Intercultural Communication and Muslim American Youth in US School Contexts

Abstract

Effective intercultural communication is highly valued in political, professional, and academic contexts. Universities even offer courses focused on the cultural dimensions of interpersonal communication. Despite the multicultural, globalized world we live in, there is still a great deal of misunderstanding and lack of cultural/intercultural communication in many societies which has caused a great deal of conflict on individual and societal levels. Nowhere can this misunderstanding and lack of intercultural communication skills have a more powerful impact and serious negative repercussions than on students. In many school contexts around the world, this issue is still not being addressed on the administrative or curriculum levels. In the USA some teachers and administrators, and even curricula are insensitive to many of the cultural differences that exist in today’s classrooms despite the introduction of multicultural education. This chapter examines the effects of the lack of understanding and ineffective intercultural communication of teachers and administrations toward Muslim American students in US school contexts. There are gaps and shortcomings in the academic system that need to be recognized and examined to prevent a cultural divide that already exists in the larger social context created by politics and the media. Teachers and academic leaders are the most important factors that governments and agencies should be focusing on when it comes to building cultural understanding and effective communication between cultures.

Conclusion

The cases discussed here are not isolated cases within the US school contexts. There are bound to be innumerable cases that have not been studied. As Moore (2009) explains, “For most of American history, public schools—via school board policies, segregation, community pressures , textbooks, curriculum, and instructional activities—have ignored, distorted, downplayed, or lied about the treatment of many minority and immigrant populations ” (p. 144) in the USA.

Muslim American youth have had to add to their baggage the “moral exclusion,” of becoming “the other” who had to be watched, detained, and sometimes deported, in order to save “us” (Sirin and Fine 2008, p. 1) . The challenges, difficulties, and struggle of finding safe spaces to foster identities, feeling value and worth, and finding a sense of belonging and stability have intensified. They are currently made to inhabit spaces that may be shaping their identities in harmful ways (Giroux 1994) . They are no longer just being positioned within forms of knowledge, representations, and images that have a creeping or quiet kind of hegemony about them, as Giroux explains (1994) , but are getting loud and clear messages embodied in the wrath of a government and a society that now deems them as the enemy.

There are gaps and shortcomings in the academic system that need to be recognized and examined to prevent a cultural divide that already exists in the larger social context created by politics and the media. What is not needed is a further divide in the classrooms. Teachers are the most important factors that governments and agencies should be focusing on when it comes to building cultural understanding and effective communication between cultures. Teachers not only mold minds, in terms of instilling knowledge into these minds, they play crucial roles in maintaining stereotypes or fostering positive cultural attitudes and perspectives that become part of the students’ experiences. These experiences will most likely be internalized and may reflect on how they treat, accept, or reject people of other cultures.

There is a need to acknowledge, as Carter (2005) explains, that “Multiple cultural repertoires do and should exist, and the common cultural repertoire that we share should be continually checked and balanced, revisited, revamped, and revitalized to insure that it is representative of the whole society” (p. 1). This acknowledgement comes in the form of not only curriculum inclusion, but effective culturally competent teachers and academic leaders who matter most. As Carter (2005) rightfully explains, students “require guidance in how to maintain several cultural competencies” and that can only be achieved if we have culturally competent individuals who “simply listen carefully to students as they describe their school experiences” and “figure[e] out how to mend the cracks in our elementary and secondary school systems” (p. 1). “It is these students, as Carter says, who reveal that they experience schools as organized ineffectually and blind to their social, cultural and material realities” and it is these voices that should “direct educators, social scientists, and society’s attention to areas that must be addressed in order for them to have academic success” (2005, p. 1).