Judith Butler is perhaps best known for her take-up of the debate between Derrida and Austin over the function of the performative and her subsequent suggestion that the subject be understood as performatively constituted. Another important but less often noted move within Butler's consideration of the processes through which the subject is…

This study examined experienced and novice teachers' views on teaching in multicultural classrooms, asking 40 elementary student teachers and 26 cooperating teachers how they viewed the needs of students from diverse cultural backgrounds. Participants rated 23 statements about multicultural education on a Likert scale of agreement, and completed…

Methodological problems caused by an ethnocentric view in analyzing another culture are discussed along with some aspects of culture analysis in general and stereotypes about other cultures and their functions in cross-cultural communication. It is suggested that miscommunication is subject to various norms and value systems that are not made…

Themes from the author's research into cultural interfaces and cross-cultural encounters have implications for organization development (OD) and training for internationalizing business and developing competencies for working effectively with people of diverse cultures. These themes are: (1) unawareness in the United States of cultural unawareness…

Attitudes and policies toward bilingualism in the United States have always been affected by political considerations. Although controversy over bilingualism is political in principle, it is a particular kind of political controversy, that is, a manifestation of a new stage in the history of an even larger controversy over the meaning of…

Four person intercultural teams were found in which the three man majority in each group were American white males. An American white female, American black male or foreign male was the minority member. After 13 weeks of joint tasks, data was collected on roles claimed for self and attributed to others. Results are discussed in terms of…

The most developed supra-national language-based movement today is la Francophonie, the movement representing all of the populations of the world that speak French. French is an international language and is spoken in many parts of the world, although the exact number of francophones is not known. La Francophonie has a number of major…

Major worldwide trends point to increased global interdependency and interrelatedness, to a growing need to overcome barriers that separate cultures, and to the development of new leadership that is culturally fluent and aware of cross-cultural opportunities and problems. This paper addresses major global-related questions and trends and the…

Lack of commitment, lack of knowledge, and lack of leadership allow contradictions between what is professed (appreciation of cultural diversity) and what is practiced (Anglo-oriented monoculturalism) in American education today. The traditional melting pot philosophy has failed to respect ethnic differences, and has consequently resulted in a…

In the past, American educational consultants have attempted to export American educational philosophy and procedures to other countries largely without regard to the specific needs or problems of these countries. Although these consultants regard the knowledge they share as scientific and technical and thus culture- and value-free, it is often…

There has been relatively little research into the ways in which language may be manipulated to increase social distance in interethnic and interracial encounters. The first part of this paper discusses three types of communicative distance, which reflect three different intensities of ethnocentrism: "low,""moderate," and…

The possibility exists that another language resource, the Spanish language of the Mexican American, will be lost in the United States due to language ethnocentrism. Mexican American bilingualism is viewed as an intellectual handicap by public educators who do not understand the basic linguistic bias of instruments utilized to measure the…

The hypothesis that monolingual and bilingual German-Canadian speakers differ in their attitudes toward German language and culture and in their achievement in the study of German was tested. The results were compared to those obtained by Gardner and Lambert in their French-American studies, in which it was found that home language background is…

Wide variation in approaches to teaching about Asia in the schools suggests a need for categorizing those approaches so that a teacher might see his approach in some relationship with others of differing persuasions. The following evolutionary levels of conceptualization are suggested; Asia as (1) a setting for Western history, where Western…