April 14---3rd Culture Kids

We were joined by George Walker a former Director General of the IBO to talk about the impact an international education can have on children who become adults!

We spoke with Shawn Ahmed a 3rd culture child who at 27 is now acting with the influence of his education to change the world!

3rd Culture Kids

http://blogs.ibo.org/georgew/2005/09/

International education and cultural understanding

I am in retrospective mood, looking back at the different ways I have interpreted the phrase ‘international education’ since I first met it in 1991. Amongst the variety of descriptions, analyses, definitions and explanations there is at least one common thread in my writings on the subject: the importance of cultural understanding.

In this context, I have found particularly helpful T.S. Eliot’s Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948), Jerome Bruner’s The Culture of Education (1996), Laurence Stenhouse’s Culture and Education (1967), the various writings of Hofstede, Trompenaars et al and the Asian Perspective in UNESCO’s Delors Report (1996) written by Zhou Nanzhao (a member of the IBO Council of Foundation). Yet, if I am completely honest, I doubt if I could provide an entirely satisfactory explanation, never mind a definition of exactly what I mean by that seductive phrase ‘cultural understanding’.

I was therefore drawn to a stimulating article in the latest issue (August 2005) of the Journal for Research in International Education (JRIE) by Lodewijk van Oord ,a teacher at Atlantic College in Wales, entitled ‘Culture as a configuration of learning’. What makes a culture, writes van Oord, are not the habits, traits and customs identified by people like Hofstede but particular configurations of learning and meta-learning (learning how to learn). He argues that teachers in international schools are unnecessarily worried about students accommodating to different ways of life (as an example he quotes the ease with which a Peruvian student adapted to unfamiliar authority relationships in Norway) and even to different languages (he quotes his own capacity to direct tourists around a European capital).

‘Each culture will constitute a kind of learning that subordinates other kinds of learning’. That is clear enough, but then, ‘Cultural differences can, therefore, be characterized in terms of what brings about this configuration of learning’, and we are suddenly back with the chicken-and-egg that characterizes much of this debate. Van Oord identifies two distinct learning configurations: conceptual thinking (the West) and performative learning (Asia), the first derived from religious orthodoxy (‘true belief’) and the latter from religious orthopraxy (‘right practice’). But then the chicken comes back to chase its egg with the statement ‘Orthodox belief (eg Christianity) and orthoprax ritual (eg Hinduism) are products of different configurations of learning where different kinds of learning dominate over other kinds of learning’.

I believe van Oord underestimates the way habits, traits and customs create a significant cultural divide. The Peruvian student had probably been selected with her ‘adaptability’ in mind and in a sink-or-swim environment chose the latter, as most young people do. In a school that has a significant cultural minority to call into daily question the mid-Atlantic pseudo-culture of most international schools – I am thinking, for example, of the 20% local Francophone students at the International School of Geneva – the situation appears rather more complex.

I hope this fascinating article will be widely read and I want to end on a note of strong agreement: van Oord is surely right when he says ‘the configuration of learning presumed in international academic curricula is a western configuration based on conceptual learning as the dominant form of learning’. He is calling for a new approach and the IBO must accept a responsibility to respond.

George Walker