The Design of Cross-Cultural Training: An Alternative to the University Model

Abstract

The inapplicability of traditional university-based training has become a chronic complaint in organizations which must prepare large numbers of persons for service overseas. In the Peace Corps, for example, which in almost seven years now has trained more persons for overseas work than any other civilian government agency, complaints about the irrelevance of traditional classroom training have been growing steadily since the first Volunteers entered training. (The Peace Corps continues to train most of its Volunteers at universities, for a variety of reasons not having to do with the quality of training; but a vigorous effort is made to influence the training institutions to design programs that differ sharply from the standard curriculum design.) The complaints are not directed toward the content of the traditional academic disciplines that bear on overseas work. The content can be relevant to performance in an alien culture; moreover, the acknowledged experts in the subject matter fields appropriate to overseas work are found in universities and colleges for the most part. The dissatisfaction is with the ways in which such subject matter is taught. When returned Peace Corps Volunteers talk about their training, they do not complain about incompetent professors; they complain about the sense in which their experiences in training, however interesting or well presented they may have been, simply did not prepare them for the total life they had to lead overseas. Despite the overall success of the Peace Corps, it has not been uncommon for even a "good" Volunteer to take five or six months, or onefourth of his tour overseas, to become fully operational in an overseas environment. Now prospective Peace Corps Volunteers are highly motivated students, keenly aware that their success in a strange and alien environment will depend in large measure on their ability to deal with the dynamics of the culture in which they will be working. Above average in commitment to their work, energetic, imaginative, and intelligent, they exhibit a happy blend of attitudes and motives. Yet, primed for a really stirring training experience as they are, many of those who have completed their two years abroad seem unusually dissatisfied with the training that preceded their overseas tour. Somehow training had little more bearing on what actually happened to them overseas than the rest of their middle class life experiences, including their experiences in college prior to the Peace Corps. The purpose of this paper is to examine the basis for such discontent by dissecting the relationships between the ends and means of training for cross-cultural performance. The conclusion to which the analysis leads is that the traditional methods of higher education simply will not get the job done. Nor are they well suited to training for any application situation that requires the ability to adapt to or to act in unfamiliar and ambiguous social situations. (Included in this category would be all types of community development or community action work, at home or abroad, especially when such work is with the disadvantaged, as well as work in institutional subcultures that differ basically from the "outside world.") Further objectives of this paper are to present a conception of some learning processes that can lead to the ability to cope with ambiguity and to take action under stress, to present some design principles for such training, and to specify the kinds of skills and competence needed to design and operate effective cross-cultural training programs. Finally, the paper details a Peace Corps training program in which some of these design principles were tested.