March-April 2007

To fulfill the potential of what Maxine Green (1988) describes as “a world lived in common with others,” our campuses must offer the opportunity for each of us to be touched by the lives of those different from us. We will never understand racism, class, social justice, international development, or the person sitting next to us without quietly listening to the stories of those who experience the world in different ways.

But as psychologist George Kelly (1963) suggests, learning from experience requires more than being in the vicinity of events when they occur. Learning emerges from our capacity to construe those events and then to reconstrue them in transformative ways. On today’s culturally complicated campuses, individuals are indeed in the presence of intercultural events, but more often than not, they are having an ethnocentric experience that they may be ill prepared to construe.

We have long known that simply bringing different racial and cultural groups into contact may generate more heat than light (Pettigrew, 2000). Depending on the readiness of the learners, our well-structured curriculum may fail to produce constructive interaction, much less the commitment to social justice that we have designed it to produce. Difficult dialogues about race, ethnicity, and other cultural differences are hindered when learners are developmentally unprepared to handle them (Bennett & Bennett, 2004).

Educators also face new challenges both in teaching about culture, and in teaching across cultures. While culture is often addressed in the content of the curriculum, it is less frequently incorporated into the process of teaching and learning. Thus, while we study the sociological consequences of racism, we may be ineffective in communicating with the African-American colleague across the hall. While we may master Japanese literature, we may not be able to read between the lines when a Japanese student attempts to share a problem with us.

In short, cultural knowledge does not equal intercultural competence. And being global citizens—seeing ourselves as members of a world community, as well as participants in our local contexts, knowing that we share the future with others—requires powerful forms of intercultural competence.

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