How Does Our Culture Affect How we Learn? by Peter Welch
A research group at the International School of Helsinki has been exploring how we can map cultural dispositions to learning and communication styles in our classrooms. Our ambition is to develop practical tools that help teachers understand and leverage cultural diversity. This ambition is based on three insights shared by many educators in international schools:
First, many of our schools remain fundamentally ‘western’ in outlook, in our curriculum and the perspective of most of our educators. This paradigm needs to evolve in a constructive, practical manner.
Second, our schools are characterized by tremendous cultural diversity, yet rarely do we mine this richness of perspectives on what life is all about.
Third, if we are truly serving this generation of students we must be intentional about nurturing cultural intelligence. Our global citizens will live and work across borders in our evermore-connected world. To thrive they will need the soft skills that help get the best out of people with very different cultural norms.
We wanted to find a way of measuring different cultural values and assumptions and how they manifest at our school. We developed different dimensions that are relevant to learning and communication styles:
*Teacher-student relationships
*Competition and collaboration
*Linearity and non-linearity
*Direct and indirect communication
*Cross-cultural communication
We then drafted sets of questions to measure these five dimensions. Over two months of discussion with students and colleagues we developed an online questionnaire, drawing on a wide range of cultural theory and adapting it to a school environment. We gave the questionnaire to all our Upper School students (Grade 6 to 12). Then we asked our Upper School teachers to answer it with the model answers that we would want at ISH. Then we compared the two data sets. The results were fascinating. There was a great deal of overlap, but it was instructive for colleagues to discuss where the student and teacher data was not aligned. For example, we want our students to be comfortable making mistakes in class, but the data shows that this is not always true. How does culture equate to comfort with the idea of making mistakes and taking risks in class?
This all fits perfectly into ISH’s conversation about using data to individualize learning. The results give our teachers great insight into the learning and communication preferences of their students. We can measure the success we are having with the values in our vision and mission statements. At ISH we talk about empowering our students. The data shows that the longer students are at ISH the teacher-student relationship tips towards more empowerment. We can also show that our students are developing better cross-cultural communication skills over time. This is great data to share with Boards, especially in Finland where we have to define our value-added educational currency very clearly. Our next step is to create a similar questionnaire for our parents as a way of aligning educational values and expectations.
ISH is partnering with the Council of International Schools (CIS) on the further development of this questionnaire model. It is excellent that CIS and a growing number of international schools are increasing their focus on intercultural learning. We believe that this questionnaire has tremendous potential to measure the soft skills that we value. The sophisticated questionnaire platform that is being developed will allow educators to splice the data quickly by gender, age and other factors as well as culture. If you are interested in being part of this study, please be in touch.
My thanks go to in particular to Robin Schneider for his partnership in this project, to Grade 5L, the High School Student Council, Gabrielle Welch and to my colleagues in the research group: Caitlin Bestard, Rachel Curle, Matthew Derrett, Linda Gerberich, Peter Goodman, Jyri-Pekka Komonen, Sue Laws, Chandra McGowan, Brent Pinkerton, Alwyn Roberts, Minna Tammivuori-Piraux and Carrie Turunen.
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