“I created the first one in 2009 because at that time there was an energy crisis in Europe. I just created it to amuse my friends but when I put it up on my website so many people liked it that I decided to really focus on the project of mapping the stereotypes based on different places in Europe. I was surprised by the reaction because I never really expected it to take off like this.”

Here are, in alphabetical order, Europe according to Britain and, after the jump, Europe according to Bulgaria, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland, Russia, Spain, the United States and the Vatican.

As Yanko put it: “Sense of humor highly recommended.” Indeed :) Enjoy!

Europe according to Britain | Mapping Stereotypes Project | Source

Europe according to Bulgaria | Mapping Stereotypes Project | Source

Europe according to France | Mapping Stereotypes Project | Source

Europe According to Germany | Mapping Stereotypes Project | Source

Europe According to Greece | Mapping Stereotypes Project | Source

Europe According to Italy | Mapping Stereotypes Project | Source

Europe According to Poland | Mapping Stereotypes Project | Source

Europe According to Russia | Mapping Stereotypes Project | Source

Europe According to Spain | Mapping Stereotypes Project | Source

Europe According to the United States | Mapping Stereotypes Project | Source

Europe According to the Vatican | Mapping Stereotypes Project | Source

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.

_________
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.

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

And the confusion lingers…
Photo by doctabu on Flickr

A training kit on intercultural learning has been published, there have been many training courses and even long-term training courses, and last but not least an expert-seminar (report: pdf) tried to deconstruct and reconstruct intercultural learning, searching for ways forward.

Ironically, in none of the publications available you can actually find a definition of intercultural learning. And there are signs that the interest in intercultural learning is waning: not much has happened after the report of the expert seminar was published in 2009—two years after the seminar itself—and the T-Kit on Intercultural Learning, while it has been heavily criticised and could definitely use some updating, remains untouched in its tenth year of existence.

At the same time, a new term, yet not so new concept, seems to be entering the European youth field: intercultural competence.

And the confusion lingers…
Photo by pfaff on Flickr

Intercultural competence is an old star of international business. First definitions appeared around 1960, when the first steps of globalised economy were taken. A person who is interculturally competent, according to some researchers in this field, is rich in skills, knowledge and attitudes expressed by (among others): frustration tolerance, patience, communication skills, openness, tolerance of ambiguity, has self distance, speaks languages and so many many more characteristics that essentially describe an unachievable super-human perfectly equipped for any kind of social interaction, regardless where those that are interacted with are from. A problem of vagueness that in it’s core seems to be strangely familiar to the debates around intercultural learning, isn’t it?

One idea of putting intercultural competence at the focus of international youth work is that it is regarded to be the result of intercultural learning. Linguistically this seems to be quite logical. If learning leads to competence than evidently intercultural learning must lead to intercultural competence.

Not to step on anybodies toes, but it is difficult to fight back the thought that both concepts, learning and competence, are so conveniently vague (and can be so nicely attributed with ‘intercultural’) that by putting competence at the focus of discussions now, one can pretend to have progress in the discussions, while the confusion continues.

What is both interesting and confounding about intercultural competence is that definitions change from field to field (just as definitions about intercultural learning differ).

And the confusion lingers…
Photo by marcoarment on Flickr

Economists refer to different sets of personal attributes than those active in developmental co-operation and probably those would again be different in the youth field. In fact, it is difficult to actually find definitions from the youth field. Is this simply owed to intercultural competence being a relatively new concept in the youth field, with many people not yet knowing what to do with it?

Simultaneously, the question arises whether intercultural competence is the purpose of international youth work. Since it is widely considered a key soft skill in the business field, this would make a lot of sense with regards to employability – admittedly a key motivation for the public support for international youth work.

And yet, scholars argue that intercultural competence is highly context-specific and context-sensitive and that using the term in a generalized manner only feeds the confusion already attached to the notion – among them Prof. Jürgen Straub in his German handbook on intercultural communication and competence.

Guo-Ming Chen and William J Starosta define intercultural competence as

“effective and appropriate interaction between people who identify with particular physical and symbolic environments” [source]

However, what is effective and what is appropriate does not only change from ‘culture’ to ‘culture’ but also depends on the specific context and the connected values, habits, implicit and explicit rules that are embedded implicitly and explicitly in these contexts.

And the confusion lingers…
Photo by kanpeki on Flickr

In a business context, effective may mean to seal a deal quickly and sustainably and employ appropriate means to achieve that goal. But what does effective really mean in international youth work? And what does appropriate mean in international youth work?

Can intercultural competence acquired in the youth field— inyouth exchanges, seminars or training courses—become operational in an international business setting? Could it, possibly, even be contra-productive for the current economic system to be interculturally competent in a youth work style?

It is, this much is clear, a tricky and brave undertaking to put a fuzzy concept from one field and apply it to another. Let’s start to question some of the fuzziness.

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.

_________
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!

» Is intercultural learning still useful today?

(Originally posted on November 29, 2007 – updated on July 3, 2009)

10 years ago, the «Ten Theses on the correlation between European youth encounters, intercultural learning and demands on full and part-time staff in these encounters» were published by Dr. Hendrik Otten of the «Institute for Applied Communication Research – IKAB».

Since 1997, these ten theses (pdf) have informed the discourse about intercultural learning in youth work.

At the occasion of the 2007 seminar of the Council of Europe’s Directorate of Youth and Sport entitled «Intercultural learning – which ways forward?», Dr. Hendrik Otten was invited to revisit, de-construct and re-construct the ten theses. And we recorded his intervention as a podcast for the world out there!

Download the podcast below to find out why intercultural learning has failed as a concept to balance cultures, why we will have to accept more unsatisfactory compromises while constructing a shared system of justice, why the ability for intercultural discourse has to be connected with a developed understanding of human rights, how intercultural learning can be used to help people live with dilemmas and ambiguity – and whether intercultural learning has a role and chance in addressing our inner-societal wars.

Enjoy listening, and stay tuned!

In case you need some help with what to do:

A podcast is nothing else than a digital recording of a radio broadcast or a similar programme which is then made available on the internet. While the name is coming from both broadcasting and iPod, a podcast is not restricted to an iPod or any other media player, in fact. You can listen to it easily, using one of many different ways.

If you wanna know more about podcasting, head over to Wikipedia.

The only thing that you need is a computer which can play mp3-files. Millions of programmes do that for you – Windows Media Player (or Jetaudio if you are on the outlook for a better and free alternative) on PC computers or Quicktime on MAC machines or iTunes on both.

Normally your computer knows very well what to do anyway, so just go ahead and download the mp3 file — your machine will take it from there, most likely. If not, ask a geeky character in your vicinity.

Just be aware that audio podcasts are usually not the smallest files (also true for ours: 13 Megabytes), so download might take a moment or two. The good news: It happens in the background, so you can continue to work away!

For you iTunes users out there, we have also included the iTunes link. For you nerdy friends of ours, we also have a more modern version of the soundfile available. And for all friends of RSS and feed readers, we also have a link especially for our podcasts.

I have never tried this, but I think an answer to the question “What is the intercultural dimension of your project?” that goes in the direction of

“you know, our youth exchange focuses on the environment as well as sustainable development and, frankly, we don’t have the time to deal with issues of culture to the extent necessary to really develop a meaningful intercultural learning dynamic. Of course we will facilitate the development of the group, which is made up of a diverse and multicultural mix of individuals so that they can learn from each other and everyone’s valuable experiences. But we don’t want to half-heartedly pretend we will do intercultural learning when we don’t even have the time to cover our own topic. I’d rather not pretend that the international evening will give us an intercultural learning result.”

might not be very pleasing to those deciding who gets funding.

Or would it? Why not?

So many topics are relevant to non-formal education with young people in (and beyond) Europe. Human rights, violence, participation, citizenship, gender equality, sustainable development, to name but a few, are incredibly important and each one deserves time, focus and competence. None of these topics, however, are mandatory to be included in publicly funded projects at the European level. No one asks you to cover sustainable development when your primary topic is gender equality.

Why is the story so different with intercultural learning?

Anyone who takes intercultural learning seriously will hopefully agree that digging deep into the topic of culture and the twisted side-paths of identity, politics and policy, communication and social interaction — that all this demands time, focus and a specific decision to do so. Real intercultural learning, like any profound learning experience, has to be planned and implemented in full knowledge of its complexity and the conditions of work these demand.

It is never as simple as “we do an international evening, therefore we have intercultural learning”. There is a profound—and often confused—difference between intercultural learning within a project and the intercultural dimension of a project.

Almost any group of people that comes together has some degree of diversity. Depending on how strict you are with your definition of ‘culture’ you will find an intercultural dimension in almost any group. The likelihood, however, that a group of people, where almost every person comes from a different geographical location, grew up in a different socio-political environment, with a different family structure and a different educational pathway, will require specific facilitation to overcome differences or obstacles to working effectively together as a result of their diversity is quite high.

There is always diversity in a group | Photo by Maistora

In other words:

An international group has in almost all cases a significant intercultural dimension that can be used as an educational vehicle.

Embracing the richness of diverse groups and using it for the purposes of learning—what-ever that may be constituted by—can offer great opportunities to participants to develop their communication skills, tolerance of ambiguity, empathy and to interpret situations from different angles and perspectives other than their own.

But could that already be considered real intercultural learning?

In my opinion (and experience) intercultural learning is not only and exclusively reflected in intercultural interaction, even though this should always be a part of it. It is, as mentioned above, linked to political education, knowledge about culture and the capacity for successful social interaction.

Maybe one of the problems of Intercultural Learning is it’s label or name, which is unclear and fuzzy as it describes a process: learning that is characterised by the adjective intercultural. I would, therefore, like to suggest to just leave Intercultural Learning aside for a while and call it Diversity Education. Take a look at it from a different angle.

Practitioners of Human Rights Education refer sometimes to their field of activity as educating for, about and through human rights. This differentiation can be helpful also when thinking about Diversity Education. In this light education about diversity could include topics such as culture, power relations, minority issues, communication, (social) inclusion policies, cultural rhetoric, conflict transformation and many more.

Education for diversity would have a clear political aim or fostering a culture of human rights and helping people in understanding the complexities of modern realities as well as supporting their desire to work for open societies and mutual respect among diverse people.

Education through diversity would use contexts with many layers of diversity as an educational vehicle for reflecting participants’ own innate diversity. It would use co-operation and joint projects as challenging and catalysing stimulators for reflection and learning. If Intercultural Learning could encompass what I just described as Diversity Education, it could develop into a crucial and dynamic, complex but tangible field of educational praxis in Europe and anywhere else.

So, to conclude, and humble as this author’s opinion may be, it is fine for institutions to ask how the intercultural dimension of the group will be handled. But this should not be confused with intercultural learning. There is only so much ground to cover in one week and youth workers should be honest with that in application forms, and funding institutions should be realistic as to how much they can expect. Particularly when the youth exchange, the seminar or the training course is not specifically on intercultural learning!

Strange as it may seem, giving intercultural learning the recognition that it deserves might mean it should no longer be mandatory.

If researchers, policy makers and educational practitioners can agree that intercultural learning is a field of educational activity that stands on the same line such as human rights or citizenship education; and if the tool-box approach to pressing 1.5 hours of intercultural learning into any gathering of young people is discouraged; and if we clearly distinguish between a responsible and sustainable management of a group’s intercultural dimension and intercultural learning…

then we might actually promote the understanding of complexity,
rather than the promotion of simplifications.

At the DYS seminar entitled «Intercultural learning – which ways forward?», Ingrid Ramberg from the Multicultural Centre in Botkyrka, Sweden was invited to be the rapporteur. In that function, she presented some first reflections at the end of the seminar. Again, we recorded her intervention as a podcast for the world out there.

The other two podcasts are here and here.

Download the podcast below to find out some of the first conclusions and reflections by Ingrid (a full-fledged report will be available at some point in 2008).

standard version | mp3 version | Podcast Feed | iTunes Link

Enjoy listening, and stay tuned!

In case you need some help with what to do:

A podcast is nothing else than a digital recording of a radio broadcast or a similar programme which is then made available on the internet. While the name is coming from both broadcasting and iPod, a podcast is not restricted to an iPod or any other media player, in fact. You can listen to it easily, using one of many different ways.

If you wanna know more about podcasting, head over to Wikipedia.

The only thing that you need is a computer which can play mp3-files. Millions of programmes do that for you – Windows Media Player (or Jetaudio if you are on the outlook for a better and free alternative) on PC computers or Quicktime on MAC machines or iTunes on both.

Normally your computer knows very well what to do anyway, so just go ahead and download the mp3 file — your machine will take it from there, most likely. If not, ask a geeky character in your vicinity.

Just be aware that audio podcasts are usually not the smallest files (also true for ours: 7 Megabytes), so download might take a moment or two. The good news: It happens in the background, so you can continue to work away!

For you iTunes users out there, we have also included the iTunes link. For you nerdy friends of ours, we also have a more modern version of the soundfile available. And for all friends of RSS and feed readers, we also have a link especially for our podcasts.

In 2005, a discussion document on intercultural learning was published in follow-up to the Council of Europe’s Directorate of Youth and Sports Long Term Training Course “Intercultural Learning” — LTTC ICL (the paper is available here).

In this document, Dr Gavan Titley argues that, while intercultural learning has become a key work area in European youth training during the last fifteen years, approaches that have been consolidated and widely reproduced during this period are no longer adequate to the realities in which young people live and practice youth work.

At the occasion of the DYS seminar entitled «Intercultural learning – which ways forward?», Gavan was invited to revisit the paper and its main conclusions and bring it in relation to the current educational practice of intercultural learning. Again, we recorded his intervention as a podcast for the world out there.

Download the podcast below to find out why using culture as a concept is dangerous and often inherently racist, why Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay has an intercultural policy and what this means for intercultural learning in non-formal education (and probably elsewhere, too!).

standard version | mp3 version | Podcast Feed | iTunes Link

Enjoy listening, and stay tuned!

In case you need some help with what to do:

A podcast is nothing else than a digital recording of a radio broadcast or a similar programme which is then made available on the internet. While the name is coming from both broadcasting and iPod, a podcast is not restricted to an iPod or any other media player, in fact. You can listen to it easily, using one of many different ways.

If you wanna know more about podcasting, head over to Wikipedia.

The only thing that you need is a computer which can play mp3-files. Millions of programmes do that for you – Windows Media Player (or Jetaudio if you are on the outlook for a better and free alternative) on PC computers or Quicktime on MAC machines or iTunes on both.

Normally your computer knows very well what to do anyway, so just go ahead and download the mp3 file — your machine will take it from there, most likely. If not, ask a geeky character in your vicinity.

Just be aware that audio podcasts are usually not the smallest files (also true for ours: 21 Megabytes), so download might take a moment or two. The good news: It happens in the background, so you can continue to work away!

For you iTunes users out there, we have also included the iTunes link. For you nerdy friends of ours, we also have a more modern version of the soundfile available. And for all friends of RSS and feed readers, we also have a link especially for our podcasts.

In every training course, there is one morning where you wake up with a terrible headache.

While trying to orient yourself – Where am I? Where is my head? Is this my room? Who are you?! – you vaguely remember the previous night, and the enlightenment hits you right there and then: it was the Polish Vodka.

During the next training, you stay away from the vodka, but the Armenian Brandy is just the same… In fact, you can easily recognise regular training course participants – they are the ones who stay away from most of the drinks during the infamous, obligatory, intercultural night.

A night of drinks and snacks, songs and dances.

A night that is rightfully confronted with some fundamental questions: How to make sure that intercultural evenings do not become a parody of what intercultural learning is about? How to avoid the nationalization of culture in an international environment?

These are just two questions asked in the introduction to the seminar on

«Intercultural Learning – which ways forward?»

organised by the Directorate of Youth of the Council of Europe at the end of November 2007 in the European Youth Centre Budapest.

And it seems as if such questions are not asked very often: most intercultural evenings indeed are a parody of what intercultural learning is about.

They have little to do with the people,
they reinforce stereotypes,
they have no educational meaning.

As Laimonas writes in an article for Coyote
to be published in the beginning of next year:

«Recently hardly anyone takes into consideration whether or why such an evening is really needed.»

Laimonas uses the widely known – and also widely disputed – iceberg concept of culture to make his point in saying that

«the majority of intercultural evenings are keeping people just on top of the iceberg. The underwater parts of the iceberg simply remain undiscovered.»

You can dislike the iceberg concept as much as you want, Laimonas does have a point.

So we ask you: how can we do better?

Fire away with ideas – and in January, hold them against Laimonas ideas and experiences on how to get from floating on top of the iceberg to diving into the depth of the cold water underneath.

We can’t say no more but this: it is worth the wait (and we will obviously link to the article once it has appeared in print)!

Happily co-written by Laimonas Ragauskas, Bastian Küntzel and Andreas Karsten.

In his article «A White Paper on what?», Bastian Küntzel looked into intercultural dialogue and asked whether it is a solution, a problem, or mission impossible. In November 2006, international non-governmental organisations teamed up with local youth workers from Alsace and Baden to look at these questions — and many more — in their «Forum on Intercultural Dialogue».

Based on the work of the forum, a discussion document has now been produced by Andreas Karsten and Bastian Küntzel that has received great interest from the INGO Assembly of the Council of Europe, the convener of the forum.

In their first 2007 meeting, the representatives of civil society considered the document to be one of their prime contributions to the discussions of the Council of Europe on the White Paper on Intercultural Dialogue. But even beyond the context of the white paper, the text has something to offer for other discourses as well — not the least in relation to the European Union’s «Year of Intercultural Dialogue» in 2008.

Be warned that the INGO’s discussion document possibly is, in some ways, an unusual document — it was written by a general rapporteur with the invitation to be subjectively opiniated and critically reflective and is meant to be more of a recollection of ideas and discussions than a typical report. With that approach, it aims to bring together the thinking and ideas that lead to the forum with the experiences expressed and discussions held at the forum itself.

The paper looks at culture and dialogue, at intercultural dialogue, at anti-racism and at intercultural learning. It criticises the limited approach of the Council of Europe’s White Paper in seeing culture merely to

«include everything relating to ways of life, customs, beliefs and other things that have been passed on to us for generations, as well as the various forms of artistic creations,»

a perspective which ignores that culture not only determines who we are, but also how we judge others. Because of that, the notion of culture has well disguised, yet highly political implications. The paper argues that

«the notion of culture can therefore not only be considered as ‘our different ways of life’, but also has to entail the varying and often biased modes of framing and assessing these ways of living.»

The document also presents, among other things, a range of suggestions (based on the forum’s participants’ experience from practice) how intercultural dialogue needs to be conditioned to be successful.

Going beyond that, the text also identifies some questions for further discussion in the spirit of Jostein Gaarder, who said once that

«an answer is always the part of the road that is behind you; only questions point to the future.»

These questions, which are meant as the paper’s contribution to the discussion on intercultural dialogue which is only just beginning, we share with you here for thinking and discussion:

• Is dialogue enough to evolve from multi-cultural co-existence to intercultural co-production?
• Are discrimination and racism only a question of culture? Would such a claim not delude questions of power, power relations and structural issues?
• Does the current practice of intercultural learning support such delusion? Are we the fog of racism revealed by speaking of culture?
• Is the use of the notion ‘intercultural dialogue’ and in particular the connotations of the concepts of ‘culture’ so problematic that one should disengage and withdraw from this dialogue altogether?
• How could we reclaim the terms – if at all?
• What can we do to bridge the gap between community work and mainstream public discourses on intercultural dialogue?
• How can we bring together conceptual, educational, political discourses and controversies on intercultural dialogue – on all levels; practice, policy, media and academia?
• How can the imminent culturalisation of minorities be broken up – also in our own educational, political and/or scientific work?
• How is it possible to engage in intercultural dialogue and avoid cultural relativism? Is it possible at all?
• What are the limits of local level intercultural dialogue, and what are the limits of a European approach? How can local and international levels be brought together best, i.e. in complementary and informing ways?

To read further about all sorts of issues related to culture and intercultural dialogue, the Council of Europe’s book «Resituating Culture» may be a good starting point. It is currently out of print in the Council’s bookstore, but you can download the pdf-version (1.3 MB) here.

«The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reasons for existing.Albert Einstein»

Download the discussion document here or here.

Wonderful! Everyone loves intercultural dialogue! It is the solution for fighting terrorism, it enhances social inclusion, and everyone is nice to each other and will respect each other’s worldview. Wouldn’t it be great if it was that easy?

But what is intercultural dialogue, actually? A very difficult question and so far no one has provided a satisfying answer. This white paper will have to. At least it will have to come up with a working definition. The authors will in the beginning of the paper need to include something like

for the purpose of this white paper intercultural dialogue will refer to a communication process between people who, on the basis of their socialisation have diverging sets of values…

Otherwise anyone can take the white paper and instrumentalise it for their own purpose, whether or not that is in line with the values upon which the Council of Europe was founded.

Another aspect of Intercultural Dialogue that will have to be taken into account is the one of ascribed identity and representation. When I recently made an intervention in a discussion about the White Paper, I was referred to as “the young colleague”. I found this discriminating because I believed that being young is not something that would, in this context, have anything to do with my identity and with the role I was playing. However, apparently for the person who referred to my intervention “being young” was something that would describe me sufficiently in that context.

What I want to illustrate with this is the danger of ascribing a certain identity to someone with whom one is in a dialogue with. Individuals are very complex and reducing them to only one cultural membership is simply not good enough. Furthermore, “cultures” are not democratic groups, which elect representatives who can speak on their behalf. Whenever someone is invited to participate in an intercultural dialogue on behalf of a certain “culture”, the question of whom this person is actually entitled to represent has to be asked.

Some other questions are also important…

How much can be discussed in an intercultural dialogue? Are human rights negotiable? Can someone, and especially the Council of Europe, engage in intercultural dialogue, with the aim of fostering mutual respect, if the partner refuses to accept human rights? What are the boundaries? When does tolerance become ignorance and dialogue harmful to those whose rights are disrespected?

I believe that engaging in intercultural dialogue is also about having an opinion and knowing why one has that opinion. Being able to argue one’s case and being able to agree to disagree are crucial in an honest Intercultural Dialogue that can lead to a mutual understanding and respect for each other. Human Rights are not negotiable. A friend once put it nicely by saying

The right to spin around with outstretched arms stops there where the nose of the person next to one begins.

A White Paper on a field that is not yet a traditional policy field and is not clearly defined is in so far problematic as it can become another piece of wood in the fire that let’s Huntington’s ideas of a clash of civilizations boil (too) loud and strong these days.

If the White Paper will be based on a clear working definition that takes into account multiple cultural memberships and complex identities, if it provides an action plan to make European societies more inclusive and places where everyone’s voice is heard and taken seriously — then it can become a great tool. However, in the same way that certain kinds of exercises in intercultural learning can enhance prejudice, so could this white paper.

Care that this does not happen will have to be taken.

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

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

The wave of anger was triggered by the deaths of two young men, electrocuted as they hid in a power substation in the Parisian suburb of Clichy-sous-bois. A third teenager who survived by running away claimed that the three were hiding after being pursued by the police. The police claims that the young men were mistaken and deny any link between their deaths and the ensuing violence.

This denial encapsulates the problem that this wave of violence uncovers. So focused on buzz words such as integration and social cohesion, the alleged antidotes to the problems of the ‘disadvantaged areas’, there is a widespread inability in France to go to the heart of the matter. The interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, well-known and admired (if not always liked) for his politics of zero tolerance, proposes a crackdown on the violence, and harsh treatment for its perpetrators. Some argue that, on the contrary, it is necessary to change the image people have of the banlieues as no-go areas and to give those who live there a sense of local pride. Others more radically propose that the root of the violence is the exclusion of young black and Arab people from French society, the high levels of unemployment, the ensuing poverty and the police harassment that they are confronted with as a matter of course.

The violence should not come as a surprise. Several commentators have spoken of France’s impoverished ghettoes as ticking time bombs waiting to explode. What is striking however is the relative silence with which the eruption is being met. President Jacques Chirac waited ten days before making a statement, while Nicolas Sarkozy’s promise to clean the suburbs of ‘scum’ inflamed the rioters’ anger and was quickly hushed-up by the administration. Television chat shows on the topic have presented a one-sided view of the rioters as bored youth with nothing better to do than destroy everything in sight. Guests decry the absence of parental control and the restraint reaction of the police. The most echoing silence of all is that of the left-wing, anti-racist and human rights organisations. Quick to descend to the streets to demonstrate in support of the Palestinian Intifada or against the occupation of Iraq, they have kept total silence on the home-grown ‘resistance movement’ which is taking its first steps across the concrete jungles.

This response should not surprise anyone with an understanding of France’s history of post-colonial immigration and the republican model of integration it has attempted to impose. France’s political culture makes it impossible for anyone who does not completely embrace the values of the Republic to access the public sphere: foreign residents were not even legally permitted to establish associations in France until 1981. The problem is that defenders of human rights and anti-racists tend to belong to that very French group of ‘intellectuals’ whose lives in the affluent centres rarely coincide with those in the distant banlieues. There is a belief, instilled in France through the public education system, that the values of liberty, equality and fraternity are universally accessible through a commonly applied principle of meritocracy. Those who fail to find a place in this system are professing anti-republican values such as the much dreaded communautarisme of which France’s religious Muslims (but not Christians or Jews) are accused.

What both the Right and the Left in France are therefore unable to see is that the uprising of the suburban youth, haphazard and unpleasant as it may be, is not apolitical. It is not, as one commentator has claimed, a battle between gangs in different suburbs competing to create the most havoc. The rioters have a declared aim: the removal of Nicolas Sarkozy. Their action mirrors the uprisings that swept through the black ghettoes of the United States in the 60s and 70s and those of Brixton and Toxteth among others in 1980s Britain. The rioters then and now protest against the heavy handed policing of poor, non-white people in neighbourhoods that have become no man’s lands, severed from the centres of political, cultural and economic life.

The reason that the French political arena cannot explain or propose solutions to the deep seated problems unveiled by the rioters is that it is incapable of listening to their grievances. They are either in the clutches of radical Islam or hooligans looking for a fight. The political myths of secularism and the rule of law at the base of French political culture make it impossible to think politically about the actions of those who reject both. Many young people of immigrant origin reject secularist ideology because it clearly discriminates against Islam specifically: culturally, the French state is still clearly Catholic. Neither does the rule of law command any respect when it is mainly experienced as oppressive policing based on a system of racial profiling that targets young black and North African men. The rioting symbolically tramples on these lofty principles and begs a response. By responding by imposing a curfew, France’s answer is clearly that these young men are the ‘enemy within’ they always suspected they were considered to be. History has been abruptly recalled: the government is remobilising a 1955 law brought in to impose curfews on the Algerian shanty towns of France during the War of Independence.

The malaise at the heart of the suburbs will not be rectified, as has been proposed over recent days, by an acceptance of cultural diversity or the injection of more cash into the banlieues alone. France, like all multicultural post-colonial societies, must accept and redress the institutionalisation of racist discrimination within its political, social and economic structures. It must accept that the anger of the descendents of non-white immigrants is also for their fathers and grandfathers, housed in makeshift shanty towns while they rebuilt a war torn France. They live with the legacy of Algeria and the penance that North African immigrants are still doing for France’s defeat there.

They will not be appeased by the promise of the right to vote in local elections or the building of Mosques and the funding of Muslim schools. While many, even towards the left of the political spectrum, have been encouraged by these proposals, put forward by Sarkozy with a view on the presidency, the rioters know that they will change nothing. Such a carrot and stick policy is doomed to fail because it infantilises and depoliticises their action. If anything is to change in France, it is the political message written in the ashes of the burnt out cars that must be listened to. It says that integration cannot be one-sided. Society must change in order to reflect the realities of the population as a whole, and not just the ideals which myths such as the ‘universal brotherhood of man’ have been created to artificially sustain. After all that very ideal was the basis for a revolution that happened in France. Maybe now it’s time for another!

Taken in context with and close relation to the documents recently produced on quality standards in European level youth worker training, this document could serve as a basis for the improvement of the approach to and practise of intercultural learning. Stay tuned and read a review soon here at nonformality.org!

Copies have already been sent to the participants of the LTTC ICL 2003-2004 and the team of that course. It will be uploaded to the European Knowledge Centre and the Council of Europe is printing paper copies available for distribution. Please note that the document’s status is July 2005 although no date appears in the PDF version.

Wishing you interesting reading! Should you have comments, please do not hesitate to contact the author of this article, Yael, or the author of the publication, Gavan.

Gavan on Intercultural learning (pdf, 400 kb)