Editorial

Questions of Culture
We hear more often than before about the growth, and the expectations of further growth, in distance teaching and learning across national borders. It is also quite common to see statements acknowledging that there might be special challenges for teachers and learners when programs are provided for learners in one culture by teaching institutions located in another. In practice, for teachers to empathize with students of different cultures is a challenge—and a privilege—though it is not a new one for teachers in face-to-face educational environments, particularly at the university. The challenge (and again, I say “and the privilege”) for distance educators has a different dimension from that facing teachers on campus. Added to the other peculiarities of teaching beyond the classroom, the teacher who interacts with international students at a distance is not dealing with people who have removed themselves from that culture. In the distance learning environment, the student remains physically and socially within the different culture, a culture that is foreign to, and mostly unknown to, the teacher. Given the difficulty for the teacher of acquiring at least a modicum of the perspectives of that different culture, the student has to be enabled, temporarily, to step out of that culture and enter the culture of the teacher, which is likely to be that of the majority of other learners also. Eventually, I hope, educators will learn to see how the “foreignness” of other cultures can be a teaching asset, and learn how, when designing courses and choosing content, to draw on the knowledge resource that lies within such a multicultural community of learners. The necessary understanding and the development of skills for empathizing with another culture and then generating content, at both design as well as interactive phases of teaching, takes time and openness on the part of the teacher when exposed to other cultures under the most propitious of conditions, which means, actually, “being there.” In my own experience, it took more than two of my seven years as a young expatriate educator in Africa to even recognize that some of the basic assumptions about how to acquire knowledge and the nature of knowledge itself did not always apply in dealing with questions coming out of the African environment. More interestingly, I discovered that when looking at the role of education in the development of individuals and communities in an African environment, the very questions asked from a Western perspective were often not important in that environment, while the epistemological tools of the Western educator did not lend themselves to the formation of questions that—as seen by the learners—would be significant. If it was so hard when “being there,” how much greater the challenge when it is impossible for the teacher to physically enter into the foreign culture but who must, nevertheless, draw on the knowledge in that culture and try to interpret knowledge across the two cultures, for the benefit of the students on both sides.

At the time of this writing, it seems to me that this is a problem to which there are no solutions, since indeed it is a problem that has not yet been properly identified and understood—as a pedagogical issue. Certainly a number of writers have remarked on what they see as clumsy imposition of Western values on other cultures through electronically delivered distance education, characterized, for example, by Wilson, Qayyum, and Boshier (1998) as “electronic colonialism” (276), or by Dorsher (1999) as “hegemony online.” These are valuable contributions that raise awareness that there is a problem—though value-loaded terms such as colonialism and hegemony suggest there is a policy by a government or other agency to dominate and subvert other cultures. The problem is more likely that damage is by default, through a lack of awareness on the part of educators and their institutions of the consequences of teaching based on one set of values when that teaching is directed at learners whose values are significantly different. While trying to understand the problem and beginning to think how to take better advantage of the opportunity to develop truly multicultural programs, we can look for clues in existing research and, I hope, begin to design research studies that will help us understand the question better.

Among very few formal studies in this area, Walker-Fernandez (1999) tried to identify learners’ views about the impact of their cultures on their experiences in studying online with an American university. She found that the students were well aware that there were cultural differences between themselves and their teacher and the content of the program. They were much less able to say what the effects of these differences were, for example, whether they had an effect on how they were evaluated, which was a particularly sensitive issue. Students attempt to accommodate themselves to the foreign culture by creating “extended identities.” This is a strategy that allows a person to remain him- or herself within his or her culture but temporarily take on the culture of the foreign institution. Interestingly, confirming the very tentative state of knowledge in this area, another study (Shattuck 2005) was not able to confirm the use of the extended identity strategy. Shattuck observed that “more often than not, the sense of marginalization, sometimes even alienation, from the American learner group was palpable” and added what I find a powerful observation: that “constructivist-based pedagogy couched in the highly interactive communication world can be a lonely place for an international online learner whose cultural experiences are different than the dominant educational cultures” (186).

A third study (Al-Harthi 2005) found that for Arab students the lack of physical presence in the online environment was seen as a positive feature because, in addition to advantages recognizable to Western students, it provided a reduced risk of social embarrassment. This sensitivity to what other people think is more foreign to American students, but for people of more collectivist (as contrasted with individualist) cultures, a form of communication that gives ways of saving face has value that may outweigh some of what the Western student might consider drawbacks. Female Arab students in particular felt more comfortable studying online as it allowed for an easy conformity with the separation of genders that is traditional in Muslim culture. The study identified several ways in which the Arab students dealt with problems differently than their American colleagues (and in ways that only a culturally sensitive teacher might understand). For example, when faced with a problem situation having a high degree of uncertainty, the American response is to seek information and sufficient understanding to solve the problem. An alternative strategy, however, is to find a way of avoiding the problem situation. Not turning up for class or dropping a course are simple avoidance solutions. What Hofstede (1991) called “shame” (60) was another powerful dynamic identified in this study; this refers to the way a culture responds to an individual who infringes upon social conventions. Family reputation is more highly regarded in Arab culture than in the American, and thus a female participant reported that, rather than risk saying anything that could reflect on her family, she would log off an online discussion when it was joined by a fellow student who was acquainted with her family. A male participant mentioned negative reactions of shame when words considered inappropriate, from his cultural perspective, were mentioned in class. Other issues identified by Al-Harthi (2005) include a reluctance to confront others (which seems to be one of the most common differences between North Atlantic cultures and others). Participation in discussions, which rates so highly in the theory and practice of American education, is another behavior that may appear differently in other cultures. Hofstede referred to masculine and feminine cultures. Being loud and competitive in discussion, so typical of American behavior by both genders, is a characteristic of a masculine culture. Students from a more feminine culture consider it gauche and boorish to display oneself too eagerly. Al-Harthi described how one of her respondents felt the Americans’ eagerness to participate in discussions meant they were “showing off” or trying to appear “smart.” Drawing further on Hofstede’s theory, Al-Harthi wrote that participation in discussion is also related to the type of power distance between teachers and students. In distance educational environments such as the American one, which is characterized by small power distance, it is expected that students will make uninvited interventions and ask questions about their learning materials, whereas in large power distance cultures, such as the Asian and Arab states, it is expected that communication is initiated only by teachers.

I suggest that these early research findings give a glimpse of something very significant that has eluded our observation until now and raise many questions for both practice and research. For example, even in a face-to-face classroom, what do we know, and what do we do, about the churning of emotions that accompany an international student’s discomfort at perceived showing off or shame? How often do we recognize the stress involved when a student is trying to establish an extended identity? What is the cost of this to the individual student in anxiety and distraction from what we would evaluate as good performance? How does the instructor react to the student at a personal level, and how does the instructor integrate the student into the dominant culture of the classroom? Or is that the right question? Is the question how to help each student be successful in his or her own cultural setting as well as the foreign setting? Or is it how to set up a course and manage it so as to induce the different forms of understanding that lie in the culture represented by each student, to the greater benefit of the whole class? Transfer these and other yet-to-be-articulated questions from the classroom to the distance learning environment in which the student resides within his or her culture and connects with the American culture for only a few hours at a time through an artificial communications technology, and we begin to see both the challenge and the tremendous opportunity that is latent in distance education that crosses cultures.

Michael Grahame Moore
Editor

References
Al-Harthi, A. S. 2005. Distance higher education experiences of Arab Gulf students in the United States: A cultural perspective. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning 6 (3). Available online at http://www.irrodl.org/content/v6.3/al-harthi.html

Dorsher, M. D. 1999. Hegemony online: The quiet convergence of power, culture, and computers. Ph.D. diss., University of Maryland. Abstract in Dissertation Abstracts International, publ. nr. AAT9957137, 60(12), 4232(A).

Hofstede, G. H. 1991. Cultures and organizations: Software of the mind. London: McGraw-Hill.

Shattuck, K. 2005. Cultures meeting cultures in online distance education: Perceptions of international adult learners of the impact of culture when taking online distance education courses designed and delivered by an American university. Unpublished Ed.D. diss., The Pennsylvania State University, University Park.

Walker-Fernandez, S. E. 1999. Toward understanding the study experience of culturally sensitive graduate students in American distance education programs. Ph.D. diss., Florida International University, Miami.

Wilson, M., A. Qayyum, and R. Boshier. 1998. World wide America? Think globally, click locally. Distance Education 19 (1): 109–123.