Promoting Cultural Diversity in Higher Education Through Teaching in Foreign Languages

by Mihaela Muntean, Romania, November 12, 2004

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AUTHOR: Mihaela Muntean, Babes-Bolyai University, Romania

1. What is Cultural Diversity?

We use the term culture to refer to a society or group in which many or all people live and think in the same ways.Culture has several distinguishing characteristics:

(1) It is based on symbols—abstract ways of referring to and understanding ideas, objects, feelings, or behaviors—and the ability to communicate with symbols using language. Symbols allow people to develop complex thoughts and to exchange those thoughts with others. Language and other forms of symbolic communication, such as art, enable people to create, explain, and record new ideas and information.

(2) Culture is shared. People in the same society share common behaviors and ways of thinking through culture.  They all collectively create and maintain a country’s culture.

(3) Culture is learned. While people biologically inherit many physical traits and behavioral instincts, culture is socially inherited. A person must learn culture from other people in a society. In all human societies, children learn culture from adults. Anthropologists call this process enculturation, or cultural transmission.

(4) Culture is adaptive. People use culture to flexibly and quickly adjust to changes in the world around them.

All the differences that exist between the ways certain people think, act or feel are a direct result of the distinct cultural environment they are part of, and thus, form part of what is called cultural diversity.

2.Why promote Cultural Diversity?

Self-identity usually depends on culture to such a great extent that immersion in a very different culture—with which a person does not share common ways of life or beliefs—can cause a feeling of confusion and disorientation. Anthropologists refer to this phenomenon as culture shock, which can easily be avoided through achieving basic knowledge about the other culture.

In multicultural societies, unshared forms of culture can lead to tension; that is why cultural diversity and cultural difference must be promoted in order to be understood and accepted.

Members of a society who share the same culture, often also share some feelings of ethnocentrism, the notion that one’s culture is superior to that of other societies. At its worst, ethnocentrism has led people to commit ethnocide, the destruction of cultures,and genocide, the destruction of entire populations. This happened, for example, to Jews living in Nazi Germany in the 1940s.

Anthropologists, knowing the power of ethnocentrism, advocate cross-cultural understanding through a concept known as cultural relativism. Someone observing cultural relativism tries to respect all cultures equally. Although only someone living within a group that shares culture can fully understand that culture, cultural relativists believe that outsiders can learn to respect beliefs and practices that they do not share.

At a national level, promoting cultural diversity leads to reducing the risks of interethnic conflicts and contributes to keeping countries unified. The lack of toleration and respect for other people’s culture and actions originates many times in the shortage of knowledge regarding other people’s believes and traditions and can, unfortunately, lead to undesirable events like wars, discrimination,  and racism. 

The phenomenon of globalization, an unstoppable and inevitable process, which breaks the physical borders between the countries, preserves national cultures and traditions. Although the labor market has opened more and more every day, the ones who choose to leave their country in order to get a better job will have to deal with cultural changes, and the more one knows about them in advance, the better.

3. The role of Foreign Languages in Promoting Cultural Diversity

The languages a person speaks are a true bridge for getting to know other cultures, because a language will always be a very important part of cultural identification. In most cultures, one can find the so-called “untranslatable things,” those particular things which pertain to specific cultures and which are much easier to understand when one understands the language of that culture.

There are many things defining a culture and a people that one can observe by a simple analysis of the language. For example the lack of the so-called “politeness pronouns” in English and especially in American English or in other words, the fact that we address everybody in the same way, tells a lot about everyone being treated equally and about the closeness that exists between people. This sort of sensitive thing is not very easy to perceive if one does not understand the language and therefore, does not “feel” its meaning and for that, the linguistic aspect of a culture is no doubt invaluable.

4. The role of the universities in promoting cultural diversity through teaching in foreign languages.

Universities and educational institutions, in general, are the most appropriate organizations for promoting the importance of respecting and understanding other people’s culture and of learning foreign languages.

In Romania, at the university Level, there are certain government requirements that actually prevent people from registering for PhD or Master’s degrees or even from getting their Bachelor’s degree, unless they study during college and pass together with the graduation exam a foreign language test.

The Romanian Government, together with many international organizations, believe that education is one of the most efficient ways of improving the life standard of a country, of reducing and preventing various negative impact phenomena on young people and children, as well as offering alternatives on crisis situations such as poverty, social isolations, limited access to information, discrimination etc.

That is why the Ministry of Education is providing attractive educational programs both at the undergraduate and graduate levels, for both Romanian and minority. The most important minorities in Romania have access to education in their own language, starting with kindergarten. Consequently, in Romania there are over 200,000 students, at the primary, secondary and high school level studying in other language than Romanian, out of which the most important minorities are the Hungarians, over 185,000 and the Germans – over 19,000 students. At the university level, the total amount of the students who learn in other language than Romanian exceeds 30,000 students, out of which over 25 000 are Hungarians and over 1,800 are studying in German. The institutions providing education in other languages than Romanian are based in the counties where the percentage of the ethnic minorities is considerable. Usually, in these counties, schools have special departments where students are provided with education in other language than Romanian. Therefore, on one hand, learning in their language helps students preserve their cultural identity, and on the other hand, during breaks and school events they meet with the students of the other departments (Romanians, Germans, etc.) which contributes to sharing, learning and adapting to others’ culture.

The Romanian Government tries to contribute to preserving and developing the cultural identity of the minorities by offering education in their own language.

5. Study Case: Babes-Bolyai University (UBB)

Babes-Bolyai University, based in Cluj-Napoca, Transylvania, is one of the most important universities in Romania. A multicultural and multilingual university, Babes-Bolyai promotes a politics of innovation, based on the university autonomy principle, on organized diversity and intercultural competence. UBB always tried to meet the necessities of all the students in the region, both at the fields of studies they require and from the linguistic point of view, by offering education in three lines of study: Romanian, Hungarian and German. Presently, the Romanian line has over 25,000 students, while the Hungarian and German lines have over 5000 and 700, respectively.

The university has Master’s programs and other forms of graduate studies in languages of wide international use. Moreover, at the undergraduate level, the study of at least one foreign language is mandatory no matter which college the student goes to, while any registration for Master’s or PhD is prohibited without a certificate of linguistic competence, which shows the candidate’s skills in a foreign language.

With the same purpose of promoting the creation of the European multilingual and multicultural citizen, the UBB promotes student-exchange programs, summer schools, seminars etc. Among the main purposes of UBB there is the development of communicative competence in other languages, of efficient communication strategies and efficient learning techniques – all these leading to intercultural competence, or, in other words, to the capacity of dealing with mentalities, practices, peculiarities of another linguistic community.

UBB is part of the education activities carried out under the Socrates program and are designed to encourage linguistic exchanges between young people and training of language teachers. The "Erasmus" exchange program enables higher-education students to study in a foreign country and provides them with appropriate preparatory language courses. Socrates also targets adults, who are encouraged to engage in lifelong learning, which includes languages.

Another interesting international program offered by UBB is Leonardo da Vinci. A program designed for training, Leonardo da Vinci is meant to improve occupational mobility and multilingual and multicultural communication in the working environment. Action aimed at boosting access to employment through the European Social Fund includes funding for language training.

As pointed out from the UBB curricula and programs, a special interest of UBB is to focus on multi-linguistics as an instrument of social and cognitive mediation, as well as on preserving and advertising the European cultural and linguistic heritage.

6. Conclusions. EU attitude regarding cultural diversity within the Union.

As stated in Maastricht treaty, the Union encourages knowledge, preservation and dissemination of European languages, as well as languages of third countries with which it cooperates. The learning of languages opens doors to the understanding of different cultures, which is a necessary skill for Europeans. Article 151 of the above mentioned treaty says that the Union "shall contribute to the flowering of the cultures of the Member States, while respecting their national and regional diversity and at the same time bringing the common cultural heritage to the fore.”

The aim of EU efforts in this domain is to encourage cooperation, in order to contribute to the establishment of a common cultural area for Europeans, to develop artistic and literary creation, to promote the knowledge of European history and culture and their international distribution, as a way of promoting intercultural dialogue and social integration.
 

Sources:

1. Rogers, Everett M, Intercultural Communication, Waveland Press, Inc., Illinois, 1999, p. 3, 103, 221

2. Encarta Encyclopedia Deluxe 2002

3. http://www.ubbcluj.ro/politica-lingvistica.htlm (26 October)

4. http://www.edu.ro/minoritati_18.html (26 Octrober)

5. http://europa.eu.int/comm/culture/action/lingui_1_en.htm(3 November)

DESIGNER:
Heather Cheetham, New Media Design, SUNY Cortland, USA

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