Introduction
Culture implies different things to different groups. For example, anthropologists define culture as the way people live. Others define it as the system that incorporates the biological and technical behaviors of community within their verbal and nonverbal systems.
NASW (2001) defined culture as “the integrated pattern of human behavior that includes thoughts, communication, actions, customs, beliefs, values; and the institutions of a racial, ethnic, religious or social group” (NASW, 2001, 1).
It is the totality of behavior passed from one generation to the other. Intercultural awareness campaigns try to figure out how people understand each other irrespective of their cultural differences (NASW 2000). 21st century living is described as a multicultural society in a global village.
Therefore, one may ask, what kind of communication and interactions are required to create a climate of respect, diversity tolerance with unified common goals? More so, one may wish to find out whether it is possible for neighbors to embrace their cultural differences (NASW, 2007).
Bennet outlined a great scenario on how a group of primates gathered around a bonfire would fight or take off on the sight of another group of primates heading to their fire place. This is exactly how it happens even to the more advanced primates Homo sapiens.
Arguably, our ancestors avoided people from other cultures in the best way they could. If all measures to avoid their interactions were unsuccessful, they opted for other measures such as converting them into their way of life.
Those who became stubborn to assimilations were ripped out of existence through killing; there is evidence of genocide from the history. Therefore, dealing with cultural differences, understanding it, embracing it and respecting it is vital to intercultural awareness and especially communication (Bennet 1998).
Intercultural Perspective
Understanding objective culture is very different to understanding a foreign culture. There exist perspectives, which view that learning about other cultures, their social, economic, political way of life, their linguistics, arts and so forth are sufficient to understand culture.
However, there are professors, in such sectors as linguistics, who still are unable to communicate with people from that particular community irrespective of how broad their knowledge is. Understanding objective culture merely adds knowledge about the foreign culture but does not generate much cultural competence.
On the other hand, understanding phenomenological features that define a group, and the way the group reasons and behaves will mark a step to identifying with the culture of that group. It is defined as subjective culture.
Subjective culture is defined by Bennet (1998) as “the learned and shared patterns of beliefs, behaviors, and values of groups of interacting people” (p. 1). This type of perspective is said to be more likely to lead to intercultural competence. However, it requires understanding objective culture to understand subjective culture and to have social reality (Bennet 1998).
Many people ignore the advantages of cultural orientation. Most of them, view intercultural communication as the grammatical rules applied in spoken and written practices.
To some, learning about cultural practices poses a threat to their values. Some of the non verbal perspectives of communication from various cultures are picked from TV programs and movies, which have very little for communication purposes or, which may be of faulty conceptions (Bennet 1998).
Another problem with cultural perspectives is stereotyping and generalization. For example, it is very common to take notice of people discussing that a certain lady is not behaving like a Latin woman and so forth. This is so especially with the Arabic culture and Islam where gender roles are strictly divided.
It is hard to find women from such communities in leading positions in politics or other fields. Stereotypes occur when behavioral assumptions are held by all members of a particular culture as shared traits. Such characteristics assumedly common can be respected by the observer (positive stereotype) or be disrespected (negative stereotype).
Either of the stereotypes is negative in intercultural communication because they often give false conceptions regarding the community or have partial truth in them. Secondly, stereotyping is an act of encouraging prejudice among the cultures.
However, it is important for a culture to develop identity to make a cultural generalization. Assuming that each person is an individual may lead to naive individualism (Martin & Nakayama 1997).
Advantages of Intercultural Communication
Intercultural communication focuses on interaction in human beings through giving and receiving processes. Intercultural communication emphasizes on learning about one or more cultures in addition to one’s own culture. This way, it helps in understanding importance of interculturalism.
It offers a better way to analyze interactions to enable great adoption (Bennet, 1998). From my perspective, the course supports the existence of unity, cooperation and creative conflict between multicultural societies simultaneously. This way, it renders a platform for our differences and their uniqueness be felt in synergistic harmony.
Intercultural communication and awareness are equally important in the workplace. With the current market globalization, fields like hospitality, tourism, commerce and research have to acknowledge the importance of intercultural differences and mould the diversification into unified goals.
The increasing globalization and thus diversity of the workforce implies that ignoring cultural diversity in the organization can no longer be ignored. The reasons for heterogeneity in behaviors at our places of work are fully attributed to the cultural diversity (Lum 2007).
Therefore, it is up to the management to identify courses that could match the intercultural variations at the place of work. According to Devine, Baum, & Hearns (1999), management of diversity in the workforce implies understanding the diversified population and understanding the concepts of diversity that can be visible and non visible including sex, age, background, personality, disability and work style.
Proper harnessing of such differences implies creation of productive working environment where every body feels valued and where the potential talents can be utilized fully to meet the organization goals (Devine, Baum, & Hearns 1999).
Conclusion
Therefore, it is important to integrate intercultural communication in the curriculum to help the students understand and differentiate between cultural norms, beliefs and habits in a society and possible deviations of such norms in a society. This can be achieved by allowing students to share their native cultures with their foreign colleagues.
Restrictions should be limited by allowing use of student’s native language where necessary. In this manner, there will be a development of social-cultural awareness and social linguistic presence among the students in addition to their native language and way of life.
Espousing intercultural communication is not necessarily implying that one is changing their cultural identity. Their ethnicity, religion and political backgrounds remain solidly unaffected.
Cakir (2006) has claimed that, “students use English well and get acknowledged, but in doing so, it does not imply they are changing their identity. There is no need to become British or American in order to use English well” (p. 12).
References
Bennet, MJ 1998, Basic concepts of intercultural communication: Selected readings Intercultural communication: A current perspective, Intercultural Press, New York.
Cakir, I 2006, ‘Developing cultural awareness in foreign language teaching’, Turkish online Journal of distance Education, vol. 7, no. 3, p. 12.
Devine, F, Baum, T & Hearns, N 1999, Resource guide: Cultural Awareness for hospitality and tourism. Web.
Lum, D 2010, Culturally competent Practice: A Framework for Understanding Diverse and Justice Issues, Cengage Learning, New York.
Martin, J & Nakayama, T 1997, Intercultural communication in contexts, Mayfield publishing, Mountain view.
NASW 2000, Cultural competence in the social work profession, NASW press, Washington DC.
NASW 2001, NASW stands for cultural competence in social cork practice. Web.
NASW 2007, Indicators for the Achievement of the NASW standards for cultural competence. Web.