Week 6; Jonathan Hilton

Week 6:  Intercultural Interactions -- Jonathan Hilton

I found the question in this week’s prompt, “Are you culturally competent? How do you know?” unsettling. I have spent so much time traveling, interacting with people from different cultures, and learning languages that I have never stopped to ask how I would know if I were culturally competent. UC Honors provides a “Global Studies Learning Objectives” rubric for global competence which, under its description of an “accomplished” student, contains phrases like:

“Student has substantial knowledge of...”

“The student has an excellent understanding of...”

“The student actively seeks opportunities to...”

“The student is actively involved in...”

All of these phrases can, to a certain extent, be taken in a rather vague way. Through the Honors reflections, I have gained a degree of “intrapersonal competence.” Through the experiences I have had, I have gained “interpersonal competence.” But as Vaughn writes (105), “In intercultural interactions, it is not sufficient to be only intrapersonally and interpersonally competent. Cultural competence is the ability to apply knowledge of your own and others’ cultures.” Her suggests of various models have got me thinking in terms of how I have applied (and can apply) the knowledge I have stored up about other cultures.

Me with my Chilean host family at a wedding

During my time in Chile, I certainly did the second item on Vaughn’s list (106), “personality approaches.” I developed new aspects of my personality to learn to be more easygoing and carefree to fit into the culture that surrounded me. This was part of my “development of coping skills” (100) for the process of psychological acculturation. However, I also had some interesting “psychological and emotional reactions” (100) resulting from this. For instance, becoming more easygoing and carefree gave me a psychological aversion to overwork and stress, and made me feel that there wasn’t anything in the world worth having stress about. When I returned to the U.S., this came back to bite me, because here we generally consider that some things are worth undergoing a great deal of stress to achieve.

Am I culturally competent? To a high degree, yes. However, I now realize that being culturally competent means more than I thought it did—it’s a form of applied knowledge, not a learned one.

Here I am with more members of my extended Chilean
host family, learning new cultural competencies...