Nonformality

There is no doubt that we need tools to deal with our multicultural realities. In my previous article I described some methods for raising awareness about how exclusion and oppression takes multiple forms – sometimes people from different “cultures” are subjected to oppression – and sometimes people suffer exclusion because their behaviour is explained with culture, or people suppress others by justifying their behaviour with culture.

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.

Image from the cover page of the 2009 UK White Paper The Learning Revolution on
informal adult learning by the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills.

Palomar5 Education organised a small, conspiratory event in reponse to Sir Ken Robinson’s call to bring on the learning revolution, a great opportunity to get some glimpses of how we will learn in the future through the lenses of Basti Hirsch, who went on a five-week education expedition through the United States; Aron Solomon, who is busy creating a boarding school with wheels, the Think Global School; and Margret Rasfeld, who founded a protestant reform school in Berlin. What have I seen?

Intercultural learning is an issue that is often discussed, debated and disagreed upon. Nonformality is one of the places where strong critique has been voiced about ICL and new paths have been called for.

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.

The nature of our conversations determines the quality of the ideas we share, and therefore it’s worth reflecting on the ways that we talk to each other – check out this infographic on dialogue by Peter Stoyko:

This must seem extremely obvious to educational practitioners, but anyhow: here is a study that compares two approaches for generating ideas – one a classical brainstorming that begins to look at ideas collectively right after a question or challenge is introduced, the other a variation where, after the introduction, time is given for each individual to develop some initial ideas on their own: Girotra, Terwiesch and Ulrich (2009) Idea Generation and the Quality of the Best Idea.

Well, I don’t know about the University of Pennsylvania, but where I live and work, brainstorming sessions always combine different elements that seek to benefit both from the creativity of individuals and the collective wisdom of the group. Against this experience, much of the study itself is pretty unamusing, but the graphical illustration of applying extreme value theory to processes of idea generation is interesting nonetheless:

In looking at the best idea generated—rather than the average quality of ideas—the authors identify four factors underlying the performance of the idea generation process:

“We build theory that relates previously observed group behaviour to four different variables that characterize the creative problem solving process: (1) the average quality of ideas generated, (2) the number of ideas generated, (3) the variance in the quality of ideas generated, and (4) the ability of the group to discern the quality of the ideas.”

Bloom’s Taxonomy is fascinating: It was introduced in 1956 as a classification of learning objectives and is widely considered a foundational, though not undisputed, theory for curriculum design and, more generally, education.

Yet, it also is a somewhat mystic text – Bloom himself considered the original handbook “one of the most widely cited yet least read books in American education” – Bloom, Benjamin (1956) Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The Classification of Educational Goals New York: David McKay.

And indeed, while the 1956 publication (subtitled: Handbook 1: Cognitive Domain) focused on cognitive aspects—the first of Bloom’s three domains: affective (attitudes), psychomotor (skills) and cognitive (knowledge)—much of the discussion and application ignored and continues to ignore that Bloom et al. looked at the cognitive domain only, to begin with.

Below are two visualised revisions of Bloom’s taxonomy. The figure on the left illustrates a revision of Bloom’s taxonomy in the context of 21st century learning. The figure on the right illustrates the cognitive process dimension of Bloom’s taxonomy: Anderson, Lorin and Krathwohl, David (2001) A taxonomy for learning, teaching and assessing — A revision of Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives. New York: Addison-Wesley Longman.