Cultural competence: a new challenge

This week, it was Spring break time in Tulane, so, we had not felt the emotions of Skype.
We had to discuss about cultural competences and try to correct the mistakes in our edited pages on Recycling in Italy and Recycling in USA.
When someone says to you that there is a mistake, it’s not difficult to find it. The main difficulty is avoiding mistakes in your papers.

To enrich our knowledge on culture competence, we had to read 3 different web sites at home and fill a questionnaire.
This questionnaire retrieved on http://www.sit.edu/publications/docs/competence.pdf showed us that that we are less open-minded than we believe. We learned that being intercultural competent requires specific competences and a certain amount of awareness.
If it is true that “Looking out is looking in”, we have to revolve around our culture to really know another culture but, at the same time, if we don’t want to fall into ethnocentrism, we must distance ourselves from our culture.

I found quite fun the site suggested by Sarah concerning stereotypes about Italian culture.
To be not afraid of the unknown, people tend to create models and images; in doing so, they filtered a culture with pre-established schemes, creating stereotypes.
Sometimes we associated a culture to material elements, such as food (Germans with wurstel and beer), or clothes (Scottish with kilt) or we simply choose one person such as Queen Elizabeth or Dante to represent a culture.
Every time we do that we are running down the tradition and the history of a culture, but what really matters is awareness, the awareness of the schemes we are applying to a culture that is richer than what we think.
Learning a foreign language requires the knowledge of a culture because we cannot separate a language from the context in which it was born. Knowing a culture is also useful to understand how a language can vary according to the different places where it is spoken.

I would like to be cultural competent but I don’t think the questionnaire can help me.
I mean that is only one step I have to do, that is the step of the collection of information. In fact, it does not explain how to combine theory with practice.
I can become an expert of the theory of cultural competence but I will not be a complete person if I don’t know how to deal with the foreigners coming to my town.
And all this will be possible only thanks to the respect of a culture. It does not necessarily mean that our culture must fit to others, because, first of all, we have to respect our own culture; I think that one has to ask oneself ”What I really know about my own culture?”

Last week I was surfing the Net in search of information for the e-tivity 3 and I found a site (I don’t remember the URL, sorry!) in which everyone has to describe the behaviours of his “compatriots” on certain occasions.
I learned than in Italy everybody is supposed to do the crèche at Christmas and this is the only thing WE do in this occasion. I think it is rather short-sighted and false.
No distinction about religion was made.

So, in brief, don’t base your considerations on a culture on what you have learned from one single person, go beyond! Visit a country and take notes, comparison is needed.

My cousin Elena left Italy for Spain when she was eighteenth (she wasn’t allowed before) because she hated Italian culture (more or less her words!). I can’t imagine what she could say about it to a foreign person.
But that’s the beauty of culture! Not a single culture inside one Culture!


These are only my thoughts.



Francesca