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Journal of Research in International
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Learning how to 'swallow the world': Engaging with human difference in culturally
diverse classrooms
Lodewijk van Oord and Ken Corn
Journal of Research in International Education 2013 12: 22 originally published online 21 March
2013
DOI: 10.1177/1475240913478085
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478085
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JRI12110.1177/1475240913478085Journal of Research in International EducationVan Oord and Corn
JRIE
Article
Learning how to ‘swallow the
world’: Engaging with human
difference in culturally diverse
classrooms
Journal of Research in
International Education
12(1) 22­–32
© The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/1475240913478085
jri.sagepub.com
Lodewijk van Oord
UWC Waterford Kamhlaba, Swaziland
Ken Corn
UWC Atlantic College, Wales, UK
Abstract
The perception of culture prevailing in the literature on international and intercultural education is often too
limited to be effectively utilized by educators who wish to embrace the diversity in their classrooms. Only
by reimagining the notions of ‘culture’ and ‘cultural diversity’ and by liberating them from the rigidities of
dominant sociological models can we start adopting approaches to teaching culture in ways that genuinely
prepare students for a culturally amorphous and diverse world.
Keywords
Culture, cultural liberty, identity, international education, relationality
Introduction
There appears to be no escape from culture. Within the constellation of schools, educational programmes and research agendas gathered together around the umbrella term ‘international education’,
the pertinence of cultural difference seems to lurk in the background of virtually every discussion.
Fostering ‘intercultural understanding’ has often been adopted, in itself, as a noble and worthwhile
goal of international education. In the meantime, an extensive scholarly literature has arisen to specify how culture should be understood, and what intercultural understanding might entail.
In the still-dominant perception of culture, intercultural understanding enables the bridging of
the gap between relatively isolated cultural islands. The construction of bridges is a pleasant and
convenient metaphor in education, a vivid image of what genuine intercultural understanding
might be able to do. It is a metaphor hard to disagree with, and even harder to refute, yet it remains
a somewhat reductive binary image.
Corresponding author:
Lodewijk van Oord, UWC Waterford Kamhlaba, PO Box 52, Mbabane H100, Swaziland.
Email: [email protected]
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Van Oord and Corn
We will argue that the perception of culture prevailing in this literature is too limited to be effectively utilized by educators who wish to embrace the diversity in their classrooms. We hope to
liberate the concept of ‘culture’ – and its most obvious application ‘cultural diversity’ – from its
essentialist and stereotypical shackles and move towards a more profound understanding of how to
approach human diversity. The fostering of students’ autonomy and ‘cultural liberty’ (an individual’s freedom to embrace or defy his/her own tradition) are more valuable objectives for educators
to address rather than a single-minded pursuit of intercultural understanding.
We conclude this contribution with some preliminary educational implications for those who
wish to prepare their students for our culturally dynamic and diverse world. Helping students discover their multiple group allegiances and how pluralistic and permeable identities can be, we
argue, will prove to be a more fertile breeding ground for genuine human understanding and
engagement than will be a deterministic focus on reductive impositions of culture.
Bridging culture
Fostering intercultural understanding is often regarded as a fundamental, even essential component
of international education (Hill, 2000; Walker, 2004). Yet there is little agreement in the literature
on the meaning of intercultural understanding or related concepts in which ‘understanding’ is
replaced by terms such as sensitivity, competency, literacy and awareness (Hill, 2006). Inevitably,
one’s perception of intercultural understanding is intrinsically bound to one’s understanding of
‘culture’ and ‘cultures’ in general, and it is here where one dominant view emerges. This discourse
views culture as a fairly static, contained and identifiable object, often confined within a geographical locality. Individuals are largely bound to the culture from which they originate and, as
such, culture is seen as a major determinant of human cognition and behaviour. Culture, it is said,
‘determines the boundaries of the imaginable’ (Margalit and Raz, 1990: 449). In this perspective,
our cultural confinement is largely accountable for our behavioural patterns, thoughts, beliefs and
values, which are all regarded as ‘culture’s consequences’ (Hofstede, 1980).
Proponents of this approach will add that some of these cultural characteristics are hard to observe.
The well-known iceberg model of culture, for instance, proposes that culture is not only made up of
observable elements (language, cuisine, dress, festivals, arts and so on) but even more so of a multitude of hidden elements (taboos, values, beliefs, concepts of justice and sanity and so on) (Fennes and
Hapgood, 1997). As is the case with icebergs, a very large proportion of any culture is hidden under
the surface, and we need not be reminded of the fate of the Titanic to realize that approaching a new
cultural context is an enterprise with potentially catastrophic consequences.
In organizational and educational studies, this approach to culture is often associated with the
still omnipresent work of Hofstede, whose multi-dimensional model has been used extensively as
a framework for cultural case studies. Hofstede (1994: 5) defines culture as ‘the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one group or category from another’.
Crucial to this definition is that culture functions as the main determinant of difference: it is the
essential ‘thing’ that distinguishes one group of people from another. Members of a culture share
their mental software, Hofstede argues, and this mental programming largely determines their
values and attitudes. These mental programmes are largely static and deeply embedded in a particular society. Hofstede (1994: 238) argues that ‘there is little evidence of international convergency over time’ (although spreading individualism might have its effects) and that ‘value
differences between nations described by authors centuries ago are still present today’.
Hofstede’s notion of culture leads to a highly complicated perspective on intercultural understanding. In his view, the acquisition of intercultural competency entails three phases: awareness,
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knowledge and skills. First, one has to be aware of one’s mental programming and that ‘others
brought up in a different environment carry a different mental software’ (Hofstede, 1994: 230).
Second, we need to learn about the culture with which we wish to interact. We should learn ‘about
their symbols, their heroes, and their values’ (Hofstede, 1994: 231). Third, we need skills that will
enable us to recognize and apply these elements of the other culture, and ‘experience the satisfaction of getting along in the new environment, being able to resolve first the simpler, and later on
some of the more complicated, problems of life among the others’ (Hofstede, 1994: 231).
The underpinning assumption of this model of intercultural understanding is that one needs
to make a bridge to someone’s culture in order to communicate effectively with that individual
(see Figure 1).
In other words: if I, a person in culture A (pA), wish to understand and communicate with a member
of culture B (pB), I first need to know my own culture (cA) before I can embark on a journey towards
the other culture (cB). Only when the bridge from culture A to culture B is successfully constructed can
I understand, empathize and communicate with a member of culture B. In other words, the route from
person A to person B runs via their respective cultures. As Hofstede (1994: 238) explains:
The basic skill for survival in a multicultural world … is understanding first one’s own cultural values (and
that is why one needs a cultural identity of one’s own) and next the cultural values of the other with whom
one has to communicate.
Those who support this perspective argue that we should not be too optimistic about the possibility
of genuine intercultural understanding. A particularly pessimistic view is for instance expressed by
Theo Harden (cited in Bredella, 2003: 31), who writes:
[The student] has to be able to draw the line exactly where ‘understanding’ becomes a threat to his/her
identity. Instead of creating the illusion that it is possible to ‘understand’ a foreign culture it is therefore
probably wiser to prepare the learner for the difficult position of the respected outsider, who, no matter
how much he/she might try, will never fully ‘understand’ and will never be fully ‘understood’.
What these citations leave us with is a perception of a cultural community as hermetically isolated,
often geographically located and bound together by essentialist elements. It assumes that the members of one cultural community have something fundamental in common which is highly influential in determining their actions and behaviours. The ‘mental programming’ of one culture, and this
is the bottom line, is essentially different from the way people in another culture are mentally
hard-wired. Differences within cultures may exist, yet differences between cultures are essentially
different differences and always larger and more significant than varieties within a culture. What
this leaves us with is a ‘balkanization’ of human difference.
pA
cA
bridge
cB
Figure 1. The bridging model of intercultural understanding.
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pB
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Van Oord and Corn
The balkanization of difference
‘Balkanization’ is a geopolitical term used to describe the fragmentation of larger units into smaller
ones. The developments in the Balkan region of south-east Europe in the late 20th century are here
used as a metaphor for a process of division and segregation which can be observed in many other
spheres of life, not necessarily political ones (Bjelic and Savic, 2002). Balkanization is not the
same as mere categorization, a human feature so prevalent in the sciences and in our daily lives
(Van Oord, 2008). As discussed below, categorization is a cognitive process that makes life manageable, while balkanization entails the often unintended process of disintegration. Balkanization
holds negative connotations, as it reminds us of the ethno-politics and violence of the Balkan wars
throughout the 1990s.
Although Hofstede maintains that intercultural communication can be taught, he makes it abundantly clear that it is not an easy enterprise, and often doomed to failure. He (1986: 303, italics in original) has argued that ‘cross-cultural learning situations are fundamentally problematic’ for both the
teacher and the student, because ‘teacher/student interaction is such an archetypical human phenomenon, and so deeply rooted in the culture of a society’. In addition, he has claimed that cultural differences are a nuisance at best and often a disaster (for example, Hofstede, 2011). This language of
inevitable cultural incompatibility is often repeated in studies in international school environments.
Cultural encounters are thus perceived as a ‘minefield’ and often associated with forms of ‘culture
shock’ and ‘cultural dissonance’ (Allan, 2003; Fennes and Hapgood, 1997; Kohls, 1996). Disaster,
minefield, shock: with the balkanization of difference, scholars have employed a wide range of phrases
derived from the vocabulary of war and conflict to depict the process of intercultural understanding.
And this, to our mind, is the irony of those who try to foster intercultural understanding through
the mapping and analysis of cultural difference: in the name of intercultural understanding and the
celebration of difference they have encouraged us to view other groups of people as more systematically different and more profoundly separate than they truly are. In the process, their highly
complex theorizations have made the bridging of these self-constructed cultural gaps look much
more daunting and dangerous than it often is. Education assumes hope, and one wonders how useful such conceptualizations are for educators working in increasingly diverse classrooms.
In addition, the image of the bridge as the only connector of sealed-off cultural units can easily be
manipulated and abused, as the history of the Balkan conflict vividly demonstrates. In September
1992, Bosnian-Serb forces shelled the Stari Most or ‘Old Bridge’ over the Neretva river in the ethnically mixed city of Mostar in Bosnia-Herzegovina, severely damaging its structure. The following
year, in November 1993, the bridge was completely blown up by Bosnian-Croat forces, who perceived it as a symbol of Muslim dominance in the city. This act of aggression was universally condemned as a symbolic defiance of the city’s multi-ethnic history and population make-up. For many
generations, the different ethnic groups had lived together rather peacefully. Although built by the
Ottomans, until the start of the war no one in Mostar would have interpreted the bridge as a typical
‘Muslim’ construct. Rebuilt in 2004 by the international community, the bridge now symbolizes the
possibility of inter-ethnic understanding and contact, although the wartime segregation remains. Both
the armed forces that destroyed this symbol of intercultural complexity, and those who rebuilt it, were
driven by the same assumption: That cultures (or religions, ethnicities, races and so forth) are hermetically disconnected units, unless they are deliberately connected by means of an intercultural
bridge that enables individuals to cross the gap from the one culture into the other.
Numerous striking (and, we fear, increasingly popular) examples of such essentialist assumptions emerge in academia as well. Take for example Richard Nisbett’s (2003) popular-scientific The
Geography of Thought, a study that focuses on how Westerners and East Asians think and perceive
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the world differently. Although Nisbett apologizes for making huge generalizations in comparing
‘East Asians’ with ‘Westerners,’ and realizes that there are huge differences within each of these
groups, he still asserts that such generalizations are justified. At the same time, Nisbett (2003: xxii)
seems fully aware of the limitations to his approach which, he writes, ‘will not satisfy some people
who are hugely knowledgeable about the East’. In his final paragraphs, Nisbett (2003: 224) has to
conclude that, despite the perceived cognitive separateness of Westerners and East Asians, continuing convergence (Westernization as well as Easternization) will increasingly lead to the ‘blending of
social systems and values’. And he (2003: 229) ends his study on a positive note:
So I believe the twain shall meet by virtue of each moving in the direction of the other. East and West may
contribute to a blended world where social and cognitive aspects of both regions are represented but transformed
– like the individual ingredients in a stew that are recognizable but are altered as they alter the whole.
There is, however, nothing new about this development. Nisbett seems to suggest that the separateness of Western and Eastern traditions (the one stemming from Ancient Greek thought, the other
from Ancient Confucianism) is only now beginning to cross-fertilize, ignoring the fact that the East
and the West have been influencing each other for many centuries. The Chinese communist revolution of 1949 is perhaps the most obvious example of such cross-fertilization, in which a Western
political doctrine (‘Marxism’) was transformed and applied in an Asian country.
Nisbett’s study is almost entirely based on the kind of stereotyping Martha Nussbaum warns
against in arguing that we should not make simplistic binary distinctions between the East and the
West, in which the East values order and community, and the West values freedom and the individual. Where does this leave Chinese feminists, she rightly asks, who use John Stuart Mill’s The
Subjection of Women (translated into Chinese over a hundred years ago) to criticize both Confucianism
and Marxism (Nussbaum 1997: 139, 117)? Are these equally Asian individuals simply westernized,
or do they demonstrate that cultural traditions are less homogenous and static than they are often
presumed to be, with discordant voices emerging from within as well as from without?
Categorization as a human trait
The human tendency to focus on separateness and difference instead of commonality appears to
stem from our inclination towards mental categorization. In order to make the world intelligible,
our mind tends to break up the complexity of reality into smaller and therefore manageable units:
categories, boxes, groups (Brown, 1995). Thus in order to make sense of the realities of human
complexity and diversity, we make up groups of people to make this reality manageable. We construct, for instance, Asians and Westerners, and turn them into separate groups to whom we attribute binary characteristics: Asians are like this, while Westerners are like that … None of this is
particularly harmful, as long as we are constantly aware that these made-up groups, and their
made-up singular labels, are exactly that: made-up.
Both interestingly and amusingly, Kwame Anthony Appiah explains how the mapping of cultural difference came about in Western academia. He narrates how the first 19th-century ethnographers set off to explore an unknown culture, often for 1 or 2 years, to return to their home countries
with a written account of how the other culture worked. For all of this to be worthwhile, writes
Appiah (2006: 14), these descriptions had to satisfy a desire for otherness and strangeness:
So, naturally, the ethnographer didn’t usually come back with a report whose one-sentence summary was:
they are pretty much like us. And yet, of course, they had to be. They did, after all, mostly have gods, food,
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Van Oord and Corn
language, dance, music, carving, medicines, family lives, rituals, jokes, and children’s tales. They smiled,
slept, had sex and children, and, in the end, died.
And it is these similarities in the general that are in many ways more remarkable than the differences in the detail – and that make genuine human understanding possible, whether it be international, intercultural, intergroup, or intersocio-economic (if only that word existed) understanding.
To complete Appiah’s (2006: 14) analysis:
And it was possible for this total stranger, the anthropologist, who was, nevertheless, a fellow human
being, to make progress with their language and religion, their habits – things that every adult member of
the society had a couple of decades to work on – in a year or two.
Incorrigible plurality
Just as Nisbett has to take a step back in the epilogue of The Geography of Thought, and accept that
not cultural separateness but congruence is the dynamic we are most likely to observe today, so too
does Hofstede eventually take issue with his own approach. In the appendix of Cultures and
Organizations, he (1994: 253) warns us against the stereotyping of individuals. ‘Statements about
culture are not statements about individuals,’ he writes, elaborating (in referring to the survey completed in his study of individuals from different countries) that:
There is hardly an individual who answers each question exactly by the mean score of his or her group: the
‘average person’ from a country does not exist, only an average tendency to respond among the members
of the group of respondents.
This is a remarkable conclusion for a study dealing almost entirely with the mapping of cultures
and, in the process, with the implicit stereotyping of their members who, it is argued, share a
particular type of mental programming. What Hofstede is hesitantly acknowledging is what most
critics of his model have been arguing for a long time: that the extent of heterogeneity within
what is taken to be one culture is often underestimated, and that ‘discordant voices are often
"internal" rather than coming from the outside’ (Sen, 2006: 112–113). Due to this reality, differences within a culture are often as large as, or even larger than, differences between cultures.
Cultural traditions, therefore, should be viewed as incorrigibly plural entities (Corn and Van
Oord, 2009).
What the essentialist notion of culture tends to overlook is the fact that cultures are rather amorphous and protean constructs. In addition, the relationship between the individual and his or her
cultural surroundings is less deterministic than Hofstede, Nisbett and their supporters would have
us believe. This idea of cultural multiplicity is encapsulated in the following comment by Amin
Maalouf (2000: 21):
No doubt a Serb is different from a Croat, but every Serb is also different from every other Serb, and
every Croat is different from every other Croat. And if a Lebanese Christian is different from a
Lebanese Muslim, I don’t know any two Lebanese Christians who are identical, nor any two Muslims,
any more than there are anywhere in the world two Frenchmen, two Africans, two Arabs or two Jews
who are identical.
In his novel Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie (1981: 108), no stranger to the dangers of cultural essentialism, asserts the complexity of every individual as follows:
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Journal of Research in International Education 12(1)
How many things people notions we bring with us into the world, how many possibilities and also
restrictions of possibility! … To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world.
Both Maalouf and Rushdie make it vividly clear to us that the complexity of human relations cannot be explained alone by a narrow interpretation of culture. Their understanding of human diversity is similar to the views of scholars such as Kwame Anthony Appiah and Amartya Sen. Appiah
(2005: 117) argues that the human differences that we seem to be obsessed with are ‘really a matter
not so much of cultures as of identities’. Building upon this idea of the importance of identity, Sen
(2006: 19) demonstrates how our multiple identities foster a multiplicity of allegiances, of which
culture is often only one:
There are a great variety of categories to which we simultaneously belong. I can be, at the same time, an
Asian, an Indian citizen, a Bengali with a Bangladeshi ancestry, an American or British resident, an economist,
a dabbler in philosophy, an author, a Sanskritist, a strong believer in secularism and democracy, a man, a
feminist, a heterosexual, a defender of gay and lesbian rights, with a non-religious lifestyle, from a Hindu
background … This is just a small sample of the diverse categories to which I may simultaneously belong.
The late Edward Said was one of the strongest advocates of this more dynamic and flexible perception of cultural heritage. Said (1994: 408) recognized and accepted the existence of cultural difference, but argued that our over-riding humanity can prove to be a far greater determining factor
when contemplating our identities and allegiances:
No one can deny the persisting continuities of long traditions, sustained habitations, national languages,
and cultural geographies, but there seems no reason except fear and prejudice to keep insisting on their
separation and distinctiveness, as if that was all human life was about.
This does not mean that all human difference should be discounted, or swept under the carpet
of common humanity. Yet the failure to theorize culture in all its amorphous complexities has
contributed to a radical otherness that describes people as more profoundly different than they
really are. Our contention is that people differ, and that people differ differently, but that there
is enough commonality to be found between any two human beings to get a genuine conversation going. And it is the educational application of this principle that features in the remainder
of this contribution.
A new approach to human difference
Sen’s focus on our multiple identities and allegiances and the notion of cultures as ‘incorrigibly
plural’ open up numerous avenues for the articulation of human difference in educational settings.
Allowing students to map their multiple identities, allegiances and affiliations can be a rewarding
and insightful learning experience. Students can be asked to write down and share their narratives
of how their allegiances have shifted under changing conditions and life experiences. What students
learn from this is what they most probably already knew intuitively: that individuals are members of
multiple groups, and that the pinning down of people to single and unchangeable group membership
is more likely to create confusion than to foster understanding. As Sen (2006: xii) puts it: ‘A solitarist approach can be a good way of misunderstanding nearly everyone in the world.’
In addition, the identity-approach offers possibilities to explore human diversity in terms of
interrelations beyond mere differences. This perspective is advocated by Fazal Rizvi (2006: 32),
who writes that:
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Van Oord and Corn
The notion of a pure culture, located within its own territory, has always been a myth because all cultures
result from their encounters with others. If this is so, then, relationality must be regarded as crucial for any
attempt to internationalise curriculum through cosmopolitan learning.
A more fruitful approach to human difference and the fostering of human engagement should
therefore be underpinned by the notion of relationality between cultural traditions and, more
importantly, individual people. While Figure 1 depicted the bridging model of intercultural
understanding, Figure 2 visualizes our suggested approach to the teaching of culture and human
difference, focusing on the relationality and incorrigible plurality of human traditions, including
cultural ones.
The difference between Figure 1 and Figure 2 is clear: Where the two cultures of Figure 1
were hermetically isolated within clear boundaries, the myriad cultural reality of Figure 2 lacks
such distinctions. The cultural traditions overlap and merge into a protean whole. Individual
people do not ‘leave’ their cultures to ‘bridge’ into other cultures, but establish direct connections with other individuals, whose identities may or may not be largely or partially embedded
in a similar or different cultural, religious or socio-economic habitat. The lines connecting the
individuals of Figure 2 should be seen as elastic ropes, not solid bars, as the individuals have a
degree of autonomy to position and reposition themselves in this permeable landscape without
necessarily disconnecting from others.
A focus on commonalities is more likely to result in fruitful human engagement than is our
desire to map and exaggerate the differences between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ It is in this context that
anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod (in Phillips, 2007: 24) suggests ‘an ethnography of the particular’
that aims to bring out the similarities in people’s daily lives. There particulars are likely:
[to] suggest that others live as we perceive ourselves living, not as robots programmed with ‘cultural’ rules
but as people going through life agonizing over decisions, making mistakes, trying to make themselves
look good, enduring tragedies and personal losses, enjoying others, and finding moments of happiness.
In mapping and exploring an alternative ethnography of cultures that is sceptical of impermeable
boundaries, it may thus be helpful at times to embrace the fluidities of language and imagery as
opposed to the rigidities of sociological models for a fuller insight into how to engage with the
Figure 2. The relationality model of human engagement.
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Journal of Research in International Education 12(1)
concept of cultures in education. With this in mind, let us therefore challenge and reconfigure
inadequate metaphors about bridges and borders. Let us interrogate and contest any over-stated
claims to that which is asserted as a fixed culture. As well, let us jettison the terminology of
intercultural understanding in favour of that of interpersonal engagement. Here the term ‘engage’
seems apposite and active as opposed to the passive and limited cognitive process of mere
‘understanding’. The latter term implies distance, detachment and, at best, a tolerance for otherness. Engagement is the more empathetic approach that, without negating difference, embraces
complexities and pluralities.
Another important underlying assumption of this perspective is that our many-cultured world
now consists of many-cultured societies consisting of many-cultured individuals and their numerous, at times group-related, allegiances and affiliations. The pressure and influence of these allegiances and affiliations form a person’s social identity – an amorphous and protean sense of who
one is and where one stands in relation to the social world. Cultural heritage and group membership
certainly play a role in this formulation of identity; a role which is bigger for some than for others.
The assertion that people are more and more ‘many-cultured’ assumes a wide-ranging variety of
difference. People are not only different from each other; groups of people are also different from
other groups of people. Furthermore, people differ differently as groups of people differ from each
other in a wide variety of ways. These differences change under a continuing process of crossfertilization and inter-group encounters. This fluid construction of identity is always a dynamic
rather than a static process.
Cultural liberty
The final and possibly most important underlying assumption is that individuals have some choices
to make. We have, or at least ought to have, the freedom to change our individual ways of going
about within the contexts that we find ourselves in, and reposition ourselves within or outside our
‘own’ cultural tradition. We have, in the words of Amartya Sen, a degree of ‘cultural liberty.’
Cultural liberty includes a number of things, Sen (2006: 114) argues, among which the ‘liberty to
question the automatic endorsement of past traditions, when people – particularly young people –
see a reason for changing their ways of living’.
The United Nations embraced the importance of cultural liberty in its 2004 Human Development
Report (UNDP, 2004). According to this report, ‘cultural liberty is a vital part of human development because being able to choose one’s identity – who one is – without losing the respect of others
or being excluded from other choices is important in leading a full life’ (UNDP, 2004: 1). The
notion of cultural liberty has been criticized as ‘tough liberalism’ (Nederveen Pieterse, 2005) and,
indeed, the cultural liberty approach sees the critical individual, not the culture from which he or
she emerges, as the main actor. To our mind, it is a much-needed redressing of the still dominant
deterministic model of culture.
Cultural liberty, then, is the capacity of people to live and be what they choose without being
excluded from other important commodities such as education, health care and job opportunities.
A defence of cultural liberty is a clear stance against the importance of cultural preservation, which
often takes a conservative position by glorifying endorsement of inherited traditions. Cultural
diversity is not a value in itself; it is only valuable insofar as it results from individual cultural
choices. To give just one example, a Muslim girl who is forced by her parents to wear the veil is
not enjoying cultural liberty. Likewise, the same girl who has to take her headdress off because the
school she attends does not allow students to wear religious clothing is also denied her cultural
liberty. In both cases she is not allowed to make an autonomous decision affecting her own life;
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others have done this for and to her. A person enjoys cultural freedom when he/she is able to completely abandon the cultural tradition he/she was born into, or to choose to fully embrace his/her
tradition, or indeed to navigate and negotiate their own position within such socially constructed
cultures. In most cases, individuals are likely to appreciate a large number of elements of their own
traditions while they may, at the same time, change or modify some elements. This process leads
to a continuous development of human societies and cultural traditions and, by doing so, explains
why cultures are not static and monolithic entities.
Educational implications
While postulating an alternative approach to human difference, we have largely focused on
some key differences between the ‘bridging model’ and our suggested ‘relationality model’,
presenting these two models as dualistic. We are fully aware that such an either/or approach has
its limitations, and we would like to stress that we do not fully dismiss the bridging model of
intercultural understanding. Culture can provide an obstacle in the pursuit of human engagement, particularly in deeply entrenched conflicts (Van Oord, 2008). The main purpose of the
argument is not to completely dismiss the bridging model but to provide a corrective critique to
an over-emphasis on difference.
In practical terms, the fostering of the relationality approach in educational environments will
entail a move away from traditional approaches to the celebration of cultural difference, in which
students and staff are categorized by national groups and are asked to share aspects of ‘their’ cultures. Focusing on relationality instead, students and staff could be encouraged to share individual
life stories, allowing individuals to narrate their cultural encounters and perspectives, discussing
how these many-cultured experiences have shaped their sense of self. A shift from a homogenous
interpretation of culture to one that encapsulates the incorrigibly plural nature of human experience
will place the individually lived experience at the centre stage. This approach would enable a student to develop the capacities to analyse and appreciate, but also criticize his/her own and others’
cultural heritage; identifying how his or her sense of self is linked to one or more cultural traditions. To our mind, an educational environment that fosters these capacities is crucial in the pursuit
of cultural liberty and a broader insight into how genuine human engagement across made-up
groups might operate.
By teasing out ambiguities and possibilities we would be doing those we educate a greater service than presenting them with desiccated versions of culture that embed, rather than challenge,
lazy stereotypes. As educators we must resist the intellectual slovenliness that is the inevitable
outcome of force-feeding hasty and reductive tropes about human difference. At the end of the
educative process, a student will probably be able to say, from personal experience and acquired
knowledge, that people the world over, regardless of their innumerable cultural, religious and
socio-economic differences are, in the end, pretty much the same.
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Author biographies
Lodewijk van Oord is Director of Studies at United World College (UWC) Waterford Kamhlaba, Swaziland,
where he also teaches Peace and Conflict Studies. Born in Madrid to Dutch parents, he grew up in
Switzerland, Mexico and Singapore. He completed his secondary and tertiary education in the Netherlands.
Before moving to Swaziland he taught at UWC Atlantic College, Wales.
Ken Corn is Director of Outreach and teacher of IB English and Theory of Knowledge at UWC Atlantic
College, Wales. Born in Chicago, raised in New York and latterly living in San Francisco, Ken has now spent
the second half of his life living and working in the UK (and briefly in Australia). He is both an American
citizen and a British citizen. He holds degrees and qualifications from both of these countries.
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