Teaching International Affairs With Cases

Crossnational Perspectives

Karen A. Mingst, Katsuhiko Mori

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367289492
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000313932
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book introduces intellectual and pedagogical problems in the case method of teaching international affairs. A growing international and interdisciplinary community of university and secondary schoolteachers and trainers of policy officials are introducing interactive learning methods for the classroom. This book offers lessons for them and provides new materials suitable for the classroom. Growing interest in interactive learning.

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Active Learning in Different Environments: The Influence of Culture in the Class

Karen A. Mingst

The Problem

The call for increasing use of active learning strategies in American education has broad-based support within the academy. In social studies and social sciences, proponents for active learning have been particularly vocal in the field of global education. In global education, substantive outcomes are sought (knowledge of interconnected global systems, international events, world cultures, global geography), as well as perceptual outcomes (cosmopolitanism). Integral to achievement of these new wide-ranging goals is the realization that pedagogical methods must change. Students learn that substance and perceptions are changed as they participate in active learning—in role-playing, creating maps, interviewing people, and working through real or hypothetical cases.

Although recognition of the critical impact of methodology began at the elementary and secondary school levels, it has spilled over into the university. The university climate is ripe for rethinking teaching methodologies, as both the public and the academy itself are increasingly dissatisfied with the product of traditional lecture formats and are therefore being forced to consider new methods appropriate to a new technological age. The evidence strongly suggests that when students are empowered through actively engaging the material, more learning occurs. As John Seely Brown, Allan Collins, and Paul Duguid observe:

People who use tools actively rather than just acquire them, by contrast, build an increasingly rich implicit understanding of the world in which they use the tools and of the tools themselves. The understanding, both of the world and of the tool, continually changes as a result of their interaction. Learning and acting are interestingly indistinct, learning being a continuous, life-long process resulting from acting in situations.¹

Although the general population of both children and young adults may learn more and better through active participation, research conducted in many American multicultural classrooms suggests the movement to active learning, and indeed the use of any particular learning technique, may not necessarily have the same impact on all participants. One group of studies posits that different cultural groups within the some classroom may learn differently. For example, the Hawaiian family socializes children to work interdependently within the group and with peers. Research suggests that such children may not be as motivated by individual rewards as are Caucasian students. Such children may learn just as effectively from peers as from teachers.²

If this is the case, the impact of active strategies on different learning groups may vary significantly. Thus educators need to be wary about adopting new methods or even actively promoting their export to other classroom settings. At the very least, we need to pay particular attention to their potential for differential reception.

Another group of studies finds that individual (rather than group) characteristics vary widely—that individuals themselves have different learning styles. These styles exist in three major domains: cognitive, affective, and physiological.³ Disagreement exists, however, on the extent to which these individual differences are inherent versus socialized, are shaped by age, gender, or kind of school, or are determined by all of the above at a young age. The question may probably never be fully answered. As Kenneth Cushner warns:

Teachers should realize that students bring a variety of motivation, learning styles, and cognitive patterns with them to the classroom. Culture can explain some of the variation; social class can also have an impact. Yet, there may be more within-group differences than between-group differences and educators are warned against making sweeping generalizations.⁴

If different teaching approaches differentially impact individuals, then teachers need “a whole repertoire of metaphors, demonstrations, stratagems, and examples to transform their understanding of the subject into terms that their students can grasp."⁵ And one of those repertoires, potentially tapping individual learning differences, may be active learning techniques. If different teaching approaches are more compatible with certain cultural groups than with others, we need to be careful about wholesale adoption of strategies inappropriate to the cultural setting.

Thus, this essay explores the question of whether different teaching strategies can be usefully exported into different cultural settings. Are there cross-national cultural differences in such areas as student/teacher interactions and the role of the group versus the individual in the classroom that would make the adoption of active learning strategies particularly appropriate and effective? Or, alternatively, would cultural differences prevent or interfere with the effective use of active learning techniques? Is case teaching, one such active learning strategy, likely to be successful across all cultural settings? Or might such approaches run so counter to the dominant classroom goals and styles that its use would be not only inappropriate but also detrimental?

There is ample evidence that the U.S. educational establishment, with all its faults and shortcomings, does explicitly and subtly export techniques and strategies to other countries. Both American Peace Corps teachers and Fulbright lecturers are transported to completely different cultural settings, charged with teaching an academic subject, but generally trained only to duplicate their own American experience. The thousands of international students trained in American institutions have experienced different teaching approaches, some of which are consciously or even unconsciously exported to their home country on their return.

The experiences of these groups are similar. In the United States, student and teacher interaction is informal, with students often injecting questions; the classroom, particularly at the lower grades, is an active environment where students are moving around with different tasks to perform, teachers working both individually and in small groups on tasks. Anecdotal evidence suggests that Peace Corps teachers have encountered problems in utilizing this set of classroom expectations in their new classrooms and have consequently adapted in quite different ways.⁶

American consultants called to different countries to explore educational reform begin often with the optimistic expectation that teaching styles and techniques can be usefully exported and successfully utilized in other settings. For example, in May 1995, 1 and several educators from different countries prepared papers for Cheju Island’s Ministry of Education in the Republic of Korea on our respective national experiences with internationalizing education. The project was intended to move forward the Korean effort to internationalize the primary and secondary education curricula. Among the recommendations I made emanating from the American experience was empowering individual teachers to be able not only to experiment with new curricula, but to encourage teachers to adopt active learning strategies.⁷ Yet, in a society where centralized national examinations continue to drive the system, room for curricular innovation and individual-oriented learning strategies is small indeed. And students themselves, socialized in the centralized examination process, would undoubtedly resist individual teacher-induced “diversions.” Nevertheless, our eternal American optimism and ethnocentrism continue unabated.

One American foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts, in collaboration with Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, has played a major role in promoting the use of one type of active learning technique: case-based teaching in international affairs at the international level. Although the initial program was aimed at enhancing the teaching of international affairs in American university classrooms, the program has had two side effects. First, some of those individuals trained in the case method have found themselves teaching in universities in other countries where the cultural context of the classroom may be quite different. How successful is case teaching in these very different environments? Second, the Kennedy School, particularly with the end of the Cold War and renewed interest in economic and political liberalization in other parts of the world, has found its faculty teaching training courses to bureaucrats and entrepreneurs on democratization and free market economics utilizing case teaching methodology. How successful is case teaching in this very different cultural setting, where middle-aged professional “learners” have been previously trained in a very different way?

Such individual educators do not significantly alter national educational “systems,” but they may provide useful evidence concerning the extent to which different learning approaches can be exported to diverse national cultures. Are there systematic distinctions in national cultures that suggest that various cultures learn differently? If the mechanism of learning does vary by culture, to what extent can teaching strategies seemingly at variance with the culture—significantly different from the normal experience and expected of the classroom—be effectively utilized? Are active strategies equally as successful in divergent national cultures?

Differences in National Cultures

Systematic differences among national cultures is a subject of much dispute among those in several disciplines. The debate persists, in part, because of the ambiguity of the term “culture.” For some in political science, since the term is so broad and ambiguous, all variance can be explained by culture; yet by explaining everything, “culture,” in fact, explains nothing. For others, particularly geographic area specialists, “culture,” although still vague, has meaning, and differences in more narrowly defined political culture do explain specific behaviors.

This debate has been waged most intensely in two issue areas: international negotiations and the politics of economic development. In international negotiations, does culture make a difference? One strand of literature suggests that, indeed, culture matters a lot in that it substantively affects the content of positions held by the negotiating parties. As such, it is often responsible for failure to reach consensus and accord.⁸ Another perspective contends that culture does not matter; its effects on multilateral negotiations are trivial or nonexistent.⁹ Yet another view suggests that culture matters some in that it affects the process of negotiation by differentially influencing the bargaining strategies and outcomes of a given negotiation.¹⁰

In the politics of economic development, one group points to the positive characteristics of individualistic cultures—individualism, self-worth, initiative, striving for self-improvement, the so-called Protestant ethic— as responsible for explaining economic success.¹¹ To others, although individual-level differences may explain differential success between specific individuals, differential success and failure at the national level must be traced to political and economic structural characteristics: the rigidity of governmental structures, rent-seeking behavior of governmental bureaucrats, structure of and placement in the international political economy.¹²

In cross-cultural psychology, there is little dispute as to whether culture makes a difference; it does. The challenge is to delineate the major dimensions of cultural variability. William Gudykunst, Stella Ting-Toomey, and Elizabeth Chua identify four dimensions of variability that have special applicability to the cross-national setting.

1. Individualism versus collectivism: This dimension differentiates between groups who accept the primacy of individual goals and individual standards of behavior from those groups who emphasize attainment of collective goals and norms. In the latter case, group harmony is desired to advance the group goals, while in the former case, competition is allowed and even encouraged in order to foster self-reliance, independence, and individual autonomy.

2. Low-context versus high-context communication: This dimension differentiates communication styles. In high-context situations, communication is internalized in the person and often expressed in a physical context. Since the communication is often aimed at individuals within the group, it is frequently indirect, concealing a speaker’s true intentions. In low-context communication, the emphasis is on the explicit transmitted part of the message. Speakers convey their wants and needs directly. Low-context communication is congruent to individualism, while high-context communication is congruent to collectivism.

3. Degree of uncertainty avoidance: This dimension distinguishes between those cultures that have high uncertainty avoidance—that is, individuals with low tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity—and those that do not. In high uncertainty avoidance cultures, there are more formal rules, in contrast to cultures that have a higher tolerance for ambiguity, potentially making the latter more accepting of change.

4. Degree of power distance: This dimension examines the extent to which less powerful members accept that power is distributed unequally. At one end of the spectrum are those who accept and even like the power hierarchy; those who disapprove or are uncomfortable in hierarchical situations are at the other end.¹³

A few psychologists have assigned scores on each of these dimensions for every country and region of the world.¹⁴ However, for our purposes, the most important finding from this delineation of variables and specific country scores is that one major crosscutting pattern emerges: the individualism versus collectivism variable.¹⁵ Because the other dimensions are largely isomorphic with the individualism/collectivism divide, we posit the critical divide between individualistic cultures, whose members use low-context communication, have a higher tolerance for ambiguity, and are uncomfortable with power distances, and collectivist cultures, whose members employ high-context communication, are more intolerant of ambiguity and uncertainty, and are therefore comfortable with and approve of greater power distances.

Cross-cultural psychologists have identified behavioral manifestations of these cultural variabilities. Two areas stand out. First, these cultural differences impact norms of behavior generally. In individualistic cultures, norms of equity are most often invoked, based on the notion that each individual deserves rewards based on one’s contribution to the task. If more is given to a certain individual, it is based on voluntary reciprocity. In contrast, collectivist cultures value the norm of equality, based on what everyone should gain accordi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Active Learning in Different Environments: The Influence of Culture in the Class
• Part One Case Teaching in Non-American Contexts
• Part Two Non-American Based Cases
• About the Editors and Contributors
• Index
• About the Book