DU in the DR

Student Comments Prior to Trip

 

Prior to the trip, the group met with our professor, Dr. Gabriella Ibieta, for a series of workshops on Intercultural Competence and Sensitivity, based on Milton J. Bennet’s work. The purpose of the workshops was for us to gain a better understanding about ourselves: how do we experience difference. We read a series of articles that provided information about ethnocentric and ethnorelative sides of the scale of cultural sensitivity and wrote essays describing our experiences.

 

The ethnocentric side contains stages of denial, defense and minimization respectively. Meanwhile, the ethnorelative side includes acceptance, adaptation and integration. Most of us would like to achieve the final stage of integration, the ideal state of fully understanding and integrating into more than one culture. Most people who attain this stage are those who have been born into a bicultural family or who are transnational. Living abroad for an extended period of time is a way in which people can go through all of the stages to eventually be able to integrate from culture to culture.

 

During our workshops, we shared stories from our experiences with cultures that differ from our own, and tried to place ourselves on this scale. We were asked to to describe an intercultural experience that we have had and how it made us feel. We were asked how we reacted to the situation, if we became adaptive or rejected it outright.

 

Many of us have been on the ethnocentric half of the scale at some point earlier on before having experiences that lead us to be more open minded and turn to a more ethnorelative perspective.

 

By learning about what it means to be culturally sensitive and competent, we were able to consider our own approach to cultural experiences that differ from our own. Our workshops also addressed some areas of the Dominican culture, which helped us to prepare for our trip by keeping us aware of the different stages and how to approach cultural differences.