Educational Journey towards
Multicultural Competence:
from Information to Transformation
Lasma Latsone
Latvia/ UK
June 3-5, 2013
lasma.latsone@liepu.lv
• Why are we talking about multicultural issues?
• What do we want to achieve?
Students desire ….. society
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positive and optimistic (32%);
educated (25 %);
loving and caring and supportive (20 %);
tolerant, respectful and without prejudices (19 %)
kind, friendly and polite (12%)
socially and emotionally intelligent (12 %);
prosperous and economically stable (9 %);
compassionate and empathetic (6 %).
Non-violent
• What are the resons for not reaching what we
want?
• How can we get closer to the world we desire?
My intercultural experience
• Latvia (as part of USSR)
• USA
• SA
• UK
• Latvia
(as independent country)
Human rights and multiculturalism – declared
values of the 21st century*
How we as teachers/academics can help to
enliven these values in our students?
* Valoda, vide, sadarbība, tradīcijas, vērtības, līdzdalība, kultūra. (2011). Mācību metodiskais
materiāls starpkultūru saskarsmē. IAC, Rīga.
Multicultural competence
Culture-sensitive term
Culture – oxigen
“Cultural variables are woven into an intricate tapestry – pull one thread or
change one colour of the tapestry and the composition of the entire picture
may be altered,” (Loveland, 2010).
What is cultural competence?
• Desire to become culturally competent
• Cultural awareness
• Cultural knowledge
• Cultural skills
• Cultural encounter (first-hand experience)
(Banks 1997; Leavitt 2010; Campinha-Bacote 2002; Lake 2010 etc.)
Self-analysis, self-reflection
Empathy
Is intercultural understanding possible ar all?
Are there any ethnic tensions in your surroundings/
at your workplace and how these tensions could be
diminished?
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Education
Communication skills
First-hand experience
Self-development
Social activities and state policy
Experience, power of story, and
empathy
«All genuine education comes about through experience” (Dewey, 1938)
Personal story and self-reflection:
“If we are critically conscious, we will see ourselves in the story of
others, which in turn enables us to see beyond external abstractions of
humanity into the lived experience of others… without self-reflection,
empathy is impossible” (Lake, 2010, p. 43).
Humans are able to empathize, feel compassion, fear or other
emotions when watching a film or hearing a story, therefore also they
are able understand inexperienced things within certain limitations.
Empathy and body language
Ethics of care: Nel Noddings (2002)
• Caring should be a foundation
for ethical decision-making
• Care as basic in human life - all people want to be
cared for, but longing for goodness arises out of
the experience or memory of being cared for
• ‘Empathy' vs ‘Sympathy’ (feeling with)
Social intelligence: Goleman (2006)
Toxic and nourishing people:
negative emotions as second-hand smoke
Social corosion
Forgivenes: is it a topic for higher education?
Forgiveness does not require forgetting what has happened or
total reconciliation. It means “finding a way to free oneself
from the claws of obsession about the hurt” (Goleman, 2006, p. 308)
Social intelligence as tool for reaching cultural competence
Different faces of social corrosion
(Goleman, 2006)
– TV (40% 2-year olds watch TV at least 3 hours a day )
– Fear to help others
– Virtual belonging to organizations, with no social contact
– Earphones: life in one own’s world. Social autism
– Cars replace being on the street
– Working on holidays: barriers the telephone and e-mail creates
for personal life
– TV in bedrooms, kisses and hugs via the internet
Anything sounds familiar?
Social intelligence (SI): D. Goleman
Social awareness:
• primal empathy (feeling
with others, sensing
nonverbal emotional
signals)
• attunement (listening
with full receptivity,
attuning to a person)
• empathic accuracy
(understanding other
person’s thoughts)
• social cognition
(knowing how the social
world works)
Social facility:
• synchrony (interacting
smoothly at the nonverbal
level)
• self-presentation (putting
someone at ease)
• influence (shaping the
outcome of social
interactions)
• concern (reflects a
person’s capacity for
compassion)
Adapted from T.Hart
From information to
Transformation:
Education for the
Evaluation of
Consciousness
(2009)
In multicultural education there is a need for a flexible
model which would allow to mediate between relativism
and ethnocentrism and to develop a third position which
transcends the values of foreign and people’s own
cultures helping learners to develop empathy and mutual
understanding (Bredella, 2003, p. 47).
Not always students, even within teacher education
programs, are endowed with the desired attitudes and
wisdom that allow them to embrace diversity and
culturally inclusive attitudes (Szecsi, Spillman, Vazquez-Montilla, and
Mayberry, 2010, p. 44).
Why so often information on cultural competence
remains on the level of information without reaching the
stage of transformation?
How
Power of personal example of teachers/parents
We learn to care-about through our experience of
being cared-for. Instead of starting with an ideal
state or republic, care theory starts with an ideal
home and moves outward - 'learning first what it
means to be cared for, then to care for intimate
others, and finally to care about those we cannot
care for directly (Noddings 2002).
Research on example of teachers
Education from the care perspective
/N. Noddings/
• Modelling. Educators have to show in their behaviour what it
means to care. “We do not merely tell students to care and give
them texts to read on the subject, we demonstrate our caring in our
relations with them”
• Dialogue about caring. It can help people to think critically and
better understand their own relationships and practice.
• Practice. The experiences in which we immerse ourselves tend to
produce a ‘mentality’. ‘If we want to produce people who will care
for another, then it makes sense to give students practice in caring
and reflection on that practice’.
• Confirmation. Confirmation as an act of affirming and encouraging
the best in others (based on M. Buber’s philosophy)
Are we/students able to care? Have we/students
been in caring relations/ What is our/students’
experience from our schools in terms of caring?
We learn care from experiencing and observing
it (Noddings). How much we can observe care in
today’s society?
Good education includes the education of the mind
and the heart,
balances intuition with the intellect and
mastery with mistery,
and cultivates wisdom over the
mere accumulation of facts
(Hart, 2001, 2)
“Please remember it is what you are that heals, not
what you know.” (C.G.Jung)
Thank you!