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. ↑

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!

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.

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!

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!