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This new section of the e-newsletter offers cultural and global competency development training and consulting tips for professionals.

The diversity training materials presented is arranged in procedural steps so that you can easily use the information to conduct cultural and global competency training on your own.  

Teachers, trainers, and consultants who wish to develop or augment their cultural competency training expertise find the information very valuable. Both beginners and experts will find the information useful.  

A Warning About Training Competency: The diversity training and consultation field too often involves dealing with volatile subject matter. In this way it is very similar to the mediation profession. One reason the profession has not become well established in our expert opinion is that too many people who are not cultural competency experts have taken on diversity work.

We liken the expertise problem to someone deciding to build a house without construction training. She may think that she is a natural because she comes from a legacy of construction workers in her family. Because she has heard their stories, which give her a sense of what it takes to be successful, does not translate into skillfully constructing a house.

Or she may have an affinity for the work based on building small structures on her own with very little help and from her imagination. The problem is that doing the real thing can very well result in it crumbling underneath or on top of her due to lack of expertise.

Too often the result of good intentioned, but poorly trained, folks doing diversity work is that they often leave a legacy of anger and resentment toward diversity training within the organization. One sector of the United States government can no longer have a civil conversation about diversity as a result of the scars left from full organization diversity training efforts that were poorly conducted.

Be cautious about presenting yourself as a diversity expert without having developed the competency needed to competently conduct training. While many of you will have to learn the hard way because you believe this profession is a piece of cake, those who take the time to develop the expertise will avoid the pitfalls of being unprepared to unexpected traumatic events that inevitably occur in this work.

Ask yourself the following questions to determine your preparedness:

• Am I be able to make a credible list of the knowledge, skills, and professional experiences that make me an expert, if a potential customer asks me to do so?
• Do I have at least three references that are willing to vouch for my expertise from first hand experience with my work?
• Do I have formal training that specifically developed the expertise (e.g., completion of a degree or certificate program)?

These are the basic questions you should HONESTLY ask yourself before putting yourself in harm's way because if something can go wrong, it will.

What can you do to prepare? Take at least four courses or workshops (This is the minimum):

• Take a diversity awareness course to check out your own assumptions about diversity and to determine if it is the profession that fits your values and beliefs.
• Take a course on organizational assessment and development
• Take a workshop for diversity professionals that provide training skills development
• Take a course training design, development, implementation, and evaluation
• You may be able to get around taking the full set of courses if you collaborate with someone who can compliment your weak areas.

This is the primary way to learn the profession. You may be great at training, have a lot of knowledge about diversity, and have the right attitude, and still find yourself over your head in this work. You become a master cultural competency professional only by learning from an expert within a formal or apprenticeship program.  

Global Values Exercise: [1]

Understanding your global diversity attitude

Purpose: The purpose of this lesson is to demonstrate that it is difficult to pretend that differences do not matter in a global society.

Objectives: Help participants uncover their values and beliefs about global differences.

Introduction: Read the Making the Case for Cultural & Global Competency Development lessons above.

Time: 20-90 minutes

Group size: Can be used as an individual feedback assessment or as a group exercise.

Materials:

·   Riding the waves of culture by Fons Trompenaars & Charles Hampden-Turner (20020). ISBN 1-85788-176-1. Nicholas-Brealey Pub.: London.

·   Lecturette (see below)

·   Global Values exercise below

Preparation:

Read or review the Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner book and develop a lecture based on the main points you want to cover.

Procedures:

Step 1: Introduce the workshop by covering the goals and objectives, and any logistics (e.g., breaks, restroom locations, turning off cell phones, etc.).

Step 2: Go over the lecturette below.

Step 3. Hand out the exercise in Appendix A below. Instructions: This exercise requires you to read a set of 12 items and provide a response to each. Use the score key to provide your answer. I will use the first item “There is an exception to every rule” as an example.

·      If this item is related to a value, need, want or belief I currently hold, then I would score it with an S in the blank to the left.

·      If it represents something that is not acceptable to myself, but I feel that it is acceptable for others, then I score it as O.

·      If I do not believe it is acceptable for myself or others, then it receives a N

·      I score it as U if I am undecided as to what my attitude towards the item

You will have 10 minutes to complete the items individually.  

After you complete the form, please form dyads to talk about what you learned. This is where the brackets to the right of each item becomes relevant. As you answer each item, decide if you believe it is okay for you to talk about it with others or not. Place a check mark in the bracket next to any item you do not want for whatever reason to talk about so as to flag it. This way you can focus on the items you are more comfortable discussing during the dyad conversation. 

Any questions? Ready? Get started.

Step 4. Now find a partner to discuss what you have learned. You have 10 minutes.

Step 5. Okay. Let’s come back to our original positions. Would anyone like to share what she or he discovered while doing this exercise?

Step 6. Your answers point out the challenges of working productively with people from other cultures.

Step 7. I will now cover the five relational orientations and you will begin to see how your answers represent a worldview that comes out of your cultural background.

Step 8. Let’s discuss the things covered in the lecture and how they relate to what was learned in the exercise.

Step 9. Concluding remarks

Lecturette:

Given the increased number of businesses going global, successful mergers, acquisitions, and marketing is directly influenced by cultural competence.

One of the major obstacles to achieving a global community is the ways in which culture unconsciously influence how we make sense out of the world. As we increasingly come into contact with people with worldviews different from our own, the differences create cultural barriers to effective communication and cooperation.

It is to our advantage to uncover the deep-seated values and beliefs that influence our lenses, or worldview. In addition, any insights we get concerning how our worldview matches and differs from people from other cultures, the more we can competently cross the globe.

Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner have studied people from different parts of the world in an effort to uncover the ways in which culture distinguishes people in terms of worldview. They were interested in understanding worldview with regards to three universal problems:

·      Barriers to interpersonal relationships

·      Barriers due to different conceptions of time

·      Barriers due to differential relationships to the environment

They posed problems to participants in their studies, which related to the above problems.

The participants’ solutions to the problems Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner posed to them enabled the researchers to uncover seven dimensions of culture that influence worldview. Five of the dimensions are relevant to cultural differences in worldviews about interpersonal relationship, which we focus on in this workshop. The five cultural differences are as follows:

·            Universalism-Particularism

·            Individualism-Communitarianism

·            Neutral-emotional

·            Specific-diffuse

·            Achievement-ascription

Each set is considered a continuum and, although different cultures overall tend to fall on one end or the other, all cultures have some of each. Americans tend to have a Particularistic worldview, for example, while Japanese tend to have a Particularistic worldview. However, there are many Americans who are more Particularistic and many Japanese who are more Universalistic. We can see this variability to the extent that we meet a number of people from any culture. While many will fit the stereotypical worldview category, a number of them will not.

The exercise you will take part in during this workshop provides you with insights into these dimensions. At the conclusion of the exercise, we will discuss these dimensions in more detail.

[Facilitator-Trainer: You will need to create your own lecturette based on reading the book, Riding the Waves of Culture.]

APPENDIX A

GLOBAL VALUES EXERCISE 

SCORING KEY

S = a value, need, want, or belief in my own value system O = a value, need, want, or belief acceptable for others but not for myself N = a value, need, want, or belief not acceptable for myself or others U = undecided

_____ There is an exception to each rule _____  People should receive a raise for either performance or due to personal need (e.g., family hardship). _____  I feel that loyalty in a friendship means that one will choose to distort the truth to protect her or him even for their wrongful actions. _____  A contract is a contract. If someone does not abide by it, s/he must suffer the consequences, no matter how close you are to the person. _____ Even if an individual is working closely with a team, any negligence on that person’s behalf is her or his responsibility alone. _____ It is more efficient and competent for an individual to make a time-sensitive decision based on the best information available, than to risk loss by taking more time to confer with colleagues and managers. _____ The organization one works for is an extension of one’s family  _____ Cooperation is more important in making an organization successful than competitiveness. _____ It is best to avoid showing any weakness in the workplace because doing so will make you vulnerable. _____ It is best to focus on the business at hand and discuss personal life matters to the extent that you have time. _____ It is preferable to have colleagues who do their work, attend to their own business, and allow others to do the same. _____ If a colleague adamantly disagrees with you, the individual is untrustworthy in making decisions that will directly affect you.

(        ) (        ) (        ) (        ) (        ) (        ) (        ) (        ) (        ) (        ) (        )

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Diversity in the News

A Buddhist Nun Finds Her African Soul

Despite the name Faith, I'm an unlikely candidate for spiritual aspirations. Strangers are surprised to learn that I spent a Lenten season as a Buddhist nun in the Thai forest. Their eyes widen, taking in all of me, as mine drop, seeking the floor lights marking the exit. I dread the questions, but even more I dread my stock answers, chanted like an unholy mantra. Yup, I'm not Asian. Nope, I'm not some New Ager on a holy trek to the food co-op. Nah, I don't particularly believe in religion. I don't even believe in camping. To complicate matters further -- their eyes narrow, homing in on me -- I am black. Physically soft. Pierced! And what they may not know -- addicted to African dance grooves, snacks involving processed flour and sugar, good jewelry, and bad television.

There were two reasons I found myself in the Thai forest, stripped of my curls and eyebrows and sporting strange undergarments. The first was, surprisingly, comfort. I'd been to northern Thailand before -- my junior year of high school -- and the experience had satisfied my lifelong quest for fairness. For me at that time, Thailand was a place that worked in a way that America, for all its immigrant narratives about hard work paying off, did not. It was a place where merit was truly rewarded.

At age 15, my obsession with getting the hell out of small-town America was finally within reach: I had made it into the final round of applicants for the Rotary Club International Youth Exchange program. After I plowed through a barrage of questions about global affairs and cultural sensitivity, my answers honed sharp with teenage determination, the selection committee invited my mother into the Holiday Inn conference room. Together we did a tag-team performance about my upbringing: how she supplemented my public-school education with home schooling from her old college history and anthropology and religion textbooks; how I'd petitioned the school board to be allowed to study both Spanish and French; how we dressed in makeshift rebozos and saris and dashikis for our monthly United Nations Day dinners and tried recipes for crepes and piroshki and kimchi from the Time-Life international cookbook series at the library; how neither of us expected me to be homesick. We dissembled a bit when it came to my picky palate; after all, we both knew that when push came to shove, I'd eat blood soup and fermented fish paste and roasted beetles. Dammit, I'd been raised to travel!

A pleasant-faced, well-groomed man raised his hand. "I have one last question." I fastened bright, attentive eyes on him.

"Do you anticipate any problems stemming from Faith's race? Most of the world assumes that Americans are white." He smiled. "We of course know that's not the case, but how will you handle those expectations, Faith?"

My eyes sought out my white mother, who blinked her icy Scandinavian blues. Had she forgotten I was black, or was she getting ready to take him out, despite his reasonable phrasing?

"That's an interesting question," she said. "Faith's blackness never even occurred to me until I was waiting there in the hall and noticed that every other applicant was white."

I held my breath, willing this to be the one battle she walked away from. We had a chance. She was apple-cheeked and blue-eyed and cowlicked, a farmer's daughter like their own mothers, and looked genuinely rueful about her discovery.

As I prayed feverishly, she let out a slow chuckle. The Rotarians followed suit. Then it was my turn.

I was ready. This was the question I had been answering all my life. Who better to represent America than I? Who was more American than the offspring of two New World poles -- a mother descended from Scandinavian immigrants and a student father from newly independent Africa? Who more up to the task of proving herself? To the task of translation? I could do it in my sleep. Every day I was an exchange student in my own country.

And you, I surely intimated to the table of white men and women, imagine how progressive you will look!

Afterwards, our local Rotary president was ecstatic. Here we came, a tiny rural club from eastern Washington State with the only black candidate, and swept the entire Northwest Inland Region, Canada included! "No one has ever scored so high on adaptability," he raved to my mother. "She'll be able to take her pick of countries. Anywhere she wants!"

That night we sipped the closest thing to champagne our town offered, giggling all the while. As long as I could remember, my mother and I had dreamed of international travel, her dream blurring into mine, my opportunities hers. We decided that I should spend the school year in Europe, developing my French, while she saved money to join me in the summer. We would visit Finland, my grandmother's homeland, and Sweden, my grandfather's, during the midnight sun. Or I should spend the school year in Latin America, perfecting my Spanish, and we would meet in Mexico at the Ballet Folklórico. All that hard work had paid off; it was simply up to me to pick!

A second call came as I sat at the kitchen table poring over Time-Life's World's Great Religions. The Rotary adviser assigned to me sounded tentative and apologetic. "There's been, uh, a change in plans," he reported. "You're being sent to a small town in northern Thailand." He said it twice, pronouncing it once Tai-land and once Thigh-land.

In the silence of my caught breath, he pressed on. "This town, Chiang Rai, has been having problems. None of the American exchange students can adapt. They can't eat the food, learn the language, stand the heat. They cause their host families trouble. Rotary Thailand is considering canceling the entire exchange program."

"But what about getting to choose?" I demanded, finally able to speak, more concerned with equity than with the possibility of being sent to a place I knew nothing about (other than the fact I was fairly certain it did not abound with thighs). "I was told that I ranked high enough -- "

"You did," my adviser confirmed. He sounded like a very nice guy who wished he were anywhere but on the phone with a teary teenager. "And I'm terribly sorry. But you're their last hope. If you can't adapt, they'll give up on the Thailand program."

And so it began. Already I suffered from migraines and chronic after-dinner burps ("Nerves," the doctor had said with a shrug). Now I'd been enlisted to save Thailand.

Eventually a more rational thought presented itself: "Hey," I blurted, "where's Thailand?"

It was 1979, pre-adventure travel, pre-mountain treks, pre-Pan-Asian cuisine. Way before embroidered Burmese backpacks and Indonesian rayon sarongs and pad thai takeout. Years in advance of the Travel Channel and Hmong refugees and canned coconut milk. Where the hell was Thailand?

I could almost hear the man wince, a crack like static. "I think it's near Vietnam." He paused. Crack. "And Cambodia."

Scenes of fire flared in my mind. Self-immolating monks aflame in busy Vietnamese streets. The Napalm Girl running down the road, flesh sizzling. American GI's burning green villages. We were just four years out of Vietnam, the homeless vets collecting behind Seattle's Greyhound terminal, flasks in paper bags tucked beneath the stumps of arms. Vietnam had invaded Cambodia, ending four years of Khmer Rouge rule. The stories were just trickling out. One-fifth of the country's population dead of forced labor, starvation, murder. Children sent to war. Heaps of skulls along the border.

I gripped the table. I was going to die. I had scored the highest in the entire Northwest Inland Region and my reward was being sent to war.

"Please," the man pleaded, "I'm sure Thailand's interesting. I'm sorry to say that I don't know much about it, but. ..." He petered off.

In the midst of the war reel running in my head, a second, pettier thought emerged. The other exchange students didn't have to prove their suitability despite their race. They didn't have to be the best, and yet in the end they were packing their bags for France and England and Costa Rica, while I, who earned my ranking, was off to the Hanoi Hilton.

When an hour later my mother rushed in, red-cheeked and breathless from her speed-walk downtown, toting a stack of library books about Thailand, I was still moaning about my intention to leave the United States and move to a country where merit damn well got rewarded. For a week I sulked, refusing to let her tell me anything about my new home.

Eventually, of course, curiosity got the better of me. I watched her devour the library books and send away for travel brochures. I overheard her crow, "Never been a colony!" on the phone.

"Do you want to hear about Thailand?" she asked, eyes lighting up.

I nodded, unable to fight the blood I had inherited, feeling it warm to the pulse of adventure.

"Great!" She grabbed her notes and hopped onto her bed, patting the spread next to her. "It's truly fascinating!"

And once I opened myself to the idea of some unknown country near Vietnam and Cambodia not yet on tourist maps, I too began to see the possibilities. This was virgin territory, literally uncolonized, unconquered, unexplored. The best Rotary had to offer had tried and failed. Now I, at 15 the first black ambassador, was being sent in to do the job. I had been raised to love the quest. "Tell me I can't, and I must" was practically our family motto. I had no intention of failing.

The second reason I found myself ordained in the Thai forest, stripped of contact with friends and family and having taken a vow of silence, was failure. In the five years between my high-school exchange and my sophomore year of college, the expectations of Holiday Inn Rotarians had melted into benign nostalgia. Thailand had taught me my role as the Adaptable Foreigner, and had richly rewarded my efforts. Not-yet-discovered Southeast Asia was a great place to be free, or rather to be so alone, that little was required of one. The entire society, beginning with Buddhism itself, was based on earning and rewarding merit. Glowing with confidence after my year, I'd fastened my sights on home, on the last great bastion of American meritocracy -- a university education. And it was there, at Harvard, the ultimate American institution to which I had won a scholarship, that I would learn failure -- and nearly die in the process.

Though the events driving my second trip to Thailand are more recent than the first, they're harder to remember. I recall a few hazy images: I'm 21, creeping through the courtyard of my dorm with a raincoat over my head. Two friends flank me, guiding my steps and holding the coat in place. It's dark beneath the coat and quiet, my friends' voices muffled and singsong. The plan is to get into Harvard Square and avoid being spotted by a professor who wants to help me pass his class.

The class, a special seminar on international human rights, is the exact course I imagined when I imagined college as my salvation from rural life. The focus is Southeast Asian refugees; the classroom is in my own dormitory; the professor is willing to let me write about my high-school-exchange experience in Thailand and my current volunteer work with Cambodian and Laotian refugees. All I need to do is go explain my chronic absences and incomplete work. Each week after class he stands in the courtyard outside the classroom, waiting.

Beneath my raincoat, I stagger and sweat. If I could explain, don't you think I would? My two friends giggle and steer, amazed at the lengths to which I will go to fail.

All that spring, I cried. Even when raging at my boyfriend for imagined transgressions, or teaching English to refugees who woke each morning to find their memories as barren as the bombed territory they'd fled, or ladling soup to the homeless outside Harvard's wrought-iron gates, or staring numbly at my worried mother during the rare vacation when I could afford to go home, I was really crying.

Besides nearly killing me, college taught me several things. Namely, that external identity mattered. Being black mattered. It determined where to get off the Boston subway without receiving a baseball bat to the head. Being the biracial child of a single, white mother determined which whites would use me, breezily, cheaply, to integrate certain spaces and which blacks would turn their backs, stage-whispering about "messed-up Oreos." Being female determined the number of times I would cross my professors' minds, and the number of men who would grope me, curious for integration of a sort. Being from the rural Northwest encouraged peers to laugh at my accent and unfamiliarity with The New York Times. Being on financial aid meant I spent my vacations huddled in dormitory rooms with the heat turned off, my afternoons serving Faculty Club highballs to pinstripe-suited recruiters who placed their tips wearily in my hand with a whispered confession: "You're probably better off where you are." Yes, the outside mattered, and it all mattered more than what I believed did.

The spring of my sophomore year, the spring before I headed to Thailand for the second time, I was already sick from the long Boston winter -- skin pale, legs bowed like a sailor's. In a desperate bid to save myself, I orchestrated a foolproof exit. My plan, if I could call it that, was brilliant in its simplicity. I committed myself to an exhausting mesh of responsibilities -- classes, independent study projects, volunteer extracurriculars, work-study jobs. My net was taut, intricate. Then, once everybody expected great things of me, I jumped ship. The splash could be heard all the way to Washington, where my mother was trying to teach gang kids to read, all the way over to Nigeria, where my father was arrested in the coup that ended democracy for the next 16 years.

It began during Harvard's notorious reading period. While other students scrambled to master an entire semester's worth of information in two weeks, aided by yachtloads of pharmaceuticals, I sat in my room with the phone blaring off the hook, too depressed to finish my term papers or take my exams, and too scared to get a dial tone and ask for help.

By the time exam period washed in, I'd given up any pretense of treading water. Slowly I began to sink. It would be years before I realized what actually happened, before I recognized the signs -- waking up already weak from tears, days spent in bed, avoiding friends -- of my breakdown. The self hadn't sunk. It, along with an entire raft of values, had hit bottom and shattered. Once it was too late to salvage my college career, I put the phone back on its cradle and waited, shivering like a wet dog, for Harvard to respond to its wasted investment in my potential. A lifelong perfectionist, I took a certain dull pride in my commitment to complete failure. An official directive arrived expressing sympathy for my father's imprisonment and disapproval over my behavior. I was told to leave campus for a year.

During short bursts of sugar highs, I packed my bags, thinking it wasn't enough to leave campus. The site of failure was so much wider. And so, mismatched socks trailing out of my grandfather's army duffel, I chose true exile. I would leave Cambridge, New England, the United States, North America, the entire Western Hemisphere!

When I fled my country, I didn't take a map. I wasn't looking for anything. I sensed, without yet being able to articulate it, that Harvard represented the very essence of the West that didn't work for me. All I knew for sure was that I was drowning, a constant pressure on my chest to choose between things I could not choose between -- black or white America, material or spiritual gain, gender or racial allegiance, beauty or safety, myself or others -- choose, choose! With each dichotomy I sputtered, taking on water. For the first time in my life, I was lost. Even if I could swim, where was the shore?

So why the Thai forest? In my haze, I remembered Thailand. I remembered that Eastern culture opposed oppositionals, that ambiguity flowered like orchids. There I could be brown -- not interwoven shreds of black or white flesh only resembling it from a distance. There perhaps I could catch my breath as I prepared to do battle for my place in America.

And why a Buddhist nun? This I don't know. I'm as surprised as anyone. When I returned to Thailand, I dedicated myself to a Grand Fieldwork Project, believing that I would therein avenge my academic failure and redeem my intellect. And I did just that (yes, happily, I am no dolt). But I had no such plan to redeem myself. If I had planned to start again, it certainly wouldn't have been in a world where the independent self did not exist. How could stripping possibly save anyone's life?

If I'd been thinking, I wouldn't have chosen to erase all physical identifiers and swaddle my body in sexless layers of white cloth. It wouldn't have occurred to me to try to reconstruct an identity free of this troubling, marked body. Nonetheless, the surprising decision to ordain and what I learned during my short, short tenure as a nun revised the very premises of my life. I'd been raised to believe in myself, in intellect, in the Western tenets of self and science, and I'd taught myself not to fail. Soon everything I knew and counted on would be stripped away. As it turned out, failure was the first step toward real life.

Faith Adiele is an assistant professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. This excerpt is from Meeting Faith: The Forest Journals of a Black Buddhist Nun, published this month by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. Copyright © 2004 by Faith Adiele.

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Bonfires of Belfast (Dedicated to Cait, the global Goddess from Ireland)

Like the wounded limbs

Of the dying Celt

Skankill Road and Falls Road

Converge in a city divided against itself

By a wall of bigotry and blood—

Royal orange and Republican green

West Belfast: White Soweto, occupied-British territory

Random roadblocks, army gray personnel carriers

Barbed wire and san bags

Thatcher’s eye in the sky watches

Over a giant mural of Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela

Ireland unites under Sinn Fein—

Milltown Cemetery is a barren flat place in the midst

Populated by tombstones, monuments to martyrs

Volunteer Bobby Sands—

East Belfast: mural of masked men holding guns

Ulster Volunteer Force (U.V.F.)

           Ulster Defense Association (U.D.A.)

                      Ulster Freedom Fighters (U.F.F.)

Hatred scribbled on walls

King Billy on his rearing white sash—

The children’s eyes, bonfires in August

Celebrate the victorious defeat of both sides in Belfast

by Thomas Gayton in Two Races One Face: Poetry & prose by Tom Gayton and John Peterson. (1993). Drury Lane Press: San Diego.

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