IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-0-230-37043-2_18.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Gaining Greater Cultural Awareness

In: Stories to Tell Your Students

Author

Listed:
  • Thomas A. Conklin

Abstract

Let me tell you a story about a teacher named Tom who was teaching a class on diversity as part of an organizational behavior class. The class was a fairly heterogeneous mix of students with a variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds from around the world. As the class unfolded, the topic of cultural differences and nonverbal communication practices in various cultures came up. During the discussion the class struck upon the practice of nodding their heads in an up and down motion to indicate “yes.” This act is understood in the United States to mean “yes” and yet over the course of the discussion, it became clear that what was taken for an affirmative nod was not a message of acceptance in all parts of the world. In Bulgaria, for instance, it means just the opposite. Moving the head up and down indicates the negative reply of “no” and moving the head side to side means “yes.”

Suggested Citation

  • Thomas A. Conklin, 2011. "Gaining Greater Cultural Awareness," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Joan Marques & Satinder Dhiman & Jerry Biberman (ed.), Stories to Tell Your Students, chapter 1, pages 38-40, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-37043-2_18
    DOI: 10.1057/9780230370432_18
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-37043-2_18. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.