Marit Greek & Kari Mari Jonsmoen, The Missing Link Between Education, Integration and Work

A Matter of Inadequate Communication Skills?

Paper, presentert på 11th Conference of the Nordic Network for Intercultural Communication, 26-28 november 2004, Agder University College, Kristiansand.

One of the main goals of Oslo University Collage is to become a multicultural institution. In order to achieve this, there is an agreement within the institution to aim for an environment where everybody, regardless of gender, social-, ethnic or linguistic background can feel comfortable, learn, develop and succeed as students and as future professionals. The institution aim at developing an environment that enables the students to study and cooperate on equal grounds/conditions. This is necessary in order to meet the demands of today?s society.

The student population at OUC has been heterogeneous for at least ten years. Today, around 12 % of the total number of students (amounting to approximately 1000 students), are linguistic minorities. The heterogeneous learning environment indicates a great potential and an opportunity to experience and learn how to cope with multiculturalism, to appreciate diversity and to develop cross-cultural communication skills. However, we have not taken advantage of the situation and the heterogeneous student-population is still an unused resource when it comes to develop communication skills in a multicultural society. Instead we have tended to concentrate on ways in which linguistic minority students can be helped to adapt their practices to the ones of the institution. In this way diversity tends to become an overwhelming barrier.

What are we told

The linguistic minority students themselves tell us that:

-         they feel excluded and marginalized or they exclude and marginalize themselves

-         they feel that the majority students consider them as stupid and as a burden to them

-         they feel afraid and insecure

-         they lack self-confidence

-         they are discouraged and stigmatized by the way the institutions offer help in the form of special courses for linguistic minority students

From the tutor?s point of view, the situation is described like this:

-         ?linguistic minority students do not understand what it is to be engaged and to be responsible for their own learning process.

-          ?how on earth have they been given access to higher education?

-         ?they take all our time if we allow them to?

-         ?they do not have appropriate linguistic skills?

-         ?they take no initiative?

-         ?the Norwegian students suffer because of them?

How we have dealt with the situation

There are, as far as we can see, mainly two ways of dealing with this:

1.      continue to include special groups of students by helping them to adjust to the existing learning environment - this means: the linguistic minority students have to adjust to the learning institution

2.      adjust the curriculum and the tuition to the entire, multicultural student population

In the educational institutions, there has been a tendency to focus on the first point. Meaning that the perceived problems are the learners themselves rather than how the educational institutions respond to the needs of these students. The conventions of OUC and thereby of the majority are taken as given. It appears that we assume that the institution has a relatively homogeneous culture, whose norms and practices have simply to be learned to provide access. The minority become the ones to be blamed, the ones who must adapt. It seems as if we are aiming for a mono-cultural institution instead of a multicultural institution. 

Subsequently, OUC have, over the years, made several efforts to support the linguistic minority students' language acquisition, their study skills and communication skills in a Norwegian academic context. The students have asked for guidance at our centre, individually or in groups. Some of the students have come because of a personal desire to gain skills and knowledge, but mostly they have been told by their tutor to come to us. We have believed that support and guidance would lead to integration by smoothing some of the difficulties. But the reports from both the students and from the tutors show us that this has not worked out the way we thought that it would do.

A special educational approach?

At the Centre for Multicultural and International Studies we constantly get the question How to teach linguistic minorities.  It seems to be an underlying conviction that a different, special educational approach is needed when it comes to the minority students. One has to ask whether the minority students learn in a different way than the majority students do. This gives evidence to the assumption that the minority students are a homogeneous group of students and that they all have the same needs. The great problem, however, is that these students are just as different as everybody else. They have personal learning strategies, linguistic and academic skills at different levels. There is no single method suitable for the linguistic minority students, there are many. Not all of the linguistic minority students need to develop the same set of skills and knowledge. The linguistic minorities have just as different needs as the rest of the students. Norwegian language is the main problem of only a few of the students.

It is impossible to create stimulating and broadening relations if we divide in speech and in practice, the students in ?them? and ?us?, and in ?minority? ?majority? and ?in Norwegians? and ?those with a different linguistic background?. By using this vocabulary and by consequently offering special treatment to certain groups, we sustain the diversity. The traditional students (the majority students) are regarded as the normal students and in this way we automatically create abnormal students.

This way of acting divides the learning environment. In this way we implicitly tell the students that some of them lack the basic skills that are required. Because of this, they are incapable of meeting the demands of the educational institution. If the students want to be  part of the learning community, they have to change! We meet the challenge as an individual problem and treat it as a kind of pathology. The minority students have managed to get admission to study and thus once were regarded as good enough, with the required skills ? but suddenly this does not count. This message is perceived by the majority students as well. The idea of first-rate and second-rate students is strengthened.

Nobody wants to be second-rated and stigmatized. Neither do the linguistic minorities. They wish to be treated equally. They do not wish to attend to special offers ? and especially not to special courses in language acquisition. Special tuition to specific groups of students is interpreted as a segregation practice. This is inconsistent with the wish to create a multicultural environment where everybody regardless of gender, social, ethnic or linguistic background can feel comfortable and succeed as students and as future professionals.

Linguistic skills ? the crucial point?

Through our work at SEFIA we have experienced that the language skills of the minority students, though of course crucial to learning, is not the most important issue. Many of the students in fact really have quite acceptable language skills, but still are frustrated participants in the learning environment. The majority of the non-native speakers at OUC have attended Norwegian schools and do not need to attend a Norwegian course. What they need is to practice the language in different situations within a professional context.

Research at OUC shows how students who differ from the so-called normal students, for example linguistic minorities, are given the role of non-participants in the environment. There are several examples of how diversity creates difficulties when the students work together on different topics and how the institution deals with these problems. For instance, we have experienced that minority students sometimes are given permission to work individually when teamwork actually is required. In this way the institution maintains a so-called normal situation where the abnormal do notdisturb the normal students and the tutors are free from problems they are not ready to face. Teamwork goes on in an easy way when those who participate are mostly equal and similar. It does not seem to bother neither the tutors nor the students, that they miss the opportunity to get new perspectives, new knowledge and develop important communication skills.

Consequently, some students are never heard and never given an opportunity to develop properly as a professional. Students are given permission to take the role as a passive and remain silent. Neither fellow-students nor tutors are curious to be familiar with their experiences and opinions, or interested in bringing these into the community of learning. The fact that some students are made invisible in this way strengthens oppression and creates divergent students in our minds.

When different voices are speaking up, different meanings are expressed as well. The question is whether the institution wishes to consider diverging ideas and attitudes, and make them valid. Our question is: is the culture of the subject field really defined once and for all, is it unchangeable and unaffected of the increasing multicultural society? Is our mission as an educational institution to help new generations to speak, write and think as if the culture of education is a static, homogeneous culture?

Managing multiculturalism

The students avoid cross-cultural communication, as they have probably done in earlier schooldays. Working together in theoretical and practical studies seems to be a great challenge with which they are unable to cope. It is hard to see the resources in diversity.

The students need support and guidance in their efforts to communicate as equals. They need to learn how to support one another and cooperate, despite of the differences in language skills and interpretation. But the educational staffs too need support in their work with these challenges in order to contribute to the development of multicultural competence among the students. They find it difficult to teach and to guide the increasingly diverse population. They tend to continue their praxis as if nothing has changed, as if the student population is the same as when they were students 30 years ago. To change is hard. The habit is in our minds and in our actions, and if we try to change our habits we cannot be sure to succeed immediately. And in every day life there is not much time to collaborate with other teachers or to exchange experiences.

It seems clear to us that providing extra language instruction is not the solution to achieve integration. All the students, but in particular the linguistic minorities, are in need of support to establish the confidence and emotional security to succeed. They need continuous guidance in cooperating with fellow students who may have different backgrounds. This can not be emphasized enough. There is no doubt that multicultural communication skills are necessary in today?s professional life and this ought to be learned in educational institutions.

This is an important task for the educational staff and we have all got the opportunity right in front of ourselves. We just have to grab the possibilities, utilize the surroundings and the situations that occur. In this way we will be confronted with some of the challenges we wish to escape from. This will give us an opportunity to participate in different situations with diverse people. We all need each other, but we need to practise, to reflect and to theorize. We have to go the inductive way.

A lot of research has been done. However, the educational institutions tend to deal with the challenges of multiculturalism as a matter of theoretical knowledge. Thus, the relevant abstract knowledge remains purely theoretical. Unfortunately the knowledge remains decoupled from any practical issue instead of required skills. A multicultural learning environment still seems as a distant goal. There is therefore an urgent need of change in the culture of higher education. It is in time to adjust both methods and curriculum in higher education, to meet the needs of an increasingly heterogeneous society as well as the student population. The necessary competence among tutors is essential in order to take an effective part in this improvement. Our main task is to enable the development of a culture which empowers both students and tutors effectively to use the resources and opportunities of the entire culture. Diversity is not something we have to get rid of, on the contrary, diversity must be regarded as desirable and normal. Such an approach would improve the quality of learning.

It has to be regarded as completely natural to adjust lectures and tuition to the existing student population. In both written and spoken language, we all have to consider the fact that the participants have different mother tongues. We will have to adjust the curriculum and the disciplinary demands. Diverging thoughts and divergent literacy must be given credit, value and space in the educational institution and within the individuals participating. One of our students expressed it like this: To understand us, maybe the tutors need to attend a course in how to read diverging texts. Another student explained that the tutors wanted her to write along with the sun, but she was used to writing the other way round. The result was the same, so why emphasize these technical and instrumental parts of writing? Why focus on surface features like spelling, grammar and structure? Is it not possible to view writing more as a matter of disciplinary knowledge, personal interpretation and as an expression of identity and social practice? In our opinion this is a matter of our own lacking of skills. We are disturbed and confused when we are to read a text written in an unfamiliar way and in a new and different Norwegian. What we automatically respond to is the deficiencies and we fail to perceive the meaning of the text. We do not know how to communicate, neither in written nor in spoken language, with people who use the Norwegian language in a different way than ourselves, people who think differently and who behave differently. But by learning this and by discovering new perspectives, we will learn a lot, as human-beings as well as professionals.

Thus, in our opinion, one of the crucial missing links in education, integration and work is the lack of adequate communication skills among both the majority and the minority.