The Culture of Teaching and the Teaching of Culture

In a world made smaller by information technology and convenient travel, the teaching of a psychology of all people has become increasingly important. However, the content of western psychology, in both research and teaching, has failed to encompass the complexities of culture and the importance of the role of cultural understanding in the modern world. This article presents some of the culture-based challenges facing psychology and teachers of psychology, including ethnocentrism, development of cultural competence, and integration of cultural concepts in teaching. The author concludes that the contributions of psychology to the solution of important world problems depend in part upon broader cultural understanding. The world of education today is a very different place, with a very different culture, from when I taught my first university-level psychology course 45 years ago. Perhaps the most revolutionary changes have come in the realm of information, especially in its availability, formats, and transmission. The proliferation of electronic data management and communication has resulted in a world that not only is figuratively smaller than it was a generation ago, but that also demands that teachers and students experience and know much more than they would have only a few decades earlier. In addition to the changes brought about by developing communication technologies, the world has also seen an evolving pattern of contact among people who, at other points in history, might never have met. Among the reasons for increased contact are international travel and displacement of people from their homelands by war, poverty, and other social upheavals. As a result, people are increasingly likely to experience other cultures firsthand not only via travel, but also as a consequence of the fact that the populations of western nations such as the UK and the USA have become much less insular and far more culturally diverse than in the past. Taken together, changes in information technology and in the evolution of intercultural contact have produced new challenges both for the field of psychology and for teachers of psychology. In this article I will describe some of the culture-based issues facing our discipline, and their implications for teachers of psychology. Foremost among these implications are the cultural expansion of our broad understanding of the science of psychology and the changes such expansion may engender in teaching. Even the Rat was White In the preface to his book Cultural Psychology, Heine (2012) recalled how, as a young North American arriving in rural Japan, his encounters with cross-cultural misunderstanding led him to realize that many of his ideas about human nature, developed as an undergraduate psychology student, were simply wrong. Heine's experience is certainly not unique in the West, nor would it be unexpected for any student educated in North America. After all, most of the researchers publishing in mainstream American psychology journals, and most of the participants in their research, are Americans (Arnett, 2008). Of those Americans, most are white European Americans - a state of affairs prompting Guthrie (1998) to suggest, in his aptly titled book, that 'even the rat was