ICIS Newsletter - Volume 9 Number 1 (Plain Text Version)
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THE CASE OF SANDRA: AN ENGLISH NATIVE SPEAKER OF ENGLISH IN A NONNATIVE CONTEXT NEEDS INTERCULTURAL LEARNING AND REFLECTION
Can a native speaker of English who is an educator be placed in an administrative position in a non-native culture without consideration of his or her qualifications, intercultural communication skills, and experience? This is the case of Sandra, a Native American, who was assigned a chair of the Humanities and Languages Department in a Lebanese private university. Her main challenges stem partly from her lack of needed managerial skills, which made her learn about her job by trial and error, and partly from not being familiar with departmental culture and ethos. Instead, she relied on an ethnocentric and de-contextualized set of priorities. Sandra has been struggling for almost 18 months to prove she is able to handle her job; her never-ending challenge has been to re-establish a level of trust with the department team. Right from the start, Sandra held herself accountable for unpredictable repercussions from her contractual terms and conditions that she believed were self-empowering. Effectively, to bring a native speaker of English (NSE) to a Lebanese university where English is the medium of instruction, the university has to offer good contractual terms and conditions and the NSE has to find the deal cost-effective and worthwhile. In this case, the best deal was to offer Sandra a management post with some contact teaching hours that related to her qualifications in return for the privileges offered. Consequently, Sandra’s struggle stemmed from her lacking managerial skills and expertise. As early as the first few weeks of work, Sandra’s language ability served her well and earned her a good image in teaching her credit courses but not in managing the department. Coming from a culture where accountability measures are strict, and starting her job after a week of her arrival to the country, Sandra started her work before she had a chance to read the existing brief, unclear, and very general job description. In fact, she was ignorant of what her main roles were and whatintercultural skills she needed to communicate her management vision to the team members to gain their support and proceed successfully. Consequently, she could not determine which tasks were routine and which could possibly be delayed; neither could she visualize how to handle some major tasks without referring to the administration for discussion or clarifications. On the basis of her past experience, the previous Lebanese chair knew that Sandra would not receive any files from the Administration Department. So, she passed on to Sandra all her department files including memoranda and procedures she devised, previous department evaluations, and her action-research findings. She asked Sandra to read the files and get back to her if she had any questions. To build trust with Sandra, she advised Sandra to ask for previous staff appraisals and reports of department successes, problems, and failures then discuss her observations with people who she believed would help shape her vision. From her experience, the previous chair knew that full-timers were more privileged than part-timers in the sense that no new decision could be made without their consent. In addition, they were given the privilege of selecting the courses they wanted to teach; the chair would then assign the other courses to part-timers. The previous chair thus advised Sandra not to meet the whole department team until she had met with all the full-timers to investigate what their concerns were, present her vision, discuss it in detail with them, and then set her plans. She also advised her to report regularly to the administration, seek feedback, and reassess her vision, plans, and procedures every semester. Sandra neither read the files nor took the advice seriously; rather, she wanted to reinvent the wheel. She called for a first meeting with all the department team and announced that she did not come from a management background and that it was her first experience in an Arab country. To make things worse, she added that she had never had experience with a program similar to that in the department and that she needed and would welcome everybody’s help. Sandra’s announcement gave wrong impressions about her. Not being familiar with the context and not knowing where to start from, Sandra found herself relying to a great extent on two full-timers who volunteered to be her mentors. Seeking empowerment, those two teachers took advantage of the situation to interfere with every step Sandra took and to project her as unqualified. When with part-timers, they never hesitated to express that they had the same qualifications as the chair, more experience in handling the coordination jobs in the department, and better insights into the position. Whenever all the full-timers met with Sandra, those two teachers observed that she lacked organizational skills and thus imposed their agenda and argued that her ideas were wrong. During whole-department meetings, they brought up issues Sandra was not prepared for, contradicted her, and tried to prove her wrong with false research evidence. While scheduling classes and assigning courses to teachers, they projected her as weak rather than trusting teachers’ expertise. That is, they volunteered to do the scheduling, told the teachers that Sandra was unable to do it, and that they were able to create the best scenario for course and IEP skills assignments. Meanwhile, they ignored all the previous students’ end-of-semester evaluation and complaints about teaching practices, which everyone in the department knew, and tailored assignments to teacher’s needs and interests rather than the students’. Consequently, they earned teachers’ trust, while Sandra, who would have scheduled differently, lost it. In brief, those teachers could spotlight Sandra’s weaknesses, tarnish her image, and minimize the level of trust among the team members. At that point, Sandra still felt secure enough to learn to manage through trial and error, presuming that the administration that hired her would value her honest efforts. After one semester, though observing that Sandra was not referring to the right people, the previous chair believed it was unwise to tell Sandra what was going on. Having become a trusted guide to Sandra in management issues, the previous chair insisted that Sandra read the existing files carefully, read earlier findings of the action research before making decisions, reflect on her experience, start setting down-to-earth plans, set priorities, and assign tasks to implement the plan. Sandra did not respond to the demand. Instead, she intensified the department meetings. In every single meeting she conducted, she received huge amounts of information and thus got lost. Most of the time, she conducted another meeting before having reviewed the previous minutes or narrowing the focus enough. As a result, it was easy for full-timers to redirect a meeting and influence her to change a decision that she had made earlier and thus prove to others that she was not qualified for her post. This should have alerted Sandra, coming from a different culture, to start reflecting on what was going on and acting accordingly. However, being overwhelmed with the department work besides teaching, Sandra did not recognize that those teachers were taking her further down the road to failure. They pressured her to make two big decisions: adopting new textbooks and changing the evaluation system and the distribution of hours on IEP skills. Apparently, the aims behind her consent were to please the department team complaining about the textbooks and the administration who kept receiving complaints about failure rates resulting from those textbooks. She also wanted to show the department team that she trusted them to do the job of evaluating new textbooks. Lacking experience in these areas, Sandra decided to take the risk of piloting three different variables (new textbooks, evaluation system, and distribution of hours). In principle, the risk could be attributed to Sandra’s lacking research skills, the difficulty of controlling those variables in one valid and reliable research study, and wanting to learn quickly. She made the same mistake that the administration made when recruiting her: assigning tasks to those who are not prepared for them yet. She thought it would be a wise decision to assign a new textbook evaluation to the different team members. First, she asked teachers teaching the different levels in the IEP to study the books they thought would be suitable for the levels they taught earlier. In this case, part-timers were expected to report to full-timers while Sandra took on the role of the facilitator in the evaluation meetings. The two full-time teachers believed it was the right time for them to recommend all the changes they believed worth implementing though they were proven wrong by previous research. To achieve their goal, they made the follow-up meeting a platform for imposing their vision and asked all teachers to write new syllabi compatible with the changes in the content and hourly distribution. In 3 weeks, and before enough team discussions and information exchange took place, Sandra proceeded with the team decision to change two of the four textbooks, change the number of teaching hours per IEP class, and change the distribution of those hours on the different skills (writing, reading, listening and speaking, grammar, and vocabulary). After only half a semester (7.5 weeks) of implementing change, Sandra was surprised to receive the teachers’ verbal reports that one of the new textbooks was not suitable for their students whose needs they presumably knew, and the new division of hours was unpractical. Teachers’ reports indicated that students’ interaction, interest, and achievement levels were higher before change took place. In practice, even teachers were not satisfied with the whole change. Sandra should have known that the end-of-semester assessment of instruction reveals teaching potentials but is not indicative of potentials to evaluate textbooks or make decisions not deeply rooted in research. The experience was sad and frustrating. However, it should not prevent Sandra from getting credit for being a hard-working, conscientious, and honest chair. Sandra tried her best; she carried more meetings than needed but could not set her priorities. Not having experience in a management position, she decided to be collegial yet forgot the fact that she was dealing with people from a different culture and their perception about collegiality was context-specific. In other words, in a rigidly hierarchical institution, a chair is a decision maker, while the team can only negotiate how to implement those decisions. When the team gets involved in the decision making, they will feel empowered and thus will not give up this privilege no matter what. Some of Sandra’s weaknesses include her lack of experience; lack of knowledge about the department situation, culture, and ethos; overestimation of teachers’ abilities; and delegating tasks without encouraging proactiveness and responsibility for decisions. Sandra made the wrong decisions when she decided to adopt new textbooks and to change the number of hours and their distribution on the skills in each IEP level, but has learned a great deal so far. In a nutshell, Sandra has been department chair for 18 months so far without being able to hit two main targets: addressing the department problems (making a difference in the quality of services the department provided to students) and reducing the complaints, be they from teachers, the administration, or students. However, it is never too late. Sandra is currently in a position to redefine collegiality, accountability, and true and meaningful information exchange. Her key management goals should be reflecting on her experience, building stronger bridges with the administration to report and seek guidance, setting priorities, and, very important, adjusting her intercultural communication skills to target improved department results. She also needs to change her approach without alienating the privileged full-timers. Otherwise, she will have to tolerate interferences, prepare herself to receive complaints from the administration and students, and risk deterioration in enrolment rates in the long run. Nahida Al Assi Farhat, nahida@nahida-elassi.com, is a researcher, program developer, teacher-trainer, material writer, and lecturer who is highly interested in intercultural communication research. |
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