I was one of the many participants at last Friday’s 7th Annual Symposium on Communication and Communication-Intensive Instruction. It was my first time to participate, so I can’t say anything about how it was compared to last year’s, but I think it was a great success and I had a very good time learning and thinking about various aspects of communication and communication instruction.
In the table discussion, I was assigned to a table facilitated by Phyllis Zadra, Assosiate Dean of Zicklin School, as well as John K. Gillespie, President of Gillespie Global Group, who is involved in cultural consulting and training of cooporate staff from Japan working in the US, as well as those from the US working in Japan. I don’t know if his presence and his interest had an effect on the direction of our discussion, but many of us were interested in considering cultural factors in communication and teaching of communication, and curiously, the discussion went into the direction of something that I wrote in one of my past postings at cac.ophony.org, which was about Asian people’s general tendencies to be less active in their class participation. I was glad that I was able to offer them input based on the real-life experience as someone who comes from that part of the world. I also learned that some other table also talked about this too; I must say I was pleasantly surprised that more instructors and employers are thoughtful and considerate of these challenges that people from other cultures might face going into international education and business.
A participant in my table told us another story that exemplifies the same issue. She asked one of the employers what makes the difference between the interns that eventually got a job offer from them and those that didn’t. The employer said that those who asked questions about their assignment got the job offer, and those who didn’t ask questions didn’t. This was stunning to me (it wasn’t even about participating in discussion!) and makes me sad for people who didn’t get the job. In my culture, if you are an intern you will try to understand the assignment as much as possible by only listening to the supervisor’s directions and you will try NOT to bother the supervisor unless you really have to. Asking questions about the assignment might come across as not paying attention or not having the ability to comprehend very well, so generally it should be avoided as much as you can. Of course you should ask questions if there are things that the supervisors didn’t explain, etc. but that would be after you made sure that you weren’t told about this; only then you are ‘entitled’ to ask the question. While I understand that in this culture asking questions might show that you are interested in and enthusiastic about the task at hand, if those unsuccessful interns didn’t ask questions because they didn’t feel ‘entitled’ to and they were in fact trying their best to behave themselves, that makes me sad.
It is a huge task to facilitate the understanding of these issues for everyone (students, instructors and business leaders), but I will continue thinking about how to achieve this and what I can do, as someone familiar with both cultures, to help achieve this.
You bring up one of those issues that I often wonder about as well. The Symposium was a great venue to open up discussion on so many different topics, even if there was not enough time to come up with refined solutions or approaches, given its format. I met some great people throughout the day and we talked (formally and informally) about a million different tings. But the issue of cultural difference came up as well. One sentiment that I keep hearing is that international students tend to need some sort of introduction to academic integrity/plagiarism policies in the US, and they generally do not know about the standards in the US. I am suspicious of this statement and I have yet to see a convincing scientific/statistical/qualitative evidence for this. I think entering college students from Maine, Queens, Poland or Zimbabwe are just as lost when it comes to college expectations and they need equal amount of coaching and advisement. Sure, the standards for copyright protection might be a little lax in Eastern Europe, but in academia plagiarism is as frown upon as it is here. Yet, I keep hearing anecdotal evidence that somehow foreign students are not aware of how serious of an academic crime it is. Hmm.
Hi Agnieszka,
I still remember when I received the shocking red piece of paper warning ‘plagiarism is a crime!’ on the first day of my study abroad in London. In Japan, you don’t get educated with those formally (although everyone knows it’s bad to make somebody else’s writing seem like your own).
Having said that, I agree with you that no matter where you are from, it can be a challenge to meet expectations of college-level work and academic integrity. I just had a long discussion with somebody from here who had a hard time trying to fully understand what’s considered plagiarism and what’s considered writing your ideas that happen to be the same as other people’s.