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Listen to thisTo enhance the ability of youth to help peers and themselves, the author proposes specific training in mature social decision making to help youth overcome immature moral development and egocentric thinking.
I say potAto and you say potato...The old song has
come into my head over the past couple of weeks. My own
university, Strathclyde, is hosting a group of social work students from
the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, as part of a
long-standing departmental exchange. The song’s sentiments provide a
good illustration of George Bernard Shaw’s observation that Britain and
America are two nations “divided by a common language.” There’s no
difference in the spelling of potato, nor of meaning, just of
pronunciation. But these nuances are enough to jar with us – to get
under our skin a bit.
The American students have to write reflective diaries, outlining their
learning and their observations on living in a different country. Apart
from some fairly stark distinctions between the individualistic emphasis
of the US and the more collectivist traditions of Scotland, it’s small
things they identify in their diaries – things like people in Glasgow
not greeting one another, or the American students as they walk down the
street. The initial reaction of the students was to think of Glaswegians
as rude. Of course we found the opposite when we visited North Carolina
last year. It can be disconcerting for socially reticent Scots to be
treated like long lost friends by total strangers. It’s such experiences
that help me get a handle on Leon Fulcher’s writing on the importance of
cultural safety. Professionally too there can be differences in
terminology and in some of the assumptions that underlie practice in the
two countries. An easy reaction is to assume our own practices are
somehow more enlightened and to expect others to see this in the taken
for granted way that we do. To do so assumes that there are some
universal measures or indicators of good or bad practice whereas the
truth of the matter is that, in most cases, notions of good and bad are
culturally contingent. When we start from a premise that professions
like social work or Child and Youth Care can be understood or governed
by universal standards or norms, we invariably start to judge others
against these norms. We seek to judge rather than to understand. Yet
real growth comes when we look to understand – when our curiosity drives
us to become immersed in the wonder of other cultures and other ways of
being in the world. When we allow ourselves to be open to the
differences we encounter, we start to see things in a new light.
One of the American students, having identified her initial difficulty
in coming to terms with the Scots' failure to make eye contact as she
walked along the street, noted in a subsequent diary entry that
Glaswegians were the kindest people on earth. Now as someone from
Edinburgh, this is a bit hard to take. I mean Glaswegians – they don’t say either potAto or potato ...
