Intercultural Dialogue Report

Iyehezkiel Parudani
Sed 380 12785
Cross-Cultural Interaction in Multicultural Special Education


Introduction
As a part of class project, I opened up an intercultural dialogue with Abidin Raheem (unreal name), an international student from Pakistan. In this report, I will call him Raheem. Raheem has been here in Austin since 2006 for taking Doctoral Program in department of anthropology the University of Texas at Austin. I have known him since I arrived in the US for the first time. Because at the time I did not have apartment yet to live in, he offered me a help to live in his apartment for a few days.
I decided to choose him as my partner in this dialogue with three considerable things. Firstly, his research interest for his Doctoral Program is Multicultural Education that studies about disabbility and gender issue, mental model, beliefs, and system value patterns. Because he is a doctoral student who knows many things culturally, while I am a new comer, I need to learn many important and interesting issues related to the cultural areas such as disabbility and gender issue, mental model, beliefs, and system value patterns from him as an adult student (Hollins 2008 p.142). Secondly, Raheem is an easy person to make friends and wants to help anyone who needs his help. No wonder when I asked him to be my partner in the dialogue, he immediately accepted it, although he was about to plan to go to Honolulu for his research. I know, he has never said “no” if his friends aske his help. I don’t know why, it might because he is an Asian, who really enphesises indirect context in communication and avoid negative responses (Ting-Toomey and Chung 2005 p. 177-178). Before I contacted Raheem, I had contacted two other friends of mine, but they refused for the reason of being busy writing their final term paper. “I will be very grateful to be your partner in that dialogue if it will be a solution to help you succeed in your class”,” Raheem said very enthusiastically. Thirdly, I chosen Raheem as my partner in this dialogue due to the fact that we have some culturally different perspectives either in religion, linguistic, and ideology, nationality, mental model, and identity. Either Ting-Toomey and Chung (2005) or Kalyanpur and Harry (1999) indicate that the concept of intercultural interaction and communication has different meaning in all families, communities, and groups , depending upon their histories, traditions, beliefs, and values.

Method
Running our conversation based on face to face meeting, and making the atmosphere a little bit formal, the dialogue was taking place at 4520 Duval Street, Austin Texas, 78751 the USA. The dialogue lasted on October 13, 2009. I started the dialogue right at 10:30PM and ended right at 11:40PM. I provided some questions based on the presented materials in class. As I said previously that Raheem is an easy going person, he let me did anything or used any method as long as it helped me obtain the best result of our conversation. Then, I recorded the conversation to ensure that the collected data from the conversation is valid and reliable. During the conversation going, I was keeping the creativity and the decency of our communication to let Raheem know my mental model and value in communication since communication is a reflection of one’s culture (Ting-Toomey and Chung 2005 p. 2). Besides that, I wanted to keep the dialogue going formally. I asked Raheem many times not to use non-verbal communication in presenting his explanation since I am blind and unable to see his facial expression or body movement.

Results
As I mentioned before, Raheem is doing research in Multicultural Education, the area which encompases many different actual issues such as gender, disability, education, ethnicity, racial and political discrimination. From these actual issues, I decided to focus on religion, education, disability, and family.
Religion
I started our dialogue with the topic of religion. Since religion is the very sensitive area to touch on, I asked Raheem to freely correct me as he found my mistake mentioning or I had unacceptable questions regarding this topic. Raheem is a Moslem. He and his extended family are very religious. Raheem and his extended family do not drink any kinds of alcoholic drinks such as beers, whines, champagnes, otilia liqueur, etc. “Alcoholic drinks are extremely forbidden in Islam. In the Koran (the holy bible for Moslems) as it is written in Arabic language, alcoholic drinks are explicitly described as “غير مشروعة” (forbidden thing to touch, Raheem said. In addition, Raheem is also very active in doing the daily five obligatory prayer rituals that in Islam known as Dawn Prayer (Fjr or Subh), Noon Prayer (Zuhr), Midafternoon Prayer (Asr), Sunset Prayer (Maghrib), and Evening Prayer (Isha). When I asked about his experiences running his religion in the USA, a country that predominately non-Muslim religion, Raheem said, “I am really grateful that here in the U.S., I am not hindered to do my religion’s rituals”.
Education
Raheem values education very highly. For him, education is more important/valuable than wealth. “Life without education, like a car without gasoline,” Raheem’s illustration. However, he warned other people to be wisely educated; not to torment others. He philosophically said, “if If we are being educated merely to achieve distinction, to get a better job, to be more efficient, to have wider domination over others, then our lives will be shallow and empty. If we are being educated only to be scientists, to be scholars wedded to books, or specialists addicted to knowledge, then we shal be contributing to the destruction and misery of the world”.
He was sad, however, because his parents do not value education very well. He assumed that the horizontal conflict which persistently occurs in Pakistan, has made many families become pragmatic and do not have motivation to have even basic education. In his family, only Raheem who has higher education. Both of his parents did not finish their elementary level, while his brother and sisters graduated only from secondary school.
Seeing the fact that his parents do not respect for their children’s education, Raheem decided not to expect his school payment from his parents. He had to work himself to finance his school. Delivering newspapers, magazines, and tabloids, was one of some part time jobs that he had to do to pay his school before he got fool bright scholarship to come to the United States for his Doctoral Degree.
Family
According to Ting-Toomey and Chung (2005 p. 111), “extended family consists of grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, and nieces and nephews”. Raheem is a person who comes from the culture that values extended family. In his country, Raheem lives in a big house together with his grandparents, father and mother, aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers and sisters, and nieces and nephiews. “Because in my culture,” Raheem’s said, a woman should follow her husband after married, my mother and some other women who married my uncles, also live together in the same house with us.” Raheem father has second wife who lives in another city. Therefore, Raheem’s father has to share his responsibility to two wives. Every month, usually in the second week, his father goes to his second wife and lives there for three or four days. When I asked about the houshold power sharing, Raheem said, “in my family, everything should be decided by a husband as the decision maker. However, for any decision decided by a husband, must be discussed with his wife before it is implemented.” “Furthermore,” Raheem said, “my father and uncles work for erning money for the family’s expenses while my mother and aunts are responsible to take care of household affairs such as cooking, cleaning up the house, and taking care of the kids.” “In addition,” Raheem said, “the adult children of my family are expected to pley their role to either go work with my father or uncles or stay home with my mother and aunts for the household affairs. In this case, the adult mail children play the role as my father and uncles do, while the adult female children play the role as my mother and aunts do.” By paying attention to Raheem’s elaboration, I see that small distant power and masculinity value pattern is strongly implemented in his family relationship. I also asked Raheem about the language used in his family. Amazingly, there are four languages use in his family. They are Urdu, Hindi, Arabic, and English. His father and
Disability
The last topic I discussed with Raheem was issue about disability. This is the most sentimental topic of our discussion since I am a blind person. In this section, we focused on blind and visually impaired people. Raheem said, “Well in my country blinds are not felt as unless people of society. I remember I had lesson in class two where it was mentioned that we need to help blind people as I helped blind people whenever they needed. I never recall any bad experience where someone who had discriminated against the blind people. In my culture, helping blind people are considered as religious responsibility as our religion says help poor people as they are made like this by God, so, by helping them and accepting those as they are following religious rules.” When I asked him about the most availability job for blind and visually impaired people in Pakistan, Raheem said that being a tutor on how to read Koran perfectly, masseur/acupuncture,, and musician are three most availability job for the blind and visually impaired in Pakistan.


(Help me to make conclution as the closing part of this dialogue).


This dialogue has helped me becoming more aware of the diversity of people’s culture. According to Sternberg (1999) as it was cited by Ting-Toomey and Chang (2005 p 9), “We learn more from people who are different from us than from those who are similar to us”.