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Teaching Gender, Teaching Culture: A Comparative Study of Gendered Dilemmas in Culturally Complex Situations

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Warriors or Peacekeepers?

Abstract

This chapter compares two workshops that focus on training cultural competencies in a gendered context in culturally complex situations. The workshops used the same cases on gender and culture, but one course was given in the Netherlands and the other in Argentina. After running the workshops, the effect on cultural competencies was measured with FORCIT, a scale that measures, among other qualities, flexibility, openness, respect, curiosity, and trust. The results from the two countries are compared in order to determine the best practices for teaching gender and culture and to establish what contexts and situations impact cultural awareness and cultural competences. Culture training does indeed enhance awareness, but it does not automatically enhance competences or influence behavior. We find that awareness was enhanced in the Netherlands while students in Argentina developed both awareness and competences. In this chapter, we conclude with explanations and lessons learned.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The United Nations acknowledges the importance of gender. The United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000) was the first to recognize the importance of gender mainstreaming and that armed conflict intensifies gender inequalities. Since then, seven resolutions have been adopted on women, peace, and security (1820, 1888, 1889, 1960, 2106, 2122, 2242).

  2. 2.

    According to the authors’ definition, “Political armies are military institutions that play an active and often decisive role in national politics, justifying this as a legitimate extension of their professional role.”

  3. 3.

    Indeed, in regression analysis “sex” is no longer significant because “nationality” explains the variation in the dependent variable.

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Masson, L., Moelker, R. (2020). Teaching Gender, Teaching Culture: A Comparative Study of Gendered Dilemmas in Culturally Complex Situations. In: Enstad, K., Holmes-Eber, P. (eds) Warriors or Peacekeepers?. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36766-4_10

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