Professional Development

I’m at Bibles International for a week to hear Glenn Kerr talk about Hebrew discourse analysis and Bill Smallman talk about cross-cultural communication.

I’m reading a very interesting book on the latter topic, Teaching Cross-Culturally: An Incarnational Model for Learning and Teaching, by Christian educators Judy and Sherwood Lingenfelter.

The book is full of stories about cultural clashes—especially between Western teachers and non-Western students—and subsequent wise reflection on the reasons for them.

It seems to me that stories are almost the only way to learn this material, no matter what your cultural background is. It’s utterly amazing that by age 5 children enter school already deeply acculturated, even in very subtle matters like what kinds of questions are appropriate, inappropriate, or even worth asking.