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relations to other people; what she/he is worthy of is fully determined by what human relations she/he aspires to and what human relations to other people she/he is capable to establish” (Rubenstein, 1957, p.167). Consequently, what relations students and teachers aspire to establish in the classroom will determine their value orientations/hierarchy, as these relationships are internalized by people (Vygotsky, 1989) and then determine their behavioural patterns and attitudes toward the rest of the world.
Meaningful dialogue entails reflection “to develop power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation” (Freire, Ibid, p.81).
Although the dialectical relations of people and the world exist independently of how these relations are perceived, we agree with Freire that the form of action people adopt is to a large extent a function of how they perceive themselves in the world. In such a way, the reflective experience becomes one of the major driving forces in transforming self and the world; it enhances self-awareness and world-awareness and motivates people to act accordingly. In a meaningful classroom we need to achieve such a level of reflection, when students become more action-oriented, liberated, productive and socially responsible. In order to become such, they need to be engaged in meaningful activities, relevant to their life experiences and provided conditions for personal discoveries (Zvenigorodskaya, 2001).
Human subjective power is recognized (Leontiev, 1975; Zinchenko, 2004) as one of the major driving forces in the process of personality self-development, although this process is not recognized as absolutely intentional by nature. According to Leontiev’s psychological theory of individual development, personality self-creation can be viewed as the process of human nature unfolding its potential, initially under the strong influence of such external factors, as heredity, environment, and education/nurturing. Self-creation progresses with individual self-transformation and is conditioned by subjective power and self-creating activity. Self-creating human activity will/can only come from an individual her/himself and has to be supported by meaningful education in order for a personality to reach the fullness of her/his life. As a process, personality self-development is never ending and can be described as ”constant inner revision” (Kulikova, 2003) with transformation of one’s values towards universal moral norms, such as faith and hope, freedom and responsibility, etc... It is human desire to overcome selfinsufficiency that leads a personality to the point when he/she makes a conscious decision to become better than the one existing. Thus, she/he becomes the subject of her/his own life, capable of consciously constructing her/his life strategy.
As educators, we should consider that like every transformation in general, personal transformation entails not linear progress, but some points of regression and even stagnation as we progress. In fact, students should learn to welcome confusion and chaos as a transitory state between their prior convictions and new personal perspectives when they experience meaningful and transformative self-development. It can also be viewed as a reversible process of quantitative and qualitative transformations of psychological attributes and states which add to one another in timely reformations. (Maralov, 1993).
To conclude, the theories focus on innate human capacity for self-growth and reveal psychological tools of personality self-development, such as dialogic/interactive nature of human relations, human subjective power/activity in self-creation, and reflective experience, so that we can relate them to a general curriculum about meaningful education.
The following characteristics of meaningful education can demonstrate that it serves a resource of global learning and that global learning experiences can be fully integrated in it:
1.It upgrades thinking, critical thinking, in particular.
2.It is experiential and increases relevance to participants’ personal life experiences.
3.It entails dialogic approach, which engages students and teachers negotiating meanings and solving problems as partners.
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Global learning entails self-managed/directed learning as well as partnerships with colleagues and teachers in the education process. It is also experiential and dialogic by nature. The resourceful part of meaningful education is imbedded in its anthropological nature because it is oriented on humanist values and support for personal growth of individuals. It is holistic since it or because it embraces all aspects of personal growth.
In the next sections, implications of meaningful education and some of my personal experiences in teaching, intercultural communication meaningfully will be discussed as illustrations of its value for the global graduate preparation. This might be looked upon as an attempt to incorporate pragmatic approaches in Western education, such as strategic and selfmanaged learning into meaningful education in Russian humanist tradition, based on belief in internal human quest for self perfection and value-orientation to the world.
In the existing global community all people need to raise awareness about intercultural issues. How do we teach/learn mutual transformation towards intercultural awareness of a global graduate? We speculate that a global graduate must be culturally intelligent in order to be able to effectively interact in various cultural environments. This explains our particular interest in developing cultural intelligence in the context of teaching intercultural communication. According to the theory of developing cultural intelligence, suggested by Early and Peterson, it involves meta-learning, motivational learning and behavioural learning (Earley, Peterson, 2004). Along with the authors of the theory, we recognize that cultural intelligence is one of the essential attributes for a global graduate. Such a graduate must be able to combine new cultural patterns into a coherent picture, even if she/he does not know what the coherent picture might look like. To do so requires a higher level of strategy for interaction with people, places and events. Strategy involves goal setting, self-management skills, and reflection. Our contention is that developing cultural intelligence involves not only acquiring certain skills and strategies, but holistic personality growth, if meaningful learning/teaching is applied. For example, we identified transformations in students’ value orientations, the elevation of their creativity and responsibility in making decisions, as well as an increasing degree of their satisfaction with personal self-realization, which affirms that conscious attitude to personal growth is turning/developing into an integrated personal characteristic of students under the conditions of meaningful teaching/learning.
In what follows, we a) describe ways and methods we used to teach/learn meaningfully in our intercultural communication class along with relevant theories of developing intercultural intelligence, b) reflect on empiric findings emerging from the implementation of meaningful learning/teaching, c) discuss a vision for a broader available meaningful learning/teaching implementation in global learning.
The cognitive aspect of developing cultural intelligence captures the what, who, why, and how of interaction among cultures. This aspect is well addressed through cognitive assimilation and other knowledge based training systems. Interventions focusing on the acquisition of culture specific knowledge through documentary and experiential methods may help people understand more about a given culture. The cage painting model in global learning serves as a good example of facilitating the development of cognitive models by individuals so they can visualize their dialogic co-construction of intercultural meaning.
(Alagic, Gibson, Rimmington, 2005). “The cage” is a representation of our perspective and we “paint” its bars to enable our partners to see us and to hear our life experiences and cultural background. Cage painting involves mindfulness (Langer, 200) and facilitating the process of interaction as metacognitive processes, and the participants learn the strategies being used. It enables students to reduce uncertainty through mutual self-disclosure and thus to relearn the reality and to break stereotypes. In our intercultural classes we “played” some
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scenarios, displayed on the webpage of Wichita State University to learn and to improve the strategies of intercultural communication. It helped us to identify knowledge underlying self, social and cultural schemas which give rise to habitual ways of viewing self, others, and the world. The individual personal schemas, current concerns and personal goals influenced the way students viewed the world and the way they perceived individual behaviour. For example, after “playing a scenario”, we found out that the no-control-over-the-world attitude being a Russian cultural value, is broader than expected by a representative from a Western culture, and it contrasts with American pragmatism. We got motivated to create intercultural scenarios by ourselves in order to experience learning the strategies and were generously granted such an opportunity by the colleagues from Wichita State. The topic we chose was
“Self-Reliance at the Exam”. We gradually learned the strategies with guidance of our colleagues from Wichita State until we achieved the goal - understanding of student/teacher expectations of the appropriate behaviour during tests. The misconception that self-reliance is a universal value needed to be relearned, as some cultures consider that it is appropriate to depend on each other and help each other during tests. Then, some of my students started working on their own scenarios in collaboration with each other and with American colleagues. What we learned is that superficial cultural values briefings on other cultures can easily deteriorate into a value-based stereotyping of national cultures and provide tenuous, if not downright unfounded, links to actual perceptions about the people from other cultures. Writing cultural scenarios proved to be experiential as the context was relevant to participants’ personal life experiences. For example, we discussed the difference in perception of a smile in American and in Russian culture, as it emerged from my students’ experience of being misinterpreted by Americans when they did not smile in public places. Some Americans considered them rude when they did not smile, and, as it turned out, some of my students considered American smiles insincere because “they smile very often”. We “invented” our own understanding/ knowledge that some people smile because they want to be pleasant and they want to show they are willing to communicate. Other people smile when they mean it, when joy makes them want to smile. What made our dialogue and reflections, thus, learning, more meaningful is that we increased the anthropological context in our scenarios (the concrete individuals with their personal histories spoke with Simea, a character from cage-painting scenarios) and reflected on our feelings and emotions while being engaged in learning the strategies of effective intercultural communication. Each of us shared a personal story of when he/she was misunderstood in various life situations and what helped him/her to overcome this, and what happened next, how her/his perceptions were transformed and why. Each of the characters in our scenarios was personalized; it helped to relate to our past or present experiences. We recognized that each of us was able to bring something new to the same scenario, which was the way to identify and to appreciate the exceptional and unique nature each student possesses. For us, it was significant to be able to discuss things in a safe and respectful atmosphere when it was not risky to be open and sincere. True bonding which is developed between students, who stay together as a group for several years in Russian educational system, provide such an opportunity for all of us to sincerely negotiate our meanings. Meaningful dialogue entails symmetrical interpersonal relationships among participants in educational processes, based on unconditional acceptance of each other. Thus, students appreciated empathy and openness, respect and tolerance in the classroom, as meaningful attitudes to convey to the world around us. We consider this as a possibility for all of us to search for personal meaning in life while transforming the hierarchy of values, which is critical for a self-developing personality.
Incorporating new strategies of communication and using the self as a complex filter appeared to be critical in a meaningful educational setting. Knowledge based training systems become softer and more deeply processed when they are personality oriented. We
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hold that one must also be able and motivated to use this personal knowledge/meaning and produce a socially/culturally appropriate response.
Self-efficacy, goal setting and value-orientation are the key facets of motivational learning in developing cultural intelligence. Self-efficacy plays an important role in the motivational aspect of meaningful learning because personal meanings and values are transformed with a person’s sense of efficacy for social discourse in a novel social/cultural setting. A person who does not believe in personal capability to be efficient in new lifesettings is likely to disengage after experiencing failures (Bandura, 1986). We realize that the self-image of an individual is enhanced through participation and feeling of success. Consequently, we design classes as possibilities for students to succeed rather than to fail. Discovering for themselves entails failures as well as successes, like in real life.., but when they fail, they want to do things again and succeed.
Efficacy alone, however, is not a full description of a motivational facet of developing cultural intelligence in meaningful education. An important and related addition is goalsetting. Human activities by their nature are goal directed and purposeful (Locke, Lathman. 1990). Self-efficacy reciprocally influences personal goals set, so students who are higher in motivation, tend to be higher in personal efficacy and will tend to set specific and challenging goals for themselves (Earley, Peterson, 2004). That means that students with higher motivation have a strong sense that they are able to deal with divergent perspectives of others, adapting in new cultural/social situations, and handling complexity and uncertainty. These are critical attributes for global graduates to develop.
Goals specify the conditional requirement for positive self-evaluation (Bandura, 1997), which is so important in the realm of personality self-development. The process of evaluating the significance of knowledge about what is happening with our personal well-being generates emotions, which is critically enriching in terms of personality self-development. Emotional development of students fosters their value transformation which is called the formation of a “value core” (Bakhtin 1990), or a “meaningful vertical” (Brutus, 1993) of a personality. Being invisible, it “produces” the general meaning of life. Methods focusing on the motivational facet of meaningful learning are most heavily tied to the values-orientation approach often employed in our intercultural studies. That is, emphases on cultural values not only provide specific knowledge about a target culture, but it is intended to develop empathy as well.
We agree, that “the shortcoming to this approach is that empathy and attraction to a new culture in no way imply efficaciousness and perseverance” (Earley, Peterson, 2004). So, we recommend a confidence/success – building approach to incrementally build a student’s confidence toward intercultural interaction by guiding him/her through a series of successful interactions with a new culture. For example, first video conferences, as global learning activities, were imbedded in regular classes of intercultural communication, and many students were not confident they could negotiate meanings freely with people from other countries. As we proceeded through a series of trainings and mock negotiations, they gradually gained more and more confidence.
In such a way, we created an atmosphere in which success was much more possible for everyone. The video conference about the book “The world is flat” by Thomas Friedman, which we discussed online with students from Wichita State, appeared to be a breakthrough for my students. We all gained more emotional satisfaction and confidence, self-worth and motivation to continue practicing this global learning activity. Although each session still involved uncertainties and complexities, the attitude of how to deal with these perspectives changed to be more positive. And this influenced the level of self-satisfaction, which was confirmed by improved results in academic studies in general.
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Self-efficacy, goal setting and value-orientation are interconnected and serve to motivate students instrumentally by providing a chance to make personal choices on an every day basis as well as terminally by representing long - term goals, and reinforcement of a sense of self. In each of the cases, the holistic impact on students’ personal growth is reached when internalized values and the level of self-efficacy determine direction, goals and consciousness of individual strategy in life.
The behavioural aspect of developing cultural intelligence is that a culturally intelligent personality does not only know what to do (cognitive), is motivated to do, but also has the conscious responses needed for a given situation in one’s behavioural repertoire. The conscious response in behaviour does not exclude habitual behaviour, according to Langer,
(Langer, 2000), when an individual is mindful or being aware of one’s own and others’ behaviour in the situation. In this context, cultural intelligence is relevant to global learning competence as it “involves knowledge, motivation, and skills to interact effectively and appropriately with members of different cultures” (Wiseman, 2002, p.208).
When teaching/learning intercultural communication, the acquisition of behavioural skills to produce an appropriate response in a new intercultural encounter is crucial. For example, the seemingly main purpose of communication is a “maximally efficient information exchange” (Grice, 1975, p.11). This conflicts with the no less important “social function” of communication – to support our ties with other individuals, approach/perspective. The latter is usually described through the notion of face (Goffman, 1967) which is an individual’s publicly manifested self-esteem. It has been proved that not a single instance of communication can happen without incorporating certain politeness strategy understanding or realizing that individuals are extremely vulnerable to even slight violations of the usage of politeness strategies appropriate in a given context. The communities differ immensely according to the exact rules of “polite” behaviour (Bergelson, 2003). Consequently, a global graduate must not only be aware of the differences between “positive face” (the want of approval) and “negative face” (the want of self-determination), but must be able to generate strategies for polite behaviour and tact (social distance between the communicators, directness/indirectness, etc.) in new cultural/social settings.
Another crucial behavioural pattern to acquire in meaningful learning is to collaborate. Global learning can precipitate as one revolutionary change to increase the selection for the behavioural archetypes for which collaboration is valued over power and conflict (Rimmington, 2005). This is consistent with our idea and view that collaboration is an optimal way to solve problems in the global arena.
It is evident, that collaboration as a behavioural pattern is acquired as a skill in the process of active collaboration, and is facilitated by meaningful education. Our groups of intercultural communication studies collaborate through international debates with students from the US, Japan, Korea and China. We regularly hold student-organized International
Symposiums “Young Leaders of the Asian Pacific Territory in the 21st century” (held 2003, 2005, and 2007), which usually attract the attention of representatives from the Far Eastern Economic Research Institute in Khabarovsk, Russia and delegates from Asia Pacific Territory. Participants learn to collaborate and act meaningfully when they initiate and implement joint action plans to eradicate poverty and hunger around the world. Our recent visit to Japan’s Kyoto University of Foreign Studies in October, 2007 was for the purpose of collaborating with the IMAGINE Peace Conference. This was a pioneering project, when the Action Plan Model UN was launched which provided students with many more resources to really contribute to peace and to collaborate rather than to compete. Students from different countries grouped in teams to provide help to poor families and children in Africa and got funding to do this. They all learned to collaborate in action, which facilitated their self-