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Culture and Cross-Cultural Issues | Academic Culture | Second Language Anxiety | Communication Skills
Cultural Adjustment
To avoid misunderstandings, you may want to share some information about your cultural background with your students. Such an approach may help them overcome the ethnocentrism that might otherwise affect their response to you. It may also enable a conversational exchange that provides you with information about their values and beliefs as well as the opportunity to reflect upon your own.Effective teaching requires that you attempt to understand your students in the context of their culture, just as they should make efforts to understand your background. You will begin to be more sensitive to the notion that people from the United States have many similarities and differences. At the same time you may find that you can help U.S. students to be sensitive to the similarities and differences between individuals from your country.
A goal of Teaching @ Ohio State is to provide you with ideas and alternatives for interaction in the U.S. classroom. It may be helpful for your adjustment to living and working in the United States if you think about U.S. culture as a set of knowledge and skills to be learned. Just as there may be several equations you can use to solve problems in math, there are many different approaches to the situations you will encounter while interacting with your students, peers, and professors. The more you know about the culture of the United States and the more experience you gain, the more sophisticated your approach to U.S. life will become.
Mastering new knowledge and skills can require patient and persistent effort. If you are faced with a particularly troubling situation, either in or out of the classroom, try if possible to observe how others act in such situations. If it is a classroom problem, you may want to ask other successful instructors if you can observe their classes or what they would do. You could also ask a friend from the United States what the situation means in the context of the U.S. culture and how he or she would have handled it. You may want to visualize the situation and plan how you would like to handle it, explaining to your U.S. friend how you think other people will respond to you. Once you have identified the new behavior, such as inviting students to use your office hours or to ask questions during lectures, try it out and see if it works for you. If the new behavior works well, think about whether you can generalize from it and use it in other situations. If the new behavior does not work well, investigate other culturally appropriate options.
You may want to take an analytical approach. That is, continually attempt to ask the question, "Why?" For example, why is it that Americans tend to be time conscious? Why is it that Americans feel uncomfortable with silence? Why do American students interrupt professors in class? Identify as accurately as possible your own assumptions about people, their ideas and behavior, and the clashes that can occur. Break those assumptions down, and work to rebuild them in light of what you are learning about U.S. culture.
Feel free to ask for clarification of people's expectations of you, as well as to articulate your expectations of others. Keeping your sense of humor, assuming that people have good intentions, talking to other international students as well as American colleagues, and focusing on the positive aspects of the adjustment process are also helpful.
Ideally, learning how to interact smoothly in another culture would be immediate and obvious. In reality, adjusting to the diversity and variations within different cultures will take time and patience. An adjustment period of culture shock is common among people visiting or living in a new place. The United States is a very diverse society--with respect to ethnicity, race, religion, socioeconomic status, language, customs, backgrounds, interests, and the like--and that may cause renewed culture shock, even after you have been in the country for many years.
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