Hello Thomas, I think you are raising a very interesting but, as you point out yourself, also very complex question. I work in the USA and experience and study intercultural competence and communication. The more I think about it, the less sure I am how much of what I perceive as "cultural difference" is really based on culture. In other words, I become more and more aware of the trap of ascribing differences to culture only, when there could be many other factors. One "mistake" I would like to avoid is to see someone's features and assign a nationality/culture to them without finding out what their background is. I have seen it often (and that might be interesting as a different reason for cultural misunderstanding) that a teacher talks about something (let's say for the sake of this example) Chinese and looks at the "Chinese-looking student" for confirmation (i.e., saying "You are Chinese, you can confirm this, right." The student might have Chinese heritage or another Asian background, the student might have grown up anywhere but in China. You get the idea.

Of course, we also "know" that there are cultural differences. Of course, I agree that our cultural background influences us in our attitudes and behaviors. But I try to be as open-minded as possible in order to avoid culturism.

Of course, I see that you also asked about implementation of certain educational designs in different cultural contexts, which is another question. But I thought I would add the comment above as one example of misunderstanding of "cultural background" that I see quite often.

Dear Manuela,

first of all, thank you for your very valuable contribution and sorry for my late response (I was on a business trip for the wonderful EU project "Open Discovery Space" where I am responsible for the internal Quality Management).

Actually, during my desk research I have realized in the various disciplines that, by lacking a significant and general definition, culture turned to be something like a buzzword. A lot of criticism can already be found in the literature regarding this fact but no real solutions yet are available (I developed a comprehensive approach but it is not yet published). One possible and promoted (in the literature) solution would be generally abandoning the term "culture" and finding something new that actually is clearly defined from the beginning. However, I doubt that it is possible or reasonable to eliminate a word and think that creating a new term is just more confusing. This gets obvious when analyzing culture research across the disciplines where every discipline has different terms for common phenomenons.

Even in the core-disciplines, such as Anthropology and Intercultural Communication, often, it is unclear which perspective has been taken (emic/epic/mixed approach), which investigated aspects actually have a cultural background, and which may have their biasing on a very different level, such as legal systems, religion, history, demographical development. The worst of all, often it is very unclear which particular society's culture is linked to a certain phenomenon. I must confess that I do not believe in the idea of national cultures, as this concept (if at all) just works under very specific conditions. At this point, I was able to prove this fact with empirical data (see my publication "the myth of...").

Anyways, thanks Montesquieu and later Hofstede (who sticks to Montesquieu), in the mindsets of people, culture usually is understood as a national phenomenon and however one might define culture, behavior of people is driven by stereotypes, and such, unfortunately, often are related to imaginary national phenomenons. Allow me giving an example: Once a particular incident happened, a more or less reflected person will try to find a pattern in order to avoid the incident the next time it could appear (my own theory but I am quite sure, literature would show that I am not the first one having such a thought). So, when e.g., a teacher in the US from time to time has German learners and monitors that those tend to interrupt him with questions (which for many teachers is annoying), he will come to the conclusion that this is typical German (and he might be right). Is this behavior related to culture? Who knows ... in fact, in German education, this behavior often is encouraged to some extent as, in order to "produce" critically thinking people and thus, avoid repeating historical failures for all the times, we (in the general educational concept) prefer to have a controversial discussion in the classroom instead of simply teaching facts. But is a didactical concept culture-driven or is it a driver for the development of culture? This discussion leads to nowhere (as also the question of the hen and the egg does not).

One possible approach to define culture and overcome this issue is "simply" understanding culture as a majority criterion (a variety of culture-definitions recommend this perspective). Just what still remains is the question regarding the context ... whose culture are we talking about; local culture, the culture of a particular society like a religious group, the culture of a particular organization, national culture?

Regarding your example of a Chinese who never learned Chinese culture ... investigating such a person in order to investigate CHinese culture simply is "unlucky" research design. It actually is a good way to destroy the validity of samples. The risk having someone of this type in ones sample somehow can be covered by defining a high enough standard error (Cronbach Alpha). Just, I also do not fully agree with the appropriateness of defining a standard error in the context of social and particularly culture research (investigating people's opinions anyways can just lead to temporarily valid pictures - a person always can change ones opinion from one to the other second with or without reasons ... so what does Cronbach's Alpha cover when investigating opinions ... the risk that the participants did lie or change their mind after the investigation?) From my perspective, avoiding this error is a general question of research design. Ask the participants of ones questionnaires where they are from, where they live, where they have lived in the past, if they had longer stays in other countries, a.s.o. Even maybe not necessary but in order to avoid blurring, in my on research, I generally filter all students out if they report more than 6 months living experience (studying one semester abroad) from other countries. The six months, actually, are a more or less randomly chosen time-frame. In my own life, I experienced that when entering a very different society and living there, it takes some time until there is enough understanding of the culture to allow adapting even parts of it (but the actual time one needs for adapting habits may extremely differ from person to person and according to the level of diversity). My idea was that the students could have adapted too much of a foreign culture in order to still be representative for their original one. In this context, I made an interesting experience: Korean students who came back from studying abroad, in the first time, obviously adapted some of the "foreign" behaviors and changed back after a relatively short time (as they harshly were criticized for this different behavior). If there is a regularity or if I just met "exceptions" would need to be investigated ... somehow an interesting question.

The idea of the upper research approach is collecting enough data regarding actually experienced intercultural conflicts in education (which is my chosen research context) and looking for repeatedly monitored constellations and related problems. You can imagine that an enormous mass of data would be needed to get results at all. Thus I thought maybe a "mass medium" like RG would reach enough people ... your response was the first one.

However, if receiving such results in a critical mass could be taken as indicators for choosing valuable objectives for further research (but as simple subjective descriptions, surely cannot lead to assumptions of cultural facts). The big problem is currently, that there is no reasonable starting point at all (this is what I would like to find).

I look forward your comment ... of course, all others also are allowed to join the discussion!

All my best,

Thomas

Thomas (and Manuela),

This is a very interesting and important topic, so here's my answer that arrives a bit late, sorry - but I hope you take time to get back.

I pretty much agree about the problematic terms "cultural difference" and "national culture(s)", or "dimensions of culture(s)" originating from realist-and-essentialist writers such as Hofstede and his followers, and I would replace them by "diversity", "life-world", "background" and "perspective(s)" although they are equally fluffy, perhaps. But I think it is okay to talk about e.g. institutional or generational cultures (including practice, values, and standards) within their own contexts, however blurred, negotiated, temporary and contested. Yet I do not know if replacing the term "culture" by "diversity" is any better, in case the same essentialism, colonialism and lack of understanding continues.

In my work as a lecturer and practitioner-researcher during a decade or so, I had quite a few conflicts that I experienced with my international student. Some of these cases - but not very many - I used for my autobiographical PhD study (published in Finnish). In retrospect, I think my general conclusion was that I was quite stressed out and even exhausted at times, during my classes, when encountering international students of various backgrounds. I felt I could not use my regular procedures and ways of thinking - I had to adapt and change, find something else.

On the other hand, I was (mostly) thrilled, excited and happy about the opportunity of becoming a "multicultural" teacher every day, in a continuos process. I felt I was a bit more of a teacher this way, having this identity, than I had been during my previous career. Doing my autobiographical study helped me a lot in this.

Some of the problematic things that I encountered in my classes during many years was "their" idea of my role as a teacher. Was I supposed to be their dad or something? Not al all! I had reaised all my kids and only liked play with my grandchildren in my freetime. So being a dad in a university class was against my basic conception of a teacher in the "Finnish" way.

I hated to hear them discuss the "strict" vs "relaxed" teaching styles - I thought it simplified everything. Also, some of the students' tendency to withdraw from in-class interactions, on the one hand, and some students' style to be overly active, on the other hand, upset me frequently; I never really got used to that because I hough they should change as well.

One more thing: being a "non-native" teacher of English was a sensitive issue to myself, so sometimes students coming from English-speaking countries were clever enough to use this against me.

If you need more details or discussions at all, please let me know.

Dear Esko,

thanks for sharing this story with me. I am aware that it is quite late to answer and show my gratitude (hahaha, four years to be honest), but there was some time I did not use RG and limited my activities in social media in general.

It is an interesting phenomenon you describe with students treating you as their dad, and yes, from our western understanding of higher education, this even appears to be absurd. However, in Asian countries, e.g., the relationship between teachers and students takes place on a much more personal, if not to say, private level, and even though I haven‘t met any, there might be other cultural regions where this is similar. I made my experiences in South Korea, where a relationship between students and full professors is defined by 10:1 by law. In Germany we currently have something around 65:1 in average. Further, Higher education, for us, is much of collecting knowledge, competition, and learning to think critically, while there, it is more related to becoming a better person (Li speaks of virtue as motivation), improving abilities like patience, endurance, and friendliness. It is unclear if there is a floating adoption between western and eastern regions/cultures and what actually is within between. However, what you actually could do in such cases, is - on the one hand, of course, feel honored, as you are the chosen one (even though you‘d prefer not to be), and on the other hand, you could tell them what exactly they are facing, when studying in Finland.

Huh, I really would like to distribute my online questionnaire in Finland. It could be quite exciting finding out what the differences in attitudes are between Finish and german students.

I try to check RG more often, maybe one day, we have a chance to communicate again.

All my best,

Thomas