Sarah Slade

This is another of those “read this interminable article with five sub-clauses per sentence and then write a short essay on this point, this point, this point, and remember to think about all these other, tangentally-related points. You have 1200 characters and it should take you 90 minutes” – exercises that this part of OUH880 seems to specialise in.

*sigh*

Here it is. The next few paragraphs are what I came up with after two hours of wrestling with quite a knotty topic that could be interesting if people didn’t repeat themselves.

In my context(quite high-level technical workplace learning) the ethno cultural differences are somewhat minimised by the learners being drawn largely from a privately educated cohort who have absorbed British and American-style pedagogy. Having said that I remember delivering online training to a group in Bangalore and being slightly unnerved by the silence on the other end of the line. This was in contrast to the Swiss team I had trained the day before, who barely let me finish a sentence before they launched into another complaint disguised as a question (the IT system I was training them on wasn’t that great).

I’m hesitant about assigning cultural behaviours to entire countries. The education systems of each country examined by Gunawardene et al may value teachers and education achievement differently and students may be a product of that system, but it seems somewhat reductive to say that Chinese teachers have a close out-of-school relationship with their pupils while Western teachers aren’t encouraged to do that. I can think of at least four or five instances where teachers and lecturers I know have social relations with their students, particularly at university level.

I think there is a global online culture that veers between extreme behaviour designed to provoke a negative reaction (‘trolling’) or incel communities of angry virgins on tumblr  or reddit; to fairly positive communities focused on a band or other interest (for example the  BTS ARMY – who are quite sweet, if a bit scary en masse). Whether this informs or supersedes a person’s cultural background is up for debate, but I think the cultural differences between members of an online community have become less distinct when there is a common interest or focus. Moore, Shattuck et al were writing before Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, all of which have widened online participation.

What strategies might an educator adopt to ensure their teaching is relevant and appropriate to diverse groups?

• Listening to students, Asking questions and making sure they understand the students’ cultural contexts. Maybe even doing some data analysis to monitor student engagement in various areas and modifying the pedagogic approach to suit student preferences.
• Avoid being racist or sexist or transphobic.
• The risks involved are that the students will disengage