on a Euro-centric point of view – where the modern are “us” and the traditional are “the others”, who compared to “us” seem to lack something – our rationality and science.

But isn’t this ethnocentrism exactly what we were supposed to fight by intercultural learning?

Time has moved on, our understanding of culture has developed towards greater complexity, and my argument is that we need to base intercultural learning on another concept of culture if we truly want to fight intolerance, prejudices and discrimination. Taking a recognised game like “The Derdians” (but also other games like Albatros and Rafa Rafa) and using it in an unreflected way is very dangerous. Rather than tolerance I am afraid that the game reproduces stereotypes and arrogance of certain population groups or countries towards others. It reduces differences between groups or countries to culture, rather than bringing up a discussion of educational systems in the respective countries, of economic injustices etc.

This point will be discussed further in a series of articles on ICL on this website, which will try to exemplify (and show alternatives) to the critique that Gavan Titley has raised on current ICL practices. So make sure to visit this site again!

Post scriptum: At the above mentioned training the trainers recommended the participants to skip this game and find other means of stimulating intercultural learning. An important question is whether the trainers committed the same crime as they warned about by showing the “wrong example” to reach these points rather than its alternative. This question became very urgent, as many participants kept mentioning the game as a highlight, because it had been so much fun!

Summary of related links:
Training Kit 4 ‘Intercultural Learning’
The Derdians – Excerpt T-Kit 4
ICL is not enough
The Sparkle

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