Category: Reflections

Cultural Activity is my latest intervention to test if people can understand cultures better by finding similarities. I chose the participants on the street and invited them to join my intervention. Some people are willing to join my intervention but I also been refused by many people. When I reflected about it, I thought the way I asked questions should be improved. And this intervention may takes people a few minutes so I should chose people who looked not in rush.

My plan of this intervention was asking two participants who are from different countries and answer the cultural questions together. I asked people who are not from China to do this intervention with me. The first participant is from Bangladesh. Based on the five questions we answered, she found our cultures have similarities. The second group are participants from France and Spain. Before doing this intervention, one of them was not confident enough with his English and his cohort said this activity can also help them practice their English.

In addition, I did this intervention with two experts and they gave me some feedback about this. Both of them found this activity is fun but they had different thoughts about the differences and similarities of cultures. The first expert had an opinion that basic requirements of human being are the same and we should look beyond the culture. However, the second expert likes the difference of cultures because it’s interesting.

Based on the feedback from my stakeholders and experts, I found they are happy to do this activity with people from different backgrounds and it helped them to know more about others. I think this activity can remind people about the similarities of cultures but it is not deep enough to make people think beyond the culture.

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.

During the research on this project, I had conversations with some people about cultural competence. However, I found not everyone had a concept of cultural competence in their mind and I had to explain what cultural competence is. They may have cultural competence, but they didn’t realise it is cultural competence. I also asked the staff of an education agency in China. Their main business is providing help for students who are preparing to study abroad. They have online tutoring to help students after arriving abroad, but they didn’t provide any service specialized in cultural competence. Based on this experience, I realised people may lack awareness of cultural competence.

Then I did some research about experts’ methods of developing cultural competence and the healthcare profession has been promoting cultural competence.

E-Learning for Healthcare organisation has the cultural competence e-learning tool which is made up of three 20–30-minute learning session to support clinicians in the NHS to gain knowledge and understanding of the issues around culture and health.  

I played a short part of learning session to 5 of my target audience. I got some feedback that the video is quite boring for them even it is animation. For this reason, I am planning to find a more interesting way that can increase people’s awareness and develop their cultural competence. 

My intervention 4 was designed to help people build their self-awareness by understanding their own cultural. In this intervention, I asked 6 people if they have a meaningful object in their family which was passed down from elders and then explain the story behind it. However, two of these participants said they do not have something like that in their family and other four participants provided their meaningful objects.

Though the participants are from China, they are from different part of China and have different local culture. The meaningful objects from those four participants are different and all of them can represent Chinese culture. From their feedback, they gained more awareness of their family culture when they tried to get the information and story behind the objects.

From this intervention, I got the idea of developing people’s self-awareness but there are some limitations of this intervention. First, not everyone has or likes to talk about the meaningful objects in their family. This should be considered in my future research. In addition, I need to find more people from different country and with different background so that I can get more result with less bias.