Month: October 2021

Intervention – Cultural Activity 1.0

The Idea of Intervention

Stakeholders:

People with different cultural backgrounds

Platform/medium:

Game

Intention/goal:

The goal of this intervention is to help people find cultural similarities and get an understanding of each other.

Question supporting the intervention:

If people can get an understanding of others from different cultural backgrounds by finding similarities.

Activity/event allowing users to engage:

It is a game about asking questions. 

Online version

At this stage, I contacted my stakeholders via the language exchange app so it’s easier for participators to play this game with me. I will ask participants who are from different cultural backgrounds to play this game. They can get one point when they find a similarity. Before the game started, I will ask participators how many points they expect to get and then compare it with the actual points they get after the game. In addition, they will be interviewed about their feeling.

12 Questions

What’s your favourite breakfast?

How many main meals do you have a day?

What time do you eat the main meals of the day?

What birthday traditions do you have?

What meal would you serve if you wanted to help visitors to understand your culture?

How do you celebrate the coming of a new baby?

What are weddings like in your culture?

How do you celebrate the new year?

What time do most of the stores close in your country?

Do you like to take a nap?

Is there any tradition when people move into a new place?

What do you do to stop hiccups?

Offline version

I made these question cards for participators to choose questions randomly.

I will ask participants who are from different cultural backgrounds to play this game. Each person can randomly pick a question card and answer this question with me together. If he/she has a similar answer, he/she can take this card. Every person has 5 chances to pick a card and the winner is the person who has the more cards at last.

Draft Report

Introduction

The research question is “How can young people develop cultural competence when they are living in London?” Cultural competence is an important ability to understand and communicate with people from different cultures. It provides people with a more cultural perspective to solve their problems (Improving Cultural Competence 2015). This project is about helping young people to develop their cultural competence and be able to communicate with people from different backgrounds. The background to this project is that London is a multicultural city and there are many opportunities to meet people from different places when living in London. However, living in a multicultural city does not always develop people’s cultural competence because they need to accept both cultures from their home country and host country. The perspective of this research is from an international student in London who are from China.

Methodology

The research methods are used in this project include literature review, qualitative and action research. Some background information and theory of this research are supported by books and journal articles. I also attend online sessions about cultural competence to get more information from experts. Furthermore, surveys and interviews with stakeholders and experts are used to collect data to develop the interventions.

My previous interventions were created to test how can boots people’s confidence and self-awareness in a cross-culture environment. After that, I made an online quiz based on the UAL language learning centre to test participators’ level and knowledge of cultural competence. In addition, I interviewed many experts who are online English teachers to know their knowledge and experience of cultural competence. Based on their feedback, I created my current intervention to test if the similarity between people can narrow the culture gap.  It is a game about answering cultural questions such as “What’s your favourite breakfast?” “What birthday traditions do you have?” and players can find if they have similarities during the game. 

Reflection and Analysis

At the beginning of this project, the range of my topic is big and it needs to be narrowed down. I contacted UAL Students’ Union and Language Centre to gain more information about cultural competence, but I did not get useful information from the Students’ Union and Language Centre. However, Language Centre provides online resources that I can learn some knowledge about intercultural communication. I also attended an online session about developing intercultural competence at The London School of International Communication. I found knowledge, skills and attitudes are three important elements in the process of developing cultural competence. I tried to help people gain more knowledge about culture in my research but then I failed. People can acquire cultural knowledge from books, online recourses and it is a huge area that will never end.  What I learn from my research is that attitudes are more important. If people have attitudes about cultural competence, they have the power to learn the knowledge. 

Then I focused my research on people’s attitudes. And I got some useful feedback from my experts who are culturally competent online English teachers. What I learn from them is that cross-cultural communication is not a big issue as people think. It is important to think everyone is the same. This feedback inspired me because I always try to find cultural differences instead of similarities.

Conclusion

By doing the research so far, I found developing cultural competence is not as difficult as I thought if I focused my project on effect people’s attitudes. However, there are some challenges I have in this research project because I need to gather stakeholders from different cultural backgrounds to test my interventions. At the same time, I can learn how to work with different people during this research process. As my current intervention has not been finished, I will test it on more people soon afterwards and to see if it can improve my project.

Draft Intervention

I interviewed 5 experts who are online English teachers in the UK. They have classes with students from all over the world so they need to have good cross-cultural communication skills.

Based on my previous research on cultural competence, I found people’s attitude is more important than the knowledge of culture.

By interviewing the experts, they feel that people are really accepting in London. And their way of being culturally competent is don’t think different culture is a big deal and try to find similarities with others.

Josh said something that inspired me. He said “We are all the same. We are all human but it’s easy to forget. At a lot of times, we just see what is different. That is the important thing. You shouldn’t think that people are different, it’s better to think we are the same. That always helps. even if we cannot communicate confidently, sometimes is not just even about that, you just have to find some way that you can relate, then understand each other. I think this is a good attitude to have.” 

I created a draft intervention and tested this idea with my stakeholders who are not from China. I started a new topic to find some similarities between us. For example, both of us are introverts, the food we like. And I found it will be easier to have a conversation than just talking about culture.

I’m going to explore this intervention and use similarity to help people make connections.

Cross-cultural Communication Skills

I attended another online session about developing intercultural competence at The London School of International Communication.

https://www.londonschool.com/lsic/resources/recorded-webinars/developing-your-intercultural-competence/

The expert talked about the understanding of cultural competence, greater cultural self-awareness, and some tips to communicate across cultures. Knowledge, skills and attitudes are three important areas reflect in cultural competence. People can acquire cultural knowledge from books, online recourses but knowledge is a huge area that will never end. She suggested people who want to develop cultural competence pick their relevant culture and acquire more knowledge.  

The London School of International Communication also provides an online quiz to test intercultural competence. It includes two parts which are cultural knowledge and cross-cultural communication skills. By doing this quiz, I found I lack cultural knowledge of many countries such as Brazil, India and so on.

https://www.londonschool.com/lsic/resources/intercultural-quiz/

Reflecting on my project, last week I wanted to narrow down my research topic of cultural competence to share cultural experiences in London, but cultural competence is the ability to interact with people from different cultural backgrounds, not only learning British culture. So, I want to make my project focus on the cross-cultural communication skills part of cultural competence.

I made a quiz based on the activities from the UAL language centre and I got 9 results. Most of them have knowledge about cultural competence but none of them got all correct in this quiz. 

Flexible behaviour is one of the competencies that most of them are not familiar with because only one person chose the right answer.

The illustration of flexible behaviour is “Adapt your own way of doing things and communicating to suit different contexts and situations.”

However, not everyone has awareness of flexible behaviour when having intercultural communication.

This also happened when I had a conversation with my stakeholder who was learning Chinese.

I asked him “Do you cook at home in your spare time?” in Chinese. 

And he answered “Yes. Where else could I cook?”

Then I realized the phrase “At home” misled him. “At home” can be deleted in this sentence but it’s a common way to say that in Chinese (I double-checked with my friends). I should not assume he will understand before I asked this question in my usual way.

At this stage, I am going to look at how “flexible behaviour” help people improve intercultural communication skills to achieve cultural competence. I will create an intervention about this.

Narrow Down the Topic

By thinking about the difference between different cultural backgrounds, I tried to narrow down the topic and focus on the stakeholders who are living in London, UK. It’s easier for me to collect data and in London, we can meet people from different backgrounds so people always need cultural competence. The language part of this project can be only English.

My new research topic is: How can young people develop cultural competence in London?

However, I still need to consider what area of cultural competence I am going to focus such as language, embarrassment, traveling. I am going to do a SWOT analyse to narrow down my research topic.

https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTMC_05.htm
https://www.uexpress.com/life/miss-manners

Expert-Language Centre

Language Centre in UAL provides students and staff with intercultural and communication training. Their training sessions aim to develop people’s cultural awareness, language use, communication skills and teaching approaches.

Leaflet of Intercultural Training

Language Centre also provides online resources about intercultural communication.

https://academicsupportonline.arts.ac.uk/learning-resources/22643
  • Acitivity from Section B

The activity in Session B helps me to understand the key competencies.

I tried to book a training session to get more information from the language centre and I am waiting for their reply.

Level of cultural competence

The question at moment: How can I measure people’s level of cultural competence?

I am thinking about if I can create an intervention to test it.

Secondary research:

The Four Levels of Cultural Awareness

https://www2.pacific.edu/sis/culture/pub/1.6.2-_the_four_level_of_cul.htm

I. Unconscious incompetence 

This has also been called the state of blissful ignorance. At this stage, you are unaware of cultural differences. It does not occur to you that you may be making cultural mistakes or that you may be misinterpreting much of the behavior going on around you. You have no reason not to trust your instincts. 

II. Conscious incompetence

You now realize that differences exist between the way you and the local people behave, though you understand very little about what these differences are, how numerous they might be, or how deep they might go. You know there’s a problem here, but you’re not sure about the size of it. You’re not so sure of your instincts anymore, and you realize that there are some things you don’t understand. You may start to worry about how hard it’s going to be to figure these people out. 

III. Conscious competence

You know cultural differences exist, you know what some of these differences are, and you try to adjust your own behavior accordingly. It doesn’t come naturally yet—you have to make a conscious effort to behave in culturally appropriate ways—but you are much more aware of how your behavior is coming across to the local people. You are in the process of replacing old instincts with new ones. You know now that you will be able to figure these people out if you can remain objective. 

IV. Unconscious competence

You no longer have to think about what you’re doing in order to do the right thing. Culturally appropriate behavior is now second nature to you; you can trust your instincts because they have been reconditioned by the new culture. It takes little effort now for you to be culturally sensitive.