Hello everyone out there in EAIE-land. The SAINTs will be conducting a Roundtable at the Nantes conference on mindsets, and their influence on international education. We need some stories or anecdotes from you about times when, in your professional work, you have come up against mindsets. Sometimes the effect of mindsets can have been negative, but sometimes they can have been positive too. Both kinds of stories would be valuable to us. We will make sure to protect your anonymity. If you would prefer not to respond publicly on the blog you could email your stories to me at kreus@me.com. These stories could greatly enrich the discussion at our Roundtable.
When we are thinking of mindsets we might ask questions like:
1. Are there different sorts of mindsets, such as cultural mindsets, bureaucratic mindsets, political/national mindsets
2. Are they good or bad (or both)?
3. What is the role of language in setting and maintaining mindsets?
4. Can mindsets be “cured”? Where does one go for therapy?
5. Are we aware of our mindsets, or are they, for each of us, so obvious as to defy analysis?
6. When are mindsets destructive, and when are they creative?
7. Where do prejudices and mindsets meet? Are they related?
8. How important is self-awareness?
9. Can the impact of mindsets be moderated by “more information”? What is the role of communication?
10. What is the role, good or bad, of social media like Facebook and blogs like this one?
We SAINTs would greatly appreciate your responses to these questions. You may like to suggest others as well.
In response to question 8, self-awareness is extremely important. What does this mean exactly? People don’t perceive their own culture in the same way as they do others because it is invisible, an intimate part of their being. Self-awareness is the ability for someone to perceive their own culture as if from the outside, and consequently to examine it critically. Self-awareness is a necessary key to understanding others. It makes ethnocentricity irrelevant by justifying and legitimising otherness.