In the article by Vande Berg, I found interesting this concept of “Three Master Narratives”, because I never thought about the importance of the approach that creators of study abroad programs take when planning them. It made me question do we learn more when in a “learning through experience” or “being immersed” approach? In my opinion, by being immersed we take much more with us and we learn more since we have our hands on work. A take away from this article would be the concept of “transformation”. Sometimes students come back and are faced with all the questions about their experience, and due to pressure, they might feel like they need to share what changes in them, but it is not always like that. Being exposed to a new culture does not necessarily mean a transformation.
The second article by Milton J. Bennett has an interesting graph showing “Development of Intercultural Sensitivity”, to explain how the adaptation process goes when we face a cultural shock. Our not knowing stage, when we focus on our own set of standards and customs to judge all people, slowly moving towards acceptance stage, where we recognize and explore cultural differences. I always found interesting how our reaction towards something different in one’s culture is of shock and something negative. This not knowing scares us and activates defense. But the effort to get to know that culture makes a beautiful outcome, where people are able to share their differences and understand these. A take away from this article is this idea of the difference between adaptation and assimilation, which I never thought of. One is “additive”, the other “substitutive”, I guess our aim should be the adaptation, where we expand our worldview by adding new information.
Regarding the comment on about somebody else’s post, I read Leela’s post and her words resonate a lot with my opinion regarding going abroad, that when traveling we need to have an open-minded mindset and make sure we are tolerant, since these two would be essential and helpful when interacting with people from a country different than ours. She also mentions that we can learn a lot by interacting with others, which brings me back to the two articles, immersing ourselves in a culture would be very beneficial and accepting the culture will teach us a lot, thus take us to the adaptation process. I really like her statement “I feel that our differences can oftentimes unite us” and I agree with it.
Regarding the fear that comes from seeing something unknown to you from another culture, do you think this would change if people in general could stop fearing the unknown? Bit of a half formed thought, but I’m thinking about how people do better on tests if they’re not anxious about it, so maybe people could accept cultural differences more readily if we didn’t have that fear.