Page 428 - Cultures and Organizations

Intercultural Encounters 393

Intercultural Encounters in Schools

An American teacher at a foreign-language institute in Beijing exclaimed
in class, “You lovely girls, I love you.” Her students, according to a Chinese

observer, were terrified. An Italian professor teaching in the United States
complained bitterly about the fact that students were asked to formally
evaluate his course. He did not think that students should be the judges
of the quality of a professor. An Indian lecturer at an African university
had a student who arrived six weeks late for the curriculum, but he had to
admit him because he was from the same village as the dean. Intercultural
encounters in schools can lead to much perplexity. 13
Most intercultural encounters in schools are of one of two types:
between local teachers and foreign, migrant, or refugee students or
between expatriate teachers, hired as foreign experts or sent as missionar-
ies, and local students. Different value patterns in the cultures from which
the teacher and the student have come are one source of problems. Chapters
3 through 7 described consequences for the school situation of differences
in values related to power distance, individualism, masculinity, uncertainty
avoidance, and long- or short-term orientation. These differences often
affect the relationships between teacher and students, among students, and
between teacher and parents.
Because language is the vehicle of teaching, what was mentioned ear-
lier about the role of language in intercultural encounters applies in its
entirety to the teaching situation. The chances for successful cultural adap-
tation are better if the teacher teaches in the students’ language than if the
student has to learn in the teacher’s language, because the teacher has more
power over the learning situation than any single student.
The course language affects the learning process. At INSEAD inter-

national business school, in France, Geert taught the same executive
course in French to one group and in English to another; both groups were
composed of people from several nationalities. Discussing a case study in
French led to highly stimulating intellectual discussions but few practical
conclusions. When the same case was discussed in English, it would not be
long before someone asked, “So what?” and the class tried to become prag-
matic. Both groups used the same readings, partly from French authors
translated into English, partly vice versa. Both groups liked the readings
originally written in the class language and condemned the translated
ones as “un necessarily verbose, with a rather meager message which could