Asian Students and Western Teachers: Down the Rabbit-Hole

by Clay Burell

categories: Student Culture, Teaching Ideas and Resources

Published May 25, 2009 @ 07:04AM PT

I finished cultural psychologist Richard E. Nisbett's The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently . . . and Why (Free Press, 2003) last week - which I swear I'm not reading because I'm in my second year of marriage to a Korean - and marked a few more tidbits to share (see previous posts on this topic here).

Today's tidbit should interest any history or literature teachers who have East Asians - mainly Chinese, Taiwanese, Korean, and Japanese - in their classrooms. Having taught English and history in Asian-dominated international schools in China and Korea over the last eight years, I'll be the first to admit a long-running, low-key bewilderment about these students in my history and literature classes. While they were generally capable of learning the content and demonstrating that learning in assessments, there was a hugely noticeable difference between them and their Western classmates in terms of their pleasure in that learning, their capacity to have what I call "omigod" reactions to some of the wildest plot twists in the great stories of literature or history. While the Western students gasped, the Asian students conformed to the most notorious stereotypes in Western culture of Asian impassivity and inscrutability. They just seemed to be following altogether different scripts - and Nisbett's book suggests things appeared that way to me because they are that way in fact.

Nisbett summarizes these differences toward the end of his book:

I have presented a large amount of evidence to the effect that Easterners and Westerners differ in fundamental assumptions about the nature of the world, in the focus of attention, in the skills necessary to perceive relationships and to discern objects in a complex environment, in the character of causal attribution, in the tendency to organize the world categorically or relationally, and in the inclination to use rules, including the rules of formal logic (189-90).

Before going further, I should share that my Korean brother-in-law, when I told him about this book, asked with some suspicion, "Is it saying the Western way is better than the Eastern?" The answer, thankfully, is no. Nisbett does entertain possible advantages and disadvantages to the Greek/individualist/essentialist versus Confucian/communal/relativist hard-wiring of the two cultures' ways of perceiving, thinking, and behaving; but he spreads his praise and blame evenly, in ways instructive to both East and West. (More than once, I added marginalia such as "If only Joel Klein and Arne Duncan were less Greek-agentic, and more Chinese-contextual, in their thinking about education reform." But maybe that's a later post.)

Now, on to that "tidbit."

After presenting evidence that Westerners are more prone to assume objects and individuals cause events, while Asians assign greater causal agency to an event's context and relation of forces - that Westerners, in other words, are more analytic, while Asians are more holistic - Nisbett then presents a study or two suggesting that the Asian appreciation for the complexity of any event gives them an advantage of "open-mindedness" over Westerners, an ability to consider more factors as relevant than their simplistic counterparts. A disadvantage to this holism, though, emerges when Asians are tasked to think causally: the sensitivity to a larger number of causative factors makes any predictions and hypotheses far more difficult to formulate. Everything is so complex, any outcome seems an equally plausible coin-toss (or, better, a roll of several dice).

Finally, the rub: the "Asian yawn v. Western gasp" scenario so common in my classes receives some explanatory light in the next section. Nisbett and a psychologist at a Korean university collaborated on an experiment to see if Asian holism reduced the Asian capacity to be "surprised by unanticipated outcomes." They presented studies to Korean and American participants, and gave them either one hypothesis about each study, or two contradictory hypotheses. They then had both groups read the actual study and its findings regarding the hypothesis.

Nisbett gives an example of a study that found that realism is better for mental health than idealism. The Americans who read two conflicting hypotheses found the results of the actual study more interesting and surprising. The Koreans? Yawn. The ones who read both hypotheses before reading the study confirmed one and rejected the other were no more surprised or interested than the ones who read only one hypothesis.

Bringing this back to the classroom, it was very tempting for me to attribute my Asian students' blasé reactions to an unflattering simple-mindedness, apathy, or any number of other negative qualities. If Nisbett is right - and he adduces overwhelming evidence that he is - then the joke, and the simple-mindedness, was on me. The Asian students reacted as they did because they see the world as a far more complicated thing than Westerners - including their teacher here - do. They're not surprised because their culture has inculcated in them since birth an appreciation for complexity that makes surprise far harder to come by. Be surprised when reality confounds our causal expectations? That's like being surprised that the sky is blue.

Let me end this object lesson in culturally responsive pedagogy with the same delicious twist Nisbett gives to end this chapter: there's still an advantage to Western simple-mindedness. Nisbett draws it out by observing that the scientific notion of "action at a distance" - think gravity - was far more at home in Chinese philosophy than in Western. But the complexity of Asian causal thinking left them helpless to scientifically prove this principle. That was left to Westerners who, ironically, were trying to prove, with a very wrong-headed and simple-minded causal model, the opposite: "that all motion was of the billiard ball type, with objects moving only because they come into contact with some other object" (134).

So grab the book. It's a fun read, and sure to help you better understand your Korean wife Asian students - and yourself as a Western husband teacher.

Image by Jonathan_W