Anne Fox :: Blog :: Intercultural training in conservative societies

In May I attended the SLanguages conference in Second Life where one of the most interesting sessions was given by Canadian, Mark Karstad, until recently instructional designer at Dubai Women's College in the United Arab Emirates. The session could only take place through text messaging because the telephone monopoly in the UAE precludes the use of audio communication via the Internet.

The challenge faced by Mark and his colleagues is that they are training female students to become business graduates and Dubai is becoming more and more cosmopolitan as tourists and business people flock in ever larger numbers to the country but there is a tradition of fairly strict gender separation. The DWC offer field trips for their students for example to a Chinese trade fair but out of a cohort nearing 300 only about 13 chose to go. The solution which Mark and his colleagues came up with was to organise virtual field trips and exchanges in second life.

This is not a straightforward solution since there is much in Second Life to shock but there is also a great deal which is highly educational in the form of recreations of various real places in the world and there is also the opportunity to meet people virtually and exchange experiences and opinions in a live dialogue.

So for example Mark and his students participated in a virtual exchange with colleges in South Korea and the USA. He also found a range of 'safe' destinations such as Islam Online and Darfur which are rich in intercultural experience.

In Second Life you need an online representation of yourself called an avatar and it is your avatar which moves around this virtual world. You choose what your avatar looks like, which clothes to wear and how your avatar behaves. (Some people choose their avatars to be fantasy creatures eschewing the human form altogether). So the first intriguing question was how would the women of Dubai chose to represent themselves? Would it be their public persona dressed oin the long, dark abaya and shayla headdress or would it be the fashionable clothes underneath these garments? According to Mark there was no doubt among the students that they should appear as they do in private (ie in all-female company). But this led them to a major intercultural incident when they visited Islam Online and were told off by a concerned Saudi visitor for not being appropriately dressed in this virtual representation of Mecca.

Back in real life there were also many standards which Mark had to adhere to as a non-family male person in a female institution. For example no matter what their status in the institution, all males have to pause and knock before entering a classroom in case some of the students did not have their abayas on. Another potentially fraught issue was that of jostling students as you move around the college and Mark is able to claim that he never once made physical contact with any student in the five years that he worked at the college. Only this morning I bumped into someone while shopping so I can imagine what self-awareness that must have taken.

The Second Life session which Mark led was text only so I was eager to speak live with him. The results of our conversation form the whole of the latest Absolutely Intercultural podcast. Mark has also been involved in other interesting projects and I hope to be able to speak with him again soon about these.