Culture shock is almost inevitable for people who transit from a society that believes in different cultural values to another. For example, most individuals have a hard time learning how to exchange greetings, associate with people of the opposite gender, and adapt to the general mode of life in a new culture. Usually, adapting to the new cultural environment requires people to take an emic perspective as opposed to the etic perspective, which often leads to people feeling out-of-place. This paper describes by etic and emic cultural perspective related to a transition from teaching at a regular Dutch school to an American school at The Hague. The paper uses the trompenaars, basic assumptions, and Hofstede’s cultural dimensions to explain the differences in the cultures of the two schools.
From an etic standpoint, I observed that the students at the American school liked to be independent in their activities. The work of the teachers in the classrooms was not to control the learners, but to offer them direction during the learning process. In addition, the students also indicated from their behavior that they desired to have an equal treatment in terms of both gender and social aspects such as ability among others. In fact, it looked like the students wanted to be consulted before their teachers could reach any major decision such as when the students should have an extra class, work in groups, or change from one learning activity to the other. For these reasons, I observed the students walking and working in groups, boys mixing with girls. Furthermore, I observed, before interacting with the students and the teachers at the school that everyone seemed to pay attention to issues that concerned them only. The classrooms were organized in such a way that the students interacted freely, but one could note that students did most of their work individually; they had personal textbooks, and audiovisual learning aids such as calculators among others. As much as I could not prove this straight away, I observed the students and the teachers were busy in the corridors pushing through the masses of people perhaps to meet their schedules. The two groups, teachers and students, did not have much time to chat amongst themselves. However, I also observed the students playing together during periods of break from the regular lessons.
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I also observed from the etic point of view that students at the American school appeared to be in a constant competition with one another. For instance, they would feel proud about who went to class first, who finished an assignment first, or who scored the highest mark in a test. It also appeared that the teachers at the school cultured the students to behave in such mannerism for example, the teachers constantly congratulated those who emerged first in almost all the aspects of their learning activities and encouraged those that lagged behind. I further observed that the school environment was designed in such a way that it encouraged the students to compete strongly amongst themselves through such elements as the display of the school vision and mission statements in the social places.
From an emic standpoint, I learned that the teachers and the students at the new school were designed through their system to work hard to meet deadlines. For instance, the school administration believed that students would only be successful when they worked hard, met their targets and focused on being the best in both academics and extra-curricular activity. According to Hofstede cultural dimensions model, such a character is referred to as masculinity, and it encouraged the society to believe that competition is a relevant prerequisite for success in life (Hofstede, 1998). This perspective also holds according to the basic assumptions model, which considers that cultural has three essential elements, typical behaviors, stated values, and fundamental assumptions (Ahlstrom and Bruton, 2010). According to this model, the students at the school engage in stiff competition amongst themselves since they the school esteems success in life through education. New comers at the school are all expected to fall within the expected frameworks of hard work to make the students succeed in life.
The culture at the new students encouraged the students to be highly individualistic, to value personal success over that of the group (Schein, 2010). According to the trompenaars cultural dimensions, individualism relates to the tendency of a group to see human beings as private persons as opposed to the communitarianism perspective, which treats humanity as one part of a large group. I discovered, for example, that the teachers trained the students to be self-reliant in activities such as personal tasks. Even while the students were involved in different group activities, I learned that only the individual tasks carried the highest scores. The administration of the school required that new teachers pay as much attention to grading the personal assignments as possible. This encounter was unlike the culture at the regular Dutch school in which the curriculum encouraged the students to value more communal values than they did to the individual ones.
I further learned that the culture of the new school taught the students to orient themselves towards low power distance dimensions according to Hofstede (Derr, Roussillon and Bournois, 2002). This means that like the regular Dutch school, the American school believes that students and teachers could achieve more when they are left to make their own decisions than when a figurehead directed what they did most of the time. This, as a learned later, was the reasons why the schedules for classes and learning activities allowed the students to engage in many creative activities that their teachers did not supervise. I learned that the students were quite involved in pushing for what they believed was right for them. For instance, the students would feel offended when the teachers scorned them since they believed it was unfair and against the school policy. The school administrators took much time orienting new teachers and students about the determination of the school to promote equality for all students. Equality meant that the teachers consulted the students about matters of critical concern. The teachers, therefore, are cautious in their treatment of the learners since, which is why they asked for their opinion before I could be allowed into the classroom.
In conclusion, my experience at the American school at The Hague taught me the variation in the cultural dimensions of the school from that of the regular Dutch school from where I taught before transferring during my internship. I learned that while the Dutch school taught the students to be less individualistic, that at the new school taught them to be more individualistic. For this reason, I learned that the new school required new teachers to learn the basic values and principles of success, such as cultivating stiff competition amongst the students as soon as possible. In addition, the new school culture could be defined as a low power distance one since the students valued more freedom than they valued the control of their teachers. Lastly, as opposed to the Dutch school culture of less masculinity, the American school culture esteemed such a cultural dimension.
References
Ahlstrom, D., & Bruton, G. D. (2010). International management: Strategy and culture in the emerging world . Australia: South-Western Cengage Learning.
Derr, C. B., Roussillon, S., & Bournois, F. (2002). Cross-cultural approaches to leadership development . Westport, Conn: Quorum Books.
Hofstede, G. (1998). Masculinity and femininity: The taboo dimension of national cultures . Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Schein, E. H. (2010). Organizational Culture and Leadership . New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons.
