Bridging Cultures

Grade level: 9, 10, 11, 12, i, s.

This book provides readers with a comprehensive guide to other cultures – the often-unfamiliar ways that people from other cultures think, speak and act. As such, it helps readers identify potential and real conflicts, and to take appropriate action so as to build successful relationships. The book draws on the authors’ combined experience from international line management and international projects, as well as teaching seminars and coaching clientele from around the globe. It offers an essential resource for anyone involved in transnational business and cross-border relationships.

Chronology in Context -- The Spanish Borderlands: An Overview / by Jesús F. de la Teja -- The Indigenous Borderlands: Cultures without Boundaries / Daniel J. Gelo -- Defining Heritage Continuity and Contemporary Values in the Built Environment -- The Architecture of the Twentieth Century: Management of a Cultural Tradition of Modernity / by Enrique X. de Anda Alanis -- The Many Values of Cultural Heritage / by William A. Dupont -- The Question of Modern Heritage: Mid-Twentieth Century Architecture of the Texas-Tamaulipas Border / by Stephen Fox -- Picturing Reynosa: Visualizing the Past of a Rio Bravo Mexican Border Town / by Daniel D. Arreola -- Continuity of Cultural Heritage -- Extended Borders and Cultural Citizenship / by Harriett Romo and Gabriel Aguilar -- The Enduring Practice of Quinceañeras in the Borderlands: How a Timeless Ritual Maintains Culture, Language, and Latinx Identities / by Patricia Sánchez and Melinda Vargas -- Texas Borderlands Artists: A Modern Perspective / by Ricardo Romo -- Traversing Beloved Topographies of Immanence: Storying the Borderlands Imaginary / by John Phillip Santos -- Discontinuity of Cultural Heritage -- Militarized Borders and Digital Bridges: Ethnography, Art Exhibitions, and Archives / by Margaret E. Dorsey and Miguel Díaz-Barriga -- A History of Conflict and Resilience: Borderlands Transformations / by Harriett Romo and William A. Dupont.

Bridging Cultures Between Home and School: A Guide for Teachers is intended to stimulate broad thinking about how to meet the challenges of education in a pluralistic society. It is a powerful resource for in-service and preservice multicultural education and professional development. The Guide presents a framework for understanding differences and conflicts that arise in situations where school culture is more individualistic than the value system of the home. It shares what researchers and teachers of the Bridging Cultures Project have learned from the experimentation of teacher-researchers in their own classrooms of largely immigrant Latino students and explores other research on promoting improved home-school relationships across cultures. The framework leads to specific suggestions for supporting teachers to cross-cultural communication; organization parent-teacher conferences that work; use strategies that increase parent involvement in schooling; increase their skills as researchers; and employ ethnographic techniques to learn about home cultures. Although the research underlying the Bridging Cultures Project and this Guide focuses on immigrant Latino families, since this is the primary population with which the framework was originally used, it is a potent tool for learning about other cultures as well because many face similar discrepancies between their own more collectivistic approaches to childrearing and schooling and the more individualistic approach of the dominant culture.

Bridging Cultures: Teacher Education Module is a professional development resource for teacher educators and staff developers to help preservice and in-service teachers become knowledgeable about cultural differences and understand ways of bridging the expectations of school settings with those of the home. In a nonthreatening, cognitively meaningful way, the Module is based on teacher-constructed and tested strategies to improve home-school communication and parent involvement. These innovations were developed as part of the Bridging Cultures Project, which explores the cultural value differences between the individualistic orientation of mainstream U.S. schools and the collectivistic orientation of many immigrant families. The goal of the Bridging Cultures Project is to support and help teachers in their work with students and families from immigrant cultures. The centerpiece of the Module is training resources, including an outline, an agenda, and a well-tested three-hour script designed as a lecture-discussion with structured opportunities for guided dialogue and small-group discussion. Throughout the script, "Facilitators Notes" annotate presentation suggestions and oversized margins encourage integration of the facilitator's personal experiences in presenting and adapting the Module. Ideas for using the Readings for Bridging Cultures are provided. A section of overhead transparencies and handout masters is included. The Module also provides a discussion of the role of culture in education and the constructs of individualism and collectivism, an overview of the effects of the Bridging Cultures Project, and evaluation results of the author's use of the Module in two sections of a preservice teacher education course. Bridging Cultures: Teacher Education Module brings the successful processes and practices of the Bridging Cultures Project to a larger audience in college courses and in professional development arenas. Designed for use in one or two class sessions, the Module can be incorporated in courses on educational psychology, child development, counseling psychology, and any others that deal with culture in education.

With the rapidly developing globalization of various sectors of modern life, individuals, organizations, and nations are becoming increasingly aware of the ways in which cultural diversity may not only be a potential cause of conflict but also a source of growth, creativity, and inspiration. If, traditionally, intercultural mediation has been understood as a conflict-solving strategy or as a means to facilitate communication between individuals from different cultural backgrounds, Bridging Culture aims at providing a framework and a set of theoretical reflections towards a larger vision of the field, presenting mediation as a particular form of critical intervention within the different domains of the humanities. The contributions in the present volume take intercultural mediation to be a multifaceted, interdisciplinary phenomenon, impacting upon the fields of linguistics and literature as well as translation and cultural studies, where themes such as interculturality, multilingualism, and cultural transfer are continual and urgent features of contemporary discourse and debate.

Bridging Cultures in Early Care and Education: A Training Module is a resource designed to help pre-service and in-service early childhood educators, including infant-toddler caregivers, understand the role of culture in their programs. It is also intended for professionals who work with children and their families in a variety of other roles, such as social workers, special educators, and early interventionists, and for use in college courses focused on early childhood education and child development. The module explains and illustrates how early childhood educators can use the organizing concepts of individualism and collectivism as a means of understanding cultural conflict and difference. These concepts have been shown to be highly useful in improving home-school understanding across cultures. Based on real-life examples of cultural dilemmas in early care and education settings, participants engage the concepts of individualism and collectivism to solve a variety of scenarios in a dynamic and engaging manner. *Chapter 1 introduces the Bridging Cultures for Early Care and Education approach, provides a brief history, and explains the training module. It presents the conceptual framework of individualism and collectivism, which is at the heart of the training. *Chapter 2 provides the information needed for a two-hour workshop, including a script and notes to the facilitator. The script is not meant to be read word for word. Rather, it is offered as a guide, based on a pilot-tested approach. Appendices at the end of the book contain transparency masters for the overheads referenced in the script, and masters for suggested handouts. *Chapter 3 offers ideas for augmenting the basic two-hour training by expanding it over a longer time period. It also identifies additional diversity resources that can complement the Bridging Cultures training. *Appendices providing additional information, data, and bibliographic resources are included. This module originated as part of the Bridging Cultures Project at WestEd--a nonprofit research, development, and service agency working with education and other communities to promote excellence, achieve equity, and improve learning for children, youth, and adults.

Readings for Bridging Cultures: Teacher Education Module is highly recommended for use by teacher-educators and professional development specialists who use Bridging Cultures: Teacher Education Module. It is also useful for teachers and students interested in understanding the role of culture in education. It includes five previously published articles and one book chapter, each selected for a specific purpose: *"Bridging Cultures in Our Schools: New Approaches That Work" explains the framework of individualism and collectivism, the Bridging Cultures Project, and the seven points of home-school conflict that are identified in the Module. *"Bridging Cultures With Classroom Strategies" and "Bridging Cultures With a Parent-Teacher Conference" describe teacher home-school communication. *"Cross-Cultural Conflict and Harmony in the Social Construction of the Child" and "Conceptualizing Interpersonal Relationships in the Cultural Contexts of Individualism and Collectivism" are the original research cited throughout the Module that provides the empirical basis for the Bridging Cultures framework. *The introductory chapter from Cross-Cultural Roots of Minority Child Development portrays the constructs of independence (individualism) and interdependence (collectivism) as developmental scripts with implications for theory, research, and practice.